Natural Symbols

Mary Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134773749
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Every natural symbol - derived from blood, breath or excrement - carries a social meaning and this work focuses on the ways in which any one culture makes its selections from body symbolism. Each person treats their body as an image of society and the author examines the varieties of ritual and symbolic expression and the patterns of social ritual in which they are embodied.
Natural Symbols is a book about religion and it concerns our own society at least as much as any other. It has stimulated new insights into religious and political movements and has provoked re-appraisals of current progressive orthodoxies in many fields. As a classic, it represents a work of anthropology in its widest sense, exploring themes such as the social meaning of natural symbols and the image of the body in society which are now very much in vogue in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.
In this reissue and with a new Introduction, Natural Symbols will continue to appeal to all students of anthropology, sociology and religion.

Chapter 1
Away from ritual

One of the gravest problems of our day is the lack of commitment to common symbols. If this were all, there would be little to say. If it were merely a matter of our fragmentation into small groups, each committed to its proper symbolic forms, the case would be simple to understand. But more mysterious is a wide-spread, explicit rejection of rituals as such. Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity. We are witnessing a revolt against formalism, even against form. ‘The vast majority of my classmates just sat through four years.’ So wrote Newfield of what he called the ungeneration of his college year: ‘They didn’t challenge any authority, take any risks or ask any questions. They just memorized “the given”, not even complaining when instructions turned them into mindless tape-recorders, demanding they recite rather than reason’ (Newfield, 1966:41). Shades of Luther! Shades of the Reformation and its complaint against meaningless rituals, mechanical religion, Latin as the language of cult, mindless recitation of litanies. We find ourselves, here and now, reliving a world-wide revolt against ritualism. To understand it, Marx and Freud have been invoked, but Durkheim also foretold it and it behoves the social anthropologist to interpret alienation. Some of the tribes we observe are more ritualist than others. Some are more discontented than others with their traditional forms. From tribal studies there is something to say about a dimension which is usually ignored—the band or area of personal relations in which an individual moves. But in trying to say it, we are handicapped by terminology.

Many sociologists, following Merton (1957:131ff.), use the term ritualist for one who performs external gestures without inner commitment to the ideas and values being expressed. Thus these apathetic students would be ritualists. There is some analogy in this to the usage of zoologists. For example, when an animal is said to make a ritual attack the zoologist means that a sequence of movements is initiated which, if completed normally, would end in aggression; the function of the animal ritual is communication, for when the other animal receives the signal, it changes its behaviour into ritual submission, thus inhibiting and checking the sequence of aggressive actions. This seems to be a perfectly legitimate way of distinguishing between symbolic and other behaviour in animals. A form of communication is identified; no judgement is implied about the value of the ritual as compared with other forms of communication. However, when this usage is transferred to human behaviour, ritual, defined as a routinized act diverted from its normal function, subtly becomes a despised form of communication. Other symbolic acts accurately convey information about the intentions and commitments of the actor: ritual does not. The ritualist becomes one who performs external gestures which imply commitment to a particular set of values, but he is inwardly withdrawn, dried out and uncommitted. This is a distractingly partisan use of the term. For it derives from the assumptions of the anti-ritualists in the long history of religious revivalism. The sociologist may maintain that the emotional legacy does not disturb his cool objectivity. He cannot deny however that it leaves him without convenient terminology for describing the other kind of symbolic action which correctly expresses the actor’s internal state. It would be decidedly cumbrous to use anti-ritualism for the positively committed use of symbolic forms in order to keep ritualism in its pejorative, sectarian sense. There is another reason for using ritual in a neutral sense. Anthropologists need to communicate with sociologists as well as with zoologists. They are in the habit of using ritual to mean action and beliefs in the symbolic order without reference to the commitment or non-commitment of the actors. They have a practical reason for this usage. For in small-scale, face-to-face society the gulf between personal meanings and public meanings cannot develop; rituals are not fixed; discrepancy between the situation being enacted and the form of expression is immediately reduced by change in the latter. Primitive jurisprudence sees no gap between law and morality, because there are no written precedents and because small changes in the law can be constantly made to express new moral situations and because such changes, being unrecorded, are unperceived. The idea of an immutable God-given law is in practice compatible with a changing legal situation. If this is so in the formal situation of specialized tribal law courts, how much more so in the public use of religious symbols in primitive society. However earnestly the anthropologist is assured that the worship of the gods follows an immutable pattern from the beginning of tribal history, there is no justification whatever for believing what the performers themselves believe. Primitive religions are fortunate in that they cannot carry a dead weight of ‘ritualized’ ritual (to adopt the sociologist’s usage). Therefore anthropologists have not needed so far to consider the difference between external symbolic forms and internal states. It is fair enough that ‘ritualized’ ritual should fall into contempt. But it is illogical to despise all ritual, all symbolic action as such. To use the word ritual to mean empty symbols of conformity, leaving us with no word to stand for symbols of genuine conformity, is seriously disabling to the sociology of religion. For the problem of empty symbols is still a problem about the relation of symbols to social life, and one which needs an unprejudiced vocabulary.

