In Memoriam: Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas, preeminent anthropologist of the late 20th century, died this year at 86. Within sociology, Douglas is most often remembered for Purity and Danger, a classic treatise on the maintenance of boundaries between social groups. Often overlooked, however, is her later work Risk and Culture, co-authored with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. This book, which defined Douglas's intellectual trajectory in her late career, presaged Ulrich Beck’s work on risk by nearly a decade. In the few citations of the book in sociology today, the majority focus on Douglas and Wildavsky’s discussion of the mobilization of risk-consciousness by environmental movements. Among the more fascinating chapters of the book, however, is their analysis of the ways fear activates boundaries towards fringe groups at the margins of society. Douglas would later extend this line of thought from her early work on the Basai of Congo to the philosophy of Al Qaeda in recent years. This move mirrored her long-term interest in the abominations of Leviticus, which continue to interest biblical scholars to the present day.

Douglas’s key contribution was to show how taboo or “dirt” reflected the key role of classification in human groups. Above and beyond Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, however, Douglas introduced a new typology of “grid” and “group” with which to classify the function of classification in a wide range of societies. “Grid” refers to the amount of classification used to guide everyday behavior among different segments of society. A “Group” is therefore defined by the amount of classificatory force that holds people together. Societies with strong grids are hierarchical, whereas those with weak grids produce opportunism and entrepreneurship. Extremist groups exist where grid is strong but group is weak: “Enclavists have formed a group of like-minded friends who reject the rankings, formalities and inequalities of the outside society.” Hence, Douglas interpreted the motivation of Al Qaeda in symbolic—not instrumentalist—terms.

Publishing Bootcamp

A friend of mine just forwarded me the following advice on publishing from the out-going editor of Sociological Methodology-- helpful, if alarmingly instrumental:

"The future is contained in papers not yet written. Some of those papers will be written by authors who neither need nor seek advice. However, many of those papers – and some of the most valuable ones, I predict – will be written by authors who need advice, seek it, follow it, and thereby bring their work into print. These authors frequently ask editors for general and specific advice. The best advice I can give to others is the advice that I try to take myself, every day that I write. Here it is:

1) Write on topics that other people care about. And tell the readers why they should care.

2) Tell the reader why your findings are important. Be direct. “This question is important because . . .” and “This result is important because. . .”

3) Be short and blunt. Write short sentences. Use short words. Write short paragraphs. Complicated ideas are inevitable, but complicated sounding ideas don’t sell. If your idea is complicated, then find a simple way to explain it. Readers stop reading as soon as they lose track of the author’s argument. That’s true of reviewers too. The celebrated social psychologist Stanley Schachter used to say that if he could not explain his ideas to the satisfied understanding of his un-schooled grandmother, then he knew that he was not ready to write.

4) Start with a theoretical problem and draw theoretical conclusions. Theories are very popular. Everybody wants one.

5) Write for a specific publication. Be specific. Every decision you make about writing your paper should be made on the basis of how well it helps you get your paper into your target journal. Read copies of the journal in which you wish to publish, just to get a sense of the style that is favored by that journal. Then write in that style.

6) Identify the market for your research and then write in a style that appeals to that market. For example, don’t use complex mathematical notation when writing for a subfield that is allergic to fancy methods.

7) Never say that previous research is stupid. First, all theories are eventually found to be wrong. This is science, not religion, so be easy on your predecessors. Second, your paper will be reviewed by the very same people who wrote the stupid previous research. At best, they are only human; but sometimes they are as stupid as you think, and vindictive and mean-spirited too. So say instead that you are filling gaps in the literature, building on previous findings, resolving unresolved problems, or similar.

8) Write a long abstract for the reviewers. A long, well-written abstract will help the reviewers understand your paper. That helps you get a positive review. Of course, the copy editor will make you shorten the abstract before publication, but it’s a happy task to satisfy the copy editor after your paper is accepted.

9) Revise and resubmit quickly. An R&R (rejection with an invitation to revise and resubmit) is a successful outcome. Do whatever the reviewers tell you to do, right away. If the reviewers ask you to do stupid things, then you will have to do stupid things if you want your paper published. Don’t argue with reviewers; you can do the stupid things in footnotes that declare, “A reviewer asked that we . . .” Cancel your vacation. Kiss your family and friends goodbye temporarily; come to meetings late and leave early. Work nonstop except for exercise, food, and a little sleep, in that order. An R&R is like being called up for military duty; when you gotta go, you gotta go. And don’t forget to take the advice that the reviewers give you.

10) Recognize your enemies (perfectionism and pessimism) and have a strategy for defeating them. Try to write a mediocre paper. Then rewrite it until it is a very good paper. Make it your obligation to be an optimist. The important thing is to move forward at all times.

