Risk and Blame

Professor Mary Douglas, Mary Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136490118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1992, this volume follows on from the programme for studying risk and blame that was implied in Purity and Danger. The first half of the book Douglas argues that the study of risk needs a systematic framework of political and cultural comparison. In the latter half she examines questions in cultural theory. Through the eleven essays contained in Risk and Blame, Douglas argues that the prominence of risk discourse will force upon the social sciences a programme of rethinking and consolidation that will include anthropological approaches.

Part I Rish and Blame

1 Risk and Blame¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315015842-1

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. He leapt on this information ‘You must be just the person we need in our Bible Group. There is a question we come against every week, and you will know the answer: Who came first, Adam and Eve, or the Dinosaur?’ Again I had to excuse myself, saying that it was a proper question for anthro- pology, but that I could not give much help as my main work was on risk. After a pause he came back hopefully saying that his brother-in-law was a safety officer, and that it would be good to have a talk with me about safety regulations. This is something like the scope and conclusion of my first conversation with Pro- fessor Hood. To him, too, I had to explain why an anthropologist in a Department of Religion had come to be interested in risk. It was a matter of retrospection on the book I wrote about pollution a quarter of a century ago.

All the decade that I was researching for Purity and Danger ² I had supposed the task in hand was to vindicate the so-called primitives from the charge of having a different logic or method of thinking. The evidence that there is a distinctive pre-modern mentality allegedly came from attitudes to misfortune. Moderns, the argument went, follow a line of reasoning from effects back to material causes, primitives follow a line from misfortune to spiritual beings.³ To uphold formally that their thought in itself is different is beset with difficulties. But informally a strong implicit bias holds us to that position, unless we can show that the political uses of natural dangers is a habit with ourselves as well as with others.

In Purity and Danger the rational behaviour of primitives is vindicated: taboo turns out not to be incomprehensible but an intelligible concern to protect society from behaviour that will wreck it. When miscreants are accused of spoiling the weather, killing with lightning, or causing storms at sea it is not a flaw in the reasoning process that should interest us, but something about casting blame. With much regret I left the book without making any link between taboo-thinking, which uses natural dangers to uphold community values, and our modern approach. So a gulf was left unbridged: they engage dangers politically on behalf of the constitution, we have disengaged dangers from politics and ideology, and deal with them by the light of science. What explains the difference? I hazarded the idea that their constitutions might be so much more fragile than ours that they needed recourse to blame and taboo, and hinted that the political weak- ness might be the explanation of what looked on the surface like a weakness in powers of reasoning. Time has passed, and events have made the link that was then so difficult to discern, now easy to assert. But it is interesting to reflect on why it was initially so elusive and why it is still so passionately rejected when the argument of Purity and Danger is put into terms of risk.⁴

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 I talked to a friend in political science who, on looking up the word ‘pollution’ in the new Encyclopedia of Social Sciences had been surprised to find my article⁵ on ritual defilement. A careful comment on The Golden Bough and other misunderstandings of magic and taboo was of little help to him because, at that time, concern for rivers and the survival of water-life had become a major political issue in the United States and he wanted to know what river pollution entailed. I felt he would have liked to have com- plained to the editors of the encyclopedia about their selection of writers. Polite though he was, this political scientist made it clear that my treatment of pollution was totally unconnected to the burning issues. For a long time the connection between river pollution and taboo seemed to be contrived merely by the happen- stance of language, as if one word, ‘pollution’, was doing duty for two different concepts: pollution of the environment and religious defilement. But now the clock hand has come full circle: taboo is relevant to risk and the one word, ‘pollution’, is right for both.

There is for me a satisfying sense of the dinosaur biting back, for the 1940s anthropology in which I was trained is quite antediluvian now. The theme, well known to anthropologists, is that in all places at all times the universe is moralized and politicized. Disasters that befoul the air and soil and poison the water are generally turned to political account: someone already unpopular is going to be blamed for it. This forensic theory of danger comes out of the 1940s anthropology in which I was trained at Oxford.⁶ It is so established that when I write about it my colleagues' reviews complain that it is all well known so, with added confidence, I go on to develop the implications. The questions start with how people explain misfortune.⁷ For example, a woman dies; the mourners ask, why did she die? After observing a number of instances, the anthropologist notices that for any misfortune there is a fixed repertoire of possible causes among which a plausible explanation is chosen, and a fixed repertoire of obligatory actions follow on the choice. Communities tend to be organized on one or another dominant form of explanation.⁸

One type of explanation is moralistic: she died because she had offended the ancestors, she had broken a taboo, she had sinned. Following this kind of explanation the action is expiatory; some purification rituals are called for. To avoid the same fate the community is exhorted to obey the laws. If this is the dominant form of explanation, the community which accepts it is organized very differently from one that does not blame the victim.

An alternative way of explaining misfortune is to attribute it to the work of individual adversaries. The moral will be that a survivor needs to be smarter than her rivals: they will say that the reason she died can be traced back to her not having been quick enough or clever enough in looking after her own interests; rival magic was more powerful than hers. The rivals who killed her are hardly being blamed when the finger of causation points to them, for there is not much moral concern: everyone is expected to do the same to promote their interests. The post-mortem decisions set up a community in which each member expects to be beset by rivals, and where the call to action will be for compensation at least, and probably vengeance — a community organized by the tit for tat of individual competition.

Different again in its impact on the community is the explanation of misfortune that blames an outside enemy. In this case the answer is that she died because an enemy of the community got her, not necessarily one who actually comes from outside but a hidden disloyal traitor. The action following the diagnosis is to seek out and inflict a communal punishment on the foe and to exact compensation.

