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Symbolic Anthropology Symbolic Anthropology Victor Turner (1920
Symbolic Anthropology • Examines symbols & processes by which humans assign meaning. • Addresses fundamental Symbolic anthropology questions about human social life, especially through myth & ritual. ANTH 348/Ideas of Culture • Culture does not exist apart from individuals. • It is found in interpretations of events & things around them. Symbolic Anthropology Victor Turner (1920-1983) • Studied with Max Gluckman @ Manchester University. • Culture is a system of meaning deciphered by • Taught at: interpreting key symbols & rituals. • Stanford University • Anthropology is an interpretive not scientific • Cornell University • University of Chicago endeavor . • University of Virginia. • 2 dominant trends in symbolic anthropology • Publications include: • Schism & Continuity in an African Society (1957) represented by work of British anthropologist • The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1967) Victor Turner & American anthropologist • The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes Among the Ndembu of Zambia Clifford Geertz. (1968) • The Ritual Process: Structure & Anti-Structure (1969). • Dramas, Fields, & Metaphors (1974) • Revelation & Divination in Ndembu Ritual (1975) Social Drama Social drama • • Early work on village-level social processes among the For Turner, social dramas have four main phases: Ndembu people of Zambia 1. Breach –rupture in social relations. examination of demographics & economics. 2. Crisis – cannot be handled by normal strategies. • Later shift to analysis of ritual & symbolism. 3. Redressive action – seeks to remedy the initial problem, • Turner introduced idea of social drama redress and re-establish • "public episodes of tensional irruption*” 4. Reintegration or schism – return to status quo or an • “units of aharmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations.” alteration in social arrangements. • They represent windows into social organization & values . -
Revisiting Mary Douglas
Review article Elementary forms and their dynamics: revisiting Mary Douglas by Perri 6 Professor in Public Management School of Business and Management Queen Mary, University of London E-mail: [email protected] Accepted for publication in Anthropological forum , 28.5.2014 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Mitchell Low and to Greg Acciaioli for commissioning this review article and for their comments on an earlier draft, and to Paul Richards for many invaluable suggestions. Elementary forms and their dynamics: revisiting Mary Douglas Review article on Fardon R, ed, 2013, Mary Douglas: cultures and crises – understanding risk and resolution , London: Sage and Fardon R, ed, 2013, Mary Douglas: a very personal method – anthropological writings drawn from life , London: Sage. Keywords Mary Douglas; neo-Durkheimian institutional theory; institutions; social dynamics; hierarchy; enclave; isolate; individualism; Abstract Mary Douglas’s oeuvre furnishes the social sciences with one of the most profound and ambitious bodies of social theory ever to emerge from within anthropology. This article uses the occasion of the publication of Fardon’s two volumes of her previously uncollected papers to restate her core arguments about the limited plurality of elementary forms of social organisation and about the institutional dynamics of conflict and about conflict attenuation. In reviewing these two volumes, the article considers what those anthropologists who have been sceptical either of Douglas’s importance or of the Durkheimian traditions generally will want from these books to convince them to look afresh at her work. It concludes that the two collections will provide open-minded anthropologists with enough evidence of the creativity and significance of her achievement to encourage them to reopen her major theoretical works. -
Toward a Convergence of Cognitive and Symbolic Anthropology
toward a convergence of cognitive and symbolic anthropology BENJAMIN N. COLBY-University of California, lrvine JAMES W. FERNANDEZ-Princeton University DAVID B. KRONENFELD-University of California, Riverside There is a new fermentation in social anthropology that crosses the boundaries of what have usually been seen as distinct subfields. In particular, one can envision a convergence of cognitive and symbolic anthropology. We are concerned both with the signs of con- vergence that one can already see and with the directions along which this convergence might continue. The lack of developed theory in the two subfields makes both more responsive to changing conditions which include innovations in disciplines that neighbor anthropology. as well as in cognitive and symbolic anthropology themselves. This paper ex- amines the conditions that have brought about the emergence of the two subfields as distinct groupings of anthropologists, describes the recent changes that are bringing the two closer together, and suggests future directions that may lead to a convergence and even, possibly, to a single theoretical base which is more developed and interesting than the separate formulations of earlier writings. While no such theory is advanced here, we point to the directions from which such a theory might come. separate fields of Inquiry Cognitive anthropology grows out of an enduring anthropological commitment to the analysis of native thought processes and, more particularly, to formal analyses of systems of belief and world view. Subsequently, this approach has come to rely heavily on the analysis of native terminologies and entered into a highly focused phase in the 1960s with studies of taxonomic structures and semantic features within such domains as those of kin- This review describes the conditions that have established the subfields of cognitive anthropology and symbolic anthropology as major clusterings of anthropologists. -
