In the late 1960s and early 70s British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921-2007) established a new way of interpreting social life. First known as ‘grid-group’ theory’, it has attracted several different names over the decades, including, on Wikipedia, the cultural theory of risk.
This site attempts to view the social world of today through the lens of this well-established cultural theory. People are strange and organizations even stranger. Cultural theory offers a useful framework to consider why people in groups might behave the way they do.
First setting out her theory in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970), Mary Douglas identified four cultural biases, ‘thought styles’, or worldviews. They contradict one another, but also define themselves in distinction to the others. In this way, each of the four cultures depends on the other three for its viability. As one study of Douglas’s work puts it:
“there are four sides to every question.”
Richards, Paul, and Perri 6. Mary Douglas. Anthropology’s Ancestors, Volume 4. New York: Berghahn Books, 2023.
The name of this site, Four Cultures, refers to a short article in which Douglas introduced her social theory and discussed its development over three decades:
Douglas, M. 1999. Four cultures: The evolution of a parsimonious model. GeoJournal 47:411–415. DOI: 10.1023/A:1007008025151
Since the early days, many researchers in numerous areas of study have used, adapted and extended the four cultures framework to apply to a wide variety of social contexts. As her biographer Richard Farndon observed, “the scholarship of Mary Douglas has achieved wide-ranging interdisciplinary recognition” (and you can hear Professor Farndon talking about the significance of Mary Douglas’s work in a British Academy podcast).
The aim of this site is to make a tiny contribution to furthering the recognition of Mary Douglas’s cultural theory, and of the work it has inspired. You can find resources here as well as longer articles and shorter notes. Thanks for dropping by.
“Our ultimate task is to find interpretative procedures that will uncover each bias and discredit its claims to universality.”
Mary Douglas and B. Isherwood (1979). The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London, Allen Lane, page 63
I’ve been using WordPress since 2008. During this time it’s been very robust – much more robust than the sites I’ve linked to over the years, very many of which have succumbed to linkrot and vanished.
But one serious problem is the editing interface, Gutenberg, which places ‘blocks of content’ at the heart of the process. This just isn’t how I think, and the result is a reluctance to go near WordPress and a near fatal drop-off in the frequency of posting.
And I’m not the only one to have been pondering this problem aloud recently, without a conclusive answer.
The ingredients for a post on this site are usually just text, links and a simple image or two, so my needs are more basic than those of most users. But writing directly