Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory
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RISK AND BLAME RISK AND BLAME Essays in cultural theory Mary Douglas London and New York First published in hardback in 1992 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Paperback edition published in 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1992 Mary Douglas All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-43086-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-73910-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-06280-2 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-11999-5 (pbk) To James Douglas CONTENTS Introduction ix Part I Risk and blame 1 RISK AND BLAME 3 2 RISK AND JUSTICE 22 3 RISK AND DANGER 38 4 MUFFLED EARS 55 5 WITCHCRAFT AND LEPROSY: TWO STRATEGIES FOR REJECTION 83 6 THE SELF AS RISK-TAKER: A CULTURAL THEORY OF CONTAGION IN RELATION TO AIDS 102 Part II Wants and institutions 7 THE NORMATIVE DEBATE AND THE ORIGINS OF CULTURE 125 8 WANTS 149 9 NO FREE GIFTS: INTRODUCTION TO MAUSS’S ESSAY ON THE GIFT 155 10 INSTITUTIONS OF THE THIRD KIND: BRITISH AND SWEDISH LABOUR MARKETS COMPARED 167 11 AUTONOMY AND OPPORTUNISM 187 vii CONTENTS Part III Believing and thinking 12 THOUGHT STYLE EXEMPLIFIED: THE IDEA OF THE SELF 211 13 CREDIBILITY 235 14 A CREDIBLE BIOSPHERE 255 15 THE DEBATE ON WOMEN PRIESTS 271 16 THE HOTEL KWILU: A MODEL OF MODELS 295 Name index 314 Subject index 318 viii INTRODUCTION These essays have mostly been published in the last five years. They are so dispersed that whoever has seen one of them is unlikely to come across any of the others. For this reason I am very grateful to my publishers, Routledge, for bringing them out as a third collection of my essays, and also grateful to the original publishers in giving permission for them to appear in one volume. Although written for very different occasions, they are not really variegated in their matter. They are all on the same basic theme, a complaint of inhospitality against the social sciences. Typically an anthropologist tries to see individual persons in their social environment. The anthropological project calls for a holistic view, over a long enough stretch of generations and over a large enough number of persons for some pattern to appear. Using this wider and longer view to capture something about the culture, the anthropologist asks distinctive questions. Sociologists, for example, when they are interested in ritual will want to know if the individual performer is sincere; the anthropologist wants to know how the symbolic actions in one performance match the other performances, and whether there is any fit between the pattern of ritual action and the practical services of mutual support the performers are giving to one another. For anthropologists speculations about the meanings of words are just speculations unless the context of action is taken into account. The day that anthropologists give up their attempt to ground meanings in politics and economics will be a sad day. The loss will be not so much for themselves as for the social sciences in general. For in the next twenty years or so the social sciences will be looking for just such a holistic approach that they have denied ix INTRODUCTION themselves by their methodological individualism. I predict a radical change of heart in the near future. The idea of risk has recently risen to prominence in political debate, and has become the regular coinage of exchange on public policy. The first of the essays, ‘Risk and blame’, gives a history of my attempt to find a niche in the growing learned discourse on risk where I could share with other scholars an interest in how danger is politicized. The essay on ‘Risk and justice’ (Chapter 2) explains why the language of risk is likely to perform that standardizing, centralizing role at the level of public debate. With the political unification of Europe we will find ourselves working out a common language for dovetailing policies. But the public debate needs to be able to refer back to a more or less coherent scholarly debate. It is currently impossible to make sense of the concept of risk in the compartmentalized, individualistic frame of analysis normally employed. It is my belief that the present intellectual fragmentation will no longer be endured. The pressures to speak to each other across national and disciplinary boundaries will grow, and the gravity of the questions posed as comparisons of risk will force the social sciences to make their infrastructure of assumptions coalesce. When that happens, anthropology will be there, ready to meet the demand for an objective, whole view of human action. The first six essays in this volume set the problem and explain the need for a more holistic approach to the subject of risk. A reason for hoping for such a change is the difficulty of applying the traditional discourse of social anthropology to ourselves. It cannot be done without a radical overhaul, because of deeply entrenched methodological prejudices. Methodology is the one common platform that counters the fragmentation of our knowledge of ourselves, but the accepted methodology starts and ends with the individual. It is my belief that the egocentric theoretical position of most psychology, economics, and cognitive science inhibits their understanding collective behaviour. The essays in Part 2 on ‘Wants and institutions’ bear witness to the fragmentary state of our received ideas about human behaviour. The normal sociological posture for thinking about institutions is either to leave out the individuals altogether, or to start with an individual threatened by, or controlled by institutions. There is no room for the idea that there may be some individuals whoare x INTRODUCTION setting up and maintaining the institutions as part of a process of incorporating other individuals in their own life projects. A view from inside our own society does not call for theory about the origin of institutions. But the anthropologist is forced by avocation to understand foreign individuals in the act of making their foreign institutions. This is hard enough, but it is harder still to bring home the insights gleaned from abroad. It is tempting to become perpetual tourists, lingering comfortably in the porches of wayside inns. The last essay in this volume turns away from the social sciences and reproaches the anthropologists in their turn. They must not abandon the effort to synthesize what they know about others with what is known about ourselves. For better or worse, because we cannot avoid tangling with the social sciences we cannot avoid social theory. One of the gaps most difficult to fill in our Western conceptual apparatus is the idea of the self. It is basic to utilitarian philosophy, and to economic analysis, both of which start from the assumption of a person motivated by self-interest. It is basic to psychology in all its branches, especially to cognitive psychology. It is central also to political debate and to the theory of risk, and to theories about credibility. The essay on thought styles (Chapter 12) suggests why the self is so shrouded from analysis that it rates the status of a taboo area. For ideological reasons the self is considered as pure subjectivity, incapable of analysis, insusceptible to theory. But without breaching the taboos, it is possible to write an objective account of how the idea of the self (the idea of it, of course, not the self itself), is treated in the normative debate which is the source and origin of culture. Balancing the complaints, another theme runs through all the essays, that is a theory of culture. As many of the essays illustrate, cultural theory is a way of thinking about culture that draws the social environment systematically into the picture of individual choices. It provides a method of analysing public debates as positions taken in a conflict between cultures. The background history of this theoretical effort is recorded elsewhere, as shown in the bibliographies of these essays. One of the special strengths of cultural theory is to be able to predict what specific new perspectives appear when a social position is changed, new foregrounds emerge and old worries are backgrounded. The method is continually in process of being strengthened and refined by a scattered group of colleagues whose marks are on every page xi INTRODUCTION of this book, and whose support and stimulus I warmly acknowledge. Finally I return to the topic of the Hotel Kwilu, the last essay in this volume. Academics are tempted to be content with the restricted hospitality of their disciplines. My husband has been tireless in efforts to make me relate the discourse of anthropology to the discourses in economics and political theory. I dedicate this volume to him as the only person I know impervious to the Kwilu effect. xii Part I RISK AND BLAME 1 RISK AND BLAME1 MORALS AND DANGER An American taxi driver in the Mid-West once asked what I did. When I said I was an anthropologist he asked some probing questions which I answered so lamely that I was driven to explain that I was an anthropologist working in the department of Religious Studies.