Mary Douglas and Institutions Dean Pierides University of Stirling D.C
Mary Douglas and Institutions Dean Pierides University of Stirling [email protected] Graham Sewell University of Melbourne [email protected] To be published in S. Clegg & M. Pina e Cunha (Eds.), Management, Organizations and Contemporary Social Theory, Routledge. Abstract We provide reasons why researchers of business and management who are interested in how institutions are related to organization would want to read and use the work of Mary Douglas. One of the central problems about which management and organization theorists still debate is the extent to which the structure of institutions and organizations determines the agency afforded to individuals. We show how Douglas makes space for a treatment of institutions that avoids the usual retreat to methodological individualism that characterises these debates. This holds out the promise of reinvigorating organisational analysis in a manner that is in step with calls for focusing on organization as a way of life and with calls for revisiting the classics. Keywords: Mary Douglas, institutions, rational agency, methodological individualism Dean Pierides is Lecturer in Business and Management at the University of Stirling, UK. He was awarded his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and DipEd, MEd and PhD from the University of Melbourne. He was previously a visiting scholar at Copenhagen Business School and Lecturer in Organisations and Society at the University of Manchester. His research is about how organisations deal with uncertainty, with a focus on government agencies that are responsible for emergencies and disasters, whether natural, financial or otherwise. Graham Sewell is Professor of Management and Associate Dean, Research in the Faculty of Business & Economics, University of Melbourne. -
Mary Douglas
Mary Douglas 1921 – 2007 Considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion and a focus on rule systems and social categories, Douglas was educated at the University of Oxford (St Anne’s College, 1939-1943, then 1946 and into the early 1950s for the Doctorate) and worked for 25 years on faculty at University College London. In 1989 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and in 1992 she became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) before being appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the Queen's New Year's Honours List in 2006. Most famous for: • Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) • Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970) • The World of Goods (1979) with Baron Isherwood • Evans-Pritchard (Fontana Modern Masters, 1980) • Risk and Culture (1980) with Aaron Wildavsky • How Institutions Think (1986) • Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992). • Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (2004) Relevance for Management and Organization Theory Douglas’s works have been broadly influential in the social sciences, especially in studies of the social organization of community, linked to forms of action, in comparative religion, and in the study of risk cultures. A large community of scholars interested in policy and policy analysis has developed around her work in what they would call ‘Cultural Theory’. She pioneered a compelling style of comparative analysis. Her work has been less broadly engaged in organization theory and management studies. -
Mary Douglas: a Taste for Hierarchy
Mary Douglas: A Taste for Hierarchy By François Buton and Eric Soriano Though poorly known in France, the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas is nonetheless essential for understanding the elementary forms of social organization and daily life. By shedding light on her academic career and personal life, this portrait rehabilitates the thought of a major intellectual. Unquestionably, the work of Mary Douglas (1921-2007) does not enjoy the recognition it deserves from French readers. Best known for two books published twenty years apart – Purity and Danger, 1966 (first translated into French in 1971) and How Institutions Think, 1986 (first translated in 1999)1 – the British anthropologist is the author of a far more extensive oeuvre: her collected works consist of twelve volumes that were published by Routledge between 1963 and 1992, to which must be added around ten other books published by other editors through 2007. Douglas considered Purity and Danger, her first book, to be inseparable from her second, Natural Symbols (1970), which was never translated into French, and she maintained that How Institutions Think, which consists of lectures delivered in 1986 in the United States, where she lived for a decade, could serve as a retrospective introduction to these two earlier books. In other words, to present Douglas’ work, as this essay will attempt to do, is to encourage readers to complement their reading of (occasionally confidential) translations of her books and the work of scholars who, like Marcel Calvez and Denis Duclos, have made use of Douglas’ oeuvre, by experiencing it in its original language. 1 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, Routledge, 1966 (trans. -