The anthropological usage relates the discussion more honestly to the historical controversies in religion. Ritual in the positive sense corresponds to ritualism in Church history, and allows us to identify ritualists and anti-ritualists in terms which they themselves would use. We are thus able to reflect upon ourselves and consider the causes of anti-ritualism today.

An instructive example is the recent concern of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England with Friday abstinence. This is a rule which, on the one hand, is dear to large sections of the Catholic population. They adhere to it, confess its breach with contrition, generally take it seriously. On the other hand it is not highly regarded by the clergy. In their eyes the avoidance of meat on Fridays has become an empty ritual, irrelevant to true religion. In this argument the anti-ritualists are the clergy and the ritualists a type known patronizingly as the Bog Irishmen. Bog Irishism seems to be a highly magical, irrational, non-verbal culture. Paradoxically the Bog Irish are found, not so much in Ireland, as in London parishes. Friday abstinence is the core rule of their religion: it is a taboo whose breach will bring automatic misfortune. It is the only sin they think worth mentioning in confession and they evidently believe that it will count against them more heavily on the day of judgement than breach of any of the ten commandments. To bring them nearer to the true doctrines, the rule of Friday abstinence has now been abolished in England and an active movement of new catechetics attempts to wean their offspring from magicality and bring them to a superior form of worship.

When I ask my clerical friends why the new forms are held superior, I am answered by a Teilhardist evolutionism which assumes that a rational, verbally explicit, personal commitment to God is self-evidently more evolved and better than its alleged contrary, formal, ritualistic conformity. Questioning this, I am told that ritual conformity is not a valid form of personal commitment and is not compatible with the full development of the personality; also that the replacement of ritual conformity with rational commitment will give greater meaning to the lives of Christians. Furthermore if Christianity is to be saved for future generations, ritualism must be rooted out, as if it were a weed choking the life of the spirit. We find in all this a mood which closely parallels the anti-ritualism which has inspired so many evangelical sects. There is no need to go back to the Reformation to recognize the wave on which these modern Catholics are rather incongruously riding.

Today, as much amongst us as the immigrant Irish, are the thriving, numerous Protestant sects which each arose in turn by rejecting ecclesiology, and by seeking to return to the primitive purity of the Gospel message, speaking straight to the heart of the worshipper without intervening ritual forms.

Is this move against ritual to be seen as a matter of swings of the pendulum? Such an approach implies that any strong impulse towards ritual must eventually be countered by an impulse in the other sense. One of the usual explanations of the regular renewal of anti-ritualism is that revolts against established hierarchical systems of religion come from the disinherited. A popular combination of Freud and Weber, it assumes that the principal religious function is to cope with psychological maladjustment and that as this function becomes more or less established, so the social forms become more or less routinized. A movement which begins as a sect expressing the religious needs of the poor gradually moves up the social scale. It becomes respectable. Its rituals increase, its rigorous fundamentalism in devotion to the Word becomes as weighted with magic as the sacramental edifice it started by denying. With respectability comes ritualism. With loss of good fortune comes anti-ritualism and the new sect. This is the assumption underlying many of the contributions to Patterns of Sectarianism (ed. Wilson, 1967). Wilson expresses it very clearly himself when he offers a maladjustment theory for the development of anti-ritualist sects. Maladjustment is bound to follow from social change. Hence the impulse to new sects grows with the speed of change.