These three types of blaming influence the system of justice. Or rather, the influence goes both ways, the blaming and the system of justice together are symptoms of the way the society is organized. There are communities, barely earning the name, which are not organized at all: here blame goes in all directions, unpredictably. Anything might just as plausibly have been the cause of any misfortune: flying saucers, Martian invaders, witchcraft, moral failure, technical failure; if there is no standard diagnosis, it follows there will be no standard action required. In short, the stronger the solidarity of a community, the more readily will natural disasters be coded as signs of reprehensible behaviour. Every death and most illnesses will give scope for defining blameworthiness. Danger is defined to protect the public good and the incidence of blame is a by-product of arrangements for persuading fellow members to contribute to it. Pollution seen from this point of view is a powerful forensic resource. There is nothing like it for bringing their duties home to members of the community. A common danger gives them a handle to manipu- late, the threat of a community-wide pollution is a weapon for mutual coercion.⁹ Who can resist using it who cares for the survival of the community?

In this light, the rare community which does not cast blame at all can only survive by a heroic programme of reconciliation. Such a community would have to avoid casting blame. I used to think that this type was theoretically impossible. I was convinced that the process of making a community inherently involved the members in mutual criticism and in using misfortune as a lever to raise the level of solidarity.¹⁰ This thesis is an extension of Durkheim’s thesis about the political uses of crime to the political uses of misfortune. I was sceptical that a community could be founded on a resolute refusal to blame anyone, neither the victim nor rivals or enemies. When evidence was proposed, I used to treat it with suspicion, expecting to find the fieldwork unconvincing, and the research not sufficiently aware of conflict going on. I was even disposed to believe that scale was a factor, that very small communities could achieve this benign result. Now I have learnt vigorously to resist theories that peace-loving is possible for a community if it is small in scale.¹¹ Michael Thompson has persuaded me otherwise by his accounts of the Buddhist Sherpa communities in Nepal,¹² and also by his developments of cultural theory to take account of a fuller range of attitudes to danger and blame.¹³ Cultural theory does not propose that persons who form a community consciously decide to have one or the other pattern of blaming. It expects that dangers affecting life and limb are drawn into the constitutional dialogue spontaneously and fall into regular patterns according to the kind of constitution that is being maintained.

In the late 1950s there was a general mood of rejoicing that nuclear power would usher in permanent prosperity for the world. This was why the idea was acceptable that the only people to use danger forensically were those that anthropologists study. This mood of enthusiasm for technology accounts for why the difference between them and us appeared to be a cognitive problem, a matter of knowing the real causes of things. Somehow, it was thought that science had really made things different for us. We were supposed to be able to recognize real dangers, whose causes are objectively identified, backed by the authority of valid experiment and theory. Chance, mystery and malice lurked in small corners not yet claimed by science but, generally speaking, thanks to our accurate knowledge of the world and our powerful technology, our blaming behaviour went direct to real causes instead of being deflected to the constitution-supporting function it performed elsewhere. For us, the line of reasoning implied, what you could call ‘real blaming’ was possible. Real blame was so guaranteed by its objective basis in knowledge that it could not be harnessed to the sordid work of ideology. This assumption was never challenged by critics of Purity and Danger, who presumably thought that way themselves.

Though I felt forced to accept that the difference between taboo and risk assessment was a matter of knowledge, I ardently scanned the 1950s literature on the sociology of knowledge for small exceptions. My object was to gather up any snippets of information about distorted reception of messages. I imagined there would still be residual cases of nature having been politicized even in our modern industrial democracy. I was interested in how information leaves open options for the receivers to interpret. This was already a popular topic in psychology. I was impressed with Frenkel Brunswick’s experiments with telling stories where the ideological signals were mixed up, for example sometimes the black man doing good and sometimes doing harm: she found that children could not remember the story at all unless they had first sorted out the roles into acceptable parts.¹⁴ Misreading evidence was an important theme in the history of science, where the same evidence was sometimes used to support alternative theories. In philosophy of science, and in the psychology of perception, and in the information theory that was budding then, interpretive control was fully recognized. In spite of all this current interest in perceptual focus, I found nothing to encourage me to suppose that blaming in modern society could be analysed under the same rubric as blaming anywhere else. It was unquestioned that in this respect we are uniquely different. This is why the sections in Purity and Danger which refer to the theory of perception have only a weak connection with the main argument. They are there to show that at least I tried to check.

At the same time, psychologists were developing attribution theory to study how individuals allocate blame. Nearly all the work that I read then on perception was focused on individual cognition. With a small shift of attention to institutional design there should have been an opening for experiments that assessed individual attitudes for cultural influence. Such research might well have shown that we moderns have every bit as much scope as they, the primitives, for politicized reading of danger. The time was ripe in the 1960s for a radical change in our understanding of cognitive processes so as to make proper allowance for the social component in the human make-up. Both economics and psychology were at a great height of esteem and both were using basically the same individualist cognitive model. In the early 1950s individualist theory became sacralized by its incorporation into artificial intelligence theory.¹⁵ There was at that time no scope for recognizing how blaming behaviour is geared into the making of community consensus. But now, encouraged by their having proved to be so wrong, I would propose even more radically that not just blaming but all cognition is politicized.

Looking back, there is a lot of irony. However liberal their political outlook, and however radical their political affiliation, anyone who at that time had an opinion on why the primitives were backward would propose a mental stagnation model, some version of the natives being locked into thought ways that were appropriate for their environment. But to get the discussion of primitive thought going seriously, we would have had somehow to unlock our own thought. One of the obstacles to good conversation on this topic was the low priority attached to bridging the gulf between The Golden Bough and modern technology.

To explain the difference between their attitude to pollution and ours, our civili...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Rish and Blame
• Part II Wants and Institutions
• Part III Believing and Thinking
• Name index
• Subject index