Fifty Key Sociologists: the Contemporary Theorists
FIFTY KEY SOCIOLOGISTS: THE CONTEMPORARY THEORISTS Fifty Key Sociologists: The‘ Contemporary Theorists covers the life, work, ideas and impact of some of the most important thinkers within this discipline. This volume concentrates on those figures whose main writings were based predominantly in the second half of the twen- tieth century. A–Z entries make this book easy to navigate and fig- ures covered include: Zygmunt Bauman Pierre Bourdieu Judith Butler Michel Foucault Claude Le´vi-Strauss Interested readers will find the ideas of theorists writing in the nine- teenth and early twentieth century discussed in Fifty Key Sociologists: The Formative Theorists. John Scott is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. His most recent books include Sociology: The Key Concepts (2006), Power (Polity Press, 2001), Social Theory: Central Issues in Sociology (Sage, 2006) and, with James Fulcher, Sociology third edition, 2007). Also available from Routledge Sociology: The Key Concepts John Scott 0-415-34406-9 Sociology: The Basics Martin Albrow 0-415-17264-0 Fifty Key Sociologists: The Formative Theorists Edited by John Scott 0-415-35260-6 Key Quotations in Sociology K. Thompson 0-415-05761-2 Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick 0-415-23281-3 Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (Second edition) Edited by Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick 0-415-28426-0 Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing 0-415-18156-9 Habermas: The Key Concepts Andrew Edgar 0-415-30379-6 The Routledge -
Douglas Main Document 31
Social organization, classificatory analogies and logics: Institutional theory revisits Mary Douglas Danielle M. Logue University of Technology Sydney [email protected] Stewart R. Clegg University of Technology Sydney John Gray University of Technology Sydney Accepted in Human Relations 30 October 2015 1 Abstract As a social theory of organization, it is unsurprising that institutional theory draws upon the profound and ambitious work of the late anthropologist Mary Douglas. One of the foundational concepts of organizational institutionalism, institutional logics, directly draws upon her work. Yet, in recent times, this foundational role has faded from view as institutional theory itself becomes increasingly institutionalized as a vibrant branch of organization studies. This is unfortunate for there is much continuity in current work with that of Douglas, it now being 50 years and 30 years, respectively, since the publication of two of her formative works. The deep analogies that underpin classificatory systems and the processes by which they are sustained remain significant areas under continued investigation by institutional theorists. Thus, in this paper we revisit Douglas’ core arguments and their connections to institutional theorizing. We specifically explore her contribution of ‘naturalizing analogies’ as a way of accounting for the unfolding of change across levels of analysis, extending, modifying and enriching explanations of how institutional change is reified, naturalized and made meaningful. We do this by providing empirical descriptions of meta-organizing analogies and field-level applications. We explain how Douglas’ major theoretical works are of considerable relevance for current institutional theorizing. This aids particularly in informing accounts of institutional logics and the movement between individual cognition and collective signification. -
Towards a Sociological Notion of Fiction
Primitive Classification and Postmodernity: Towards a Sociological Notion of Fiction Karin Knorr Cetina Introduction: Sociology beyond Modernism Postmodernist thinking in sociology is easily dismissed as gibberish taken over from French intellectuals and literary critics surveying the world from their Parisian desks or, worse still, from the vantage point of their brief travels to La Californie. It can be seen as an ephemeral fashion taken up by social theorists who are out of ideas, theorists who are finally getting bored with reinterpreting Weber, Durkheim and Marx.) But it can also be seen as a movement sustained by developments within sociology which imply a rupture with Enlightenment thinking, a negation of many of the definitive features which have been associated with the modern. These developments nourish a break with modernist claims by offering empirical documentation for their findings, a feature not entirely irrelevant to a science that wants to make assertions about the social world. In addition, they suggest that postmodernity is something more