The specific factors of stimulus of sect emergence are usually found in the stresses and tensions differentially experienced within the total society. Change in the economic position of a particular group (which may be a change only in relative position); disturbance of normal social relations, for instance in the circumstances of industrialization and urbanization; the failure of the social system to accommodate particular age, sex and status groups—all of these are possible stimuli in the emergence of sects. These are the needs to which the sects, to some extent, respond. Particular groups are rendered marginal by some process of social change; there is a sudden need for a new interpretation of their social position, or for a transvaluation of their experience. Insecurity, differential status anxiety, cultural neglect, prompt a need for readjustment which sects may, for some, provide.

(ibid.: 31)

And so on.

The argument which seeks to explain behaviour by reference to maladjustment, compensation, deprival is always fair game. When it rears its head among empirical sociologists it is a particularly pleasant duty to give chase. The psychoanalysts, who popularized this equilibrium model of human nature, based their case on its therapeutic value. The question of forming scientifically verifiable propositions was not their primary concern. But for a sociologist to seek the origins of a class of religious movement in terms of maladjustment and readjustment is to abdicate his role. Either he must use the proposition to prove its own premise, or he must admit it is valueless for explaining negative instances. What about the Bog Irish? Are they not dispossessed, deprived, suffering disturbance of normal social relations? When they find themselves labouring in London, or, rather, queuing outside labour exchanges, do they not feel a sudden need for a new interpretation of their social experience? For what status could be more insecure, more marginal and anxiety-prone than that of the immigrant unskilled worker in London? Yet there they are, clinging tenaciously to their ancient ecclesiastical organization and elaborate ritualism from which far less obviously marginal and socially insecure preachers strive to dislodge them. We can be dissatisfied, therefore, with this as an explanation of anti-ritualism.

The deprivation hypothesis has its roots deep in our cultural heritage. Perhaps Rousseau gave the first and most emphatic vision of the individual enchained by society and liable to revolt after a certain pitch of humiliation and despair has been reached. The assumption that has bedevilled sociology ever since is that deprival and strain can be measured cross-culturally. In my Chapter 3 below I attempt to establish methodological limits within which these notions can be applied. Anyone who uses the idea of strain or stress in a general explanatory model is guilty, at the very least, of leaving his analysis long before it is complete, at worst, of circularity. Smelser, for example, puts the factor of strain into his explanation of mass movements, panics, crazes and religious movements. Strain, for him, results from discontinuity between roles and performance (Smelser, 1962:54), but as this discontinuity cannot be assessed he proceeds to postulate its emergence as a result of social change. He detects structural strain when large classes of unattached persons flood into towns, or equally in what he calls ‘pinched’ groups (ibid.: 199 and 338). So we are little further in locating causes of mass movements of different kinds. The emotional content of a word like ‘strain’ inhibits analysis as much as maladjustment, deprivation, frustration and the rest. A further difficulty lies in concentrating on change and movement, for these can always be presumed to start in a state of disequilibrium. It is more revealing to identify in certain kinds of collective action both the distinctive social structure and the correlated symbolism which are found in the steady state in some small-scale primitive societies.

Even amongst ourselves, there is a long-term tendency to be reckoned with. A trend towards unritualistic forms of worship is found not merely among the dispossessed and disoriented. Contemporary Catholicism in America displays an

individual emphasis, found also in Protestant spirituality, focuses on a personal type of religious experience in which the individual considers himself and God to the relative exclusion of his neighbour.

For those who get their spirituality in the form of reading, the sociologist of religion goes on to say,

the bulk of spiritual reading recommended to Catholics for two centuries has emphasized this private spirituality…. In Gospel language, this means that the role of Mary took…precedence over that of Martha.