11) Circulate your paper for comments. Ask for advice with an open mind. If advice sounds good, then take it. If the reader misunderstands, conclude that you did not write clearly enough. Some very successful authors in sociology are very good at taking advice, but not very good at much of anything else. I forget their names. But I know that they circulate their papers, get advice, take the advice that they get, and then publish in the leading journals."

The End of Endnote as We Know It!

Has the "Endnote" bibliography software ever tempted you to smash your laptop with a filing cabinet full of dewey-decimal cards? If so, "Zotero" is for you. This ingenius free-ware allows one to "zap" references from an impressive array of websites straight into your firefox browser. The references have full compatibility with MS Word, and the integrated browser window allows you to store pdfs or "screenshots" of your references as well. "That's all well and good," says the hapless victim of Endnote path-dependency, "but what about all of my old Endnote references?" Fear not, skeptics, I transformed all of my old Endnote files into Zotero in less than two minutes.

It Was Like a Fever

Francesca Polletta's latest, It Was Like A Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, is essential reading for students of cultural trauma, social movements, and collective memory. Her basic thesis is that the ambiguity of narrative used in political speeches, public deliberation, and other discursive forums, is a powerful mechanism of social power. Her analysis successfully divorces narrative from the clutches of literary theory in order to show the causal and predictive power of storytelling for a variety of social outcomes. The following passage is a microcosm of the book's main message (p. viii):

"Take a story that, some say, won George Bush the 2004 election: a thirty-second television spot titled "Ashley's Story." The spot was produced by a conservative group, and it aired in nine contested states in the month before the election. It recounted sixteen-year-old Ashley Faulkner's meeting with the candidate at a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio. Ashley had lost her mother in the 2001 World Trade Center attack, and after that, the spot's narrator reported, she had "close up emotionally." The narrator continued, "But when President George W. Bush came to Lebanon, Ohio, she went to see him, as she had with her mother four years before." As Bush made his way through the crowed of well-wishers, a friend of the Faulkners told him that Ashley's mother had been killed in the 9/11 attack. Bush turned and spontaneously embraced the girl, saying that he knew it was hard and asking if she was all right. "And that was the moment," the family friend recounted, "that we saw Ashley's eyes fill up with tears." Ashley herself explained, "He's the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure I'm safe, that I'm okay." The spot concluded with Ashley's father saying, "What I saw was what I want to see in the heart and soul of the man who sits in the highest elected office in our country"

This is only one of several powerful examples Polletta gives among others including analysis of the power of narrative in an on-line forum about the September 11th attacks, the use of the Civil Rights movement in Congressional speeches over the last sixty years, and the early sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement itself. In each of these examples, Polletta convincingly demonstrates how narrative can be strategically deployed by social movements and civil debate, developing a much more sophisticated vocabulary of "framing" than the wider literature on social movements in sociology as well as linguists such as Lakoff. Poletta's analysis of the context in which narratives are presented and the manner in which they are received allows her to predict when and where the use of narrative enables, transforms, or stifles, democratic debate. Coupled with Eviatar Zerubavel's similarly innovative analysis of the social structure of denail in The Elephant in the Room, Poletta's book provides young cultural sociologists with an impressive artillery of theory and methods with which to invade the dusty barracks of political sociology.

America Hates Atheists

Just came across a fascinating article by Penny Edgell and colleagues in Minnesota's Department of Sociology. Their recent survey of 2,000 plus households suggests Americans are more uncomfortable with allowing their children to marry an athiest than any other non-Christian group. Quite a fascinating finding in light of the dormant controversy about America's "culture wars." It raises fascinating questions, for example, about why we may be more comfortable with difference than undifferentiation. If this were the case, it opens fascinating new directions for the study of secularization-- one would want to know, for example, whether similar patterns are emerging in other secularized democracies (notably Western Europe). Somewhere Durkheim just rolled his eyes.

From Edgell et al.:

Table 1. Public and Private Acceptance, Ranked Groups

This Group Does Not At All Agree with My Vision of American Society
—Atheist 39.6
—Muslim 26.3
—Homosexual 22.6
—Conservative Christian 13.5
—Recent Immigrant 12.5
—Hispanic 7.6
—Jew 7.4
—Asian American 7.0
—African American 4.6
—White American 2.2

I Would Disapprove if My Child Wanted to Marry a Member of This Group
—Atheist 47.6
—Muslim 33.5
—African American 27.2
—Asian American 18.5
—Hispanic 18.5
—Jew 11.8
—Conservative Christian 6.9
—White 2.3

Source: American Mosaic Project Survey, 2003.

Foxy News

As if the we needed another reason to question the integrity of Fox news, I recently discovered an old article on their website describing the 2005 Paris riots. According to the article, the civil unrest was caused by "marauding bands of Muslim youth." Showed this to a few friends of mine from Paris, who promptly asked me whether FOX news was available internationally via satellite (strictly for entertainment purposes, needless to say). The "Islamization" of the riots does raise interesting questions about the globalization of media coverage about conflict, however, which would be an excellent direction for future research.