than a chapter in the sociology of intellectuals and their malaise with the world, as Bauman suggests (1988), or a trend in aestheticism keyed to increased individualism, multiple choices, and 'self-enrichment' or 'self-enlargement' (Rorty, 1986). The perspectives which push sociology from within beyond the grand master themes of modernist thinking and modernist research, differentiation and rationalization, and which lead, as one might say, to pastmodern thinking, are microanalysis and construc tionism. Microanalysis is the detailed description of social episodes through means such as ethnography, discourse analysis or visual methods. It has flourished in ethnomethodology, symbolic inter actionism, social phenomenology, and so on, and has documented in detail the existence of life-worlds which theorists such as Habermas (1983) think we have lost, and the relevance of the body, Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vo\. -
Implicit Meanings
Implicit Meanings This new edition of a classic work provides an indispensable introduction to the thought of Mary Douglas. First published to great acclaim in 1975, this second edition of Implicit Meanings includes a new introduction with Mary Douglas’s reflections on how her ideas have been taken up and how her own thinking has developed over the last forty years. Implicit Meanings includes writing on the key themes which are associated with Mary Douglas’s work and which have had a major influence on anthropological thought. Essays on animals, food, pollution, risk, joking, sorcery and myth derive from initial fieldwork experiences in Africa. In different ways, the essays probe beneath the surface meanings and seek to expose the implicit understandings which tend to be taken as unchallengeable. Mary Douglas has shown that anthropology can make a central contribution to debates in many academic disciplines, and can also illuminate everyday life. Mary Douglas is a distinguished international anthropologist. She retired as Professor of Anthropology at University College London, and taught in the USA until 1988. Her books include Purity and Danger (1966), Natural Symbols (1970), The World of Goods (1979), How Institutions Think (1986), and Risk and Blame (1992). Implicit Meanings Selected Essays in Anthropology Second Edition Mary Douglas London and New York First published 1999 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 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. -
Natural Symbols
MARY DOUGLAS MARY DOUGLAS: COLLECTED WORKS VOLUME I The Lele of the Kasai VOLUME II Purity and Danger VOLUME III Natural Symbols VOLUME IV Rules and Meanings VOLUME V Implicit Meanings VOLUME VI The World of Goods VOLUME VII Edward Evans-Pritchard VOLUME VIII Essays in the Sociology of Perception VOLUME IX Food in the Social Order VOLUME X Constructive Drinking VOLUME XI Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences VOLUME XII Risk and Blame MARY DOUGLAS COLLECTED WORKS VOLUME III NATURAL SYMBOLS London and New York First published in 1970 by Barrie and Rockliff The Cresset Press This edition published 2003 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, NewYork NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group Transferred to Digital Printing 2007 © by Mary Douglas 1970 Typeset in Times by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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 Cataloging in Publication Data ISBN 0-415-28397-3 (set) ISBN 0-415-29106-2 (volume III) Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great 1engths to -
07 Douglas 1749.Indd
MARY DOUGLAS 1 Margaret Mary Douglas 1921–2007 Ending is different from completion, [. .]; the fi rst is diffi cult, and the second impossible. (Douglas 2007: xiii) IT IS CONCEIVABLE that Mary Douglas was attracted to completion by the impossibility that she expressed epigrammatically in the last book pub- lished during her lifetime. But that would imbue her with a postmodern sensibility. More plausibly it was the other way around: the pull of com- pletion, its conceivability, was so intense that its impossibility seemed inci- dental. Mary Douglas strove mightily to complete what increasingly she expressed to be a lifetime’s project. She was not minded to celebrate impos- sibility or incompletion, however limpidly her thoughts might on occasion be left open to her reader’s construal. Intellectual challenges were put into the world to be faced and overcome. 1 I completed Mary Douglas: an Intellectual Biography (London, 1999) early in 1998. A supplementary bibliography to that account was published along with a reprint of my Guardian (18 May 2007) obituary of Mary Douglas in Anthropology Today (Oct. 2007, vol. 23, no. 5, 24–7). I subsequently read two sets of papers on which I draw here: Mary made me her literary executor, in which capacity I went through the papers and books in her Bloomsbury study; fi les of particular interest were sent to be archived at University College London (photographs to the British Museum). Most personal papers pre-dating 1985 had already been deposited in the Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois. I am grateful to the archivist Kevin Leonard for the generosity of his welcome when I visited in March 2009.