(Neal, 1965:26–7)

Let me use this excerpt to signpost three phases in the move away from ritualism. First, there is the contempt of external ritual forms; second, there is the private internalizing of religious experience; third, there is the move to humanist philanthropy. When the third stage is under way, the symbolic life of the spirit is finished. For each of these stages social determinants can be identified. Loyalty to my Bog Irish ancestors would not in itself lead me to defend ritualism. Without being Irish, any anthropologist knows that public forms of symbolic expression are not to be despised. The reformers who set low value on the external and symbolic aspects of Friday abstinence and who exhort the faithful to prefer eleemosynary deeds are not making an intellectually free assessment of forms of worship. They are moving with the secular tide along with other sections of the middle classes who seek to be justified in their lives only by saving others from hunger and injustice. There are personal experiences which drive people in our society towards justification by good works. But at this point notice also that the Irishism which clings to ritual forms is itself also socially determined. The Friday abstainers are not free to follow their pastors in their wide-ranging philanthropy. For each person’s religion has to do with himself and his own autonomous needs. There is a sad disjunction between the recognized needs of clergy, teachers, writers and the needs of those they preach, teach and write for.

I hope to disclose these social determinants by considering small-scale, primitive cultures. The problem in hand is the central problem of religious history and it amazes me that anthropological insights have not yet been systematically used to resolve it. So little has been done to extend the analysis across modern and primitive cultures that there is still no common vocabulary. Sacraments are one thing, magic another; taboos one thing, sin another. The first thing is to break through the spiky, verbal hedges that arbitrarily insulate one set of human experiences (ours) from another set (theirs). To make a start I shall take ritualism to signify heightened appreciation of symbolic action. This will be manifested in two ways: belief in the efficacy of instituted signs, sensitivity to condensed symbols. The first is the sacramental, and equally the magical, theology. I see no advantage for this discussion in making any distinction between magical and sacramental. I could be talking about an historic shift in Europe from an emphasis on ritual efficacy before the Reformation to an emphasis on spontaneous, commemorative rites. Or I could be referring to the variation in tribal religions from strong to weak beliefs in magical efficacy. Let it make no difference to the argument whether I use the word magic or sacrament.

Ritualism is most highly developed where symbolic action is held to be most certainly efficacious. Between Catholic and Anglican celebrations of the Eucharist there is a shift from the emphasis on ritual efficacy in the first, to the emphasis on a commemorative rite in the second. This is a fine difference in the series (ranging from magical to unmagical ritual) whose social origins we are considering. The difference is perhaps most easily identified in attitudes to wrong-doing. Where symbols are highly valued and ritualism strong, then the idea of sin involves specific, formal acts of wrong-doing; where ritualism is weak, the idea of sin does not focus on specific external actions, but on internal states of mind: rituals of purification will not be so much in evidence.

Before I launch into a comparison of primitive religions, I must recall the delicacy of the line on which a sacramental religion rests. Sacraments, as I understand, are signs specially instituted to be channels of grace. The whole material world is held to be sacramental in the sense that material signs and channels of grace are everywhere, always available; but the sacraments are specially instituted. The Christian who approaches a sacrament must fulfil stipulated ritual conditions. If these, for one reason or another, cannot be met, he can have recourse to the more diffuse sources of grace. Instead of actually going through the instituted form of confession and absolution, he can make an inward ‘act of contrition’; instead of Eucharistic communion he can make an ‘act of spiritual communion’. The devotion to the sacraments, then, depends on a frame of mind which values external forms and is ready to credit them with special efficacy. It is such a general attitude which commits the ritualist to sacramental forms of worship. And vice versa, a lack of interest in external symbols would not be compatible with a cult of instituted sacraments. Many of the current attempts to reform the Christian liturgy suppose that, as the old symbols have lost their meaning, the problem is to find new symbols or to revivify the meaning of the old ones. This could be a total waste of effort if, as I argue, people at different historic periods are more or less sensitive to signs as such. Some people are deaf or blind to non-verbal signals. I argue that the perception of symbols in general, as well as their interpretation, is socially determined. If I can establish this, it will be important for the criticism of maladjustment or strain theories of religious behaviour.

First, to dispose of the popular idea that all primitive religions are magical and taboo-ridden. Robertson Smith (1894) voiced this impression that there has been, through the centuries, a progressive decline of magic accompanying the growth of...