orgtheory.net

Omar

Mary Douglas, the British anthropologist who sociologist Robert Bellah once referred to as “the greatest living Durkheimian” passed away last Wednesday at the age of 86 (the Times Online obituary can be read here). While nominally an anthropologist, it can be argued that Douglas’ major intellectual influence has been stronger outside of her field (in particular in the sociology of culture) than within it. There is a simple reason for this; Douglas was committed to anthropology as an explanatory science, young anthropologists are committed to endless non-scientific guilt trips about colonialism.

She is, and will continue to be, required reading in all graduate sociology of culture seminars: her uber-classic book Purity and Danger reintroduced to modern audiences the power of cultural analysis derived from the late Durkheim of The Elementary Forms and the Durkheim and Mauss of Primitive Classification. The highlight is of course her theoretical take on the classification of animals that lead to the dietary rules expounded in Leviticus, unearthing the logic of a classification system that attempted to fit a non-ambiguous man-made ordering of biological forms to the messiness of natural forms, rejecting as “abominable” all of the animals that did not fit neatly within what contemporary cognitive scientists call the “prototypes” of their class (squirmy squishy amorphous things, fish that don’t look like fish and terrestrial stuff that crawls on its belly; yuck! and don’t forget those strict hooves rules). Douglas insights regarding the “dialectical” relationship between categorical systems and the stuff that does not fit in them (cultural “dirt”) as well as the social technologies that are mobilized to deal with this stuff out of place (or with the unavoidable contact with this stuff) was an early (but not often acknowledged) influence on the “Edinburgh School” of science studies. David Bloor’s classic essay on primitive mathematical classification “Polyhedra and the abominations of Leviticus” contains a clear reference to Purity and Danger in its title for instance.

Beyond classification, Mary Douglas was also concerned with how social relations and culture interact. An early essay on the social context and consequences of “joking” is a must read in this regard and contains in a nutshell the essence of her approach to cultural phenomena. Her other classic book Natural Symbols, took off from a simple meta-theoretical analysis of Basil Bernstein’s (1964) study of differences in interactional styles between middle and working class Britons, reflections on the unintended consequences of Vatican II relaxations of dietary codes for the cultural identity of the “Bog” Irish, and her own observations culled from various anthropological field studies to develop a typology of various “forms of life” that later on became codified as grid-group analysis. According to Douglas most viable social forms fell somewhere in a bi-dimensional space composed of on the one hand an axis that separated those social systems that demarcated a high boundary between insiders and outsiders and those which did not (high group and low group), and on the other hand a second axis that separated those groups which prescribed lots of strictures in terms of interaction with others or with the material world and those which did not (high grid and low grid). An early monograph contains various contributions dealing with this form of cultural analysis.

The late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky fell in love with this stuff, in particular Douglas’ generalizations–from anthropological studies of Witchcraft and Ethno-theories of illness–of how various forms of life induce patterned forms of risk perception and blame apportionment in different collectivities (i.e. Douglas 1992), ultimately producing a highly underrated monograph on the subject entitled Cultural Theory and other works on risk perception and their consequences for political mobilization (Douglas and Wildavsky1983). This strand of cultural analysis would also form part of the early revival of interest in culture among sociologists in the early eighties spearheaded by Robert Wuthnow, Wendy Griswold, Al Bergesen, Paul DiMaggio and others (see for instance Wuthnow et al 1984) which introduced the work of Douglas to mainstream American sociology (the earliest discovery by a sociologist of the treasure trove that Douglas represents, is Bergesen’s 1978 AJS review essay) . In addition, Douglas almost single-handedly legimitized both the sociological study of both material consumption and the now growing field of food consumption in a couple of early monographs on the social role of consumer culture objects and the organization of meals and the classification of food stuffs in England (i.e. Douglas and Isherwood 1979)

Interestingly, the Douglas book that most orgheads are probably familiar with is the collection of lectures How Institutions Think which became one of the many heterodox texts amassed by DiMaggio and Powell to stake the grounds of the then groundbreaking New Institutionalist approach to the analysis of organizations. I find it interesting, simply because of the fact that these series of lectures is not very representative of Douglas’ own “thought style” (and therefore the book is not even close to being one of her best); Douglas was an ambitious and programmatic thinker, while the lectures are mostly guarded and full of “middle range” anecdotes (the most famous of which concern the differences in the Classification of grapes in Napa valley versus France). So for those of you who have only heard of Douglas through How Institutions Think, get to reading! She’ll be an intellectual presence in sociology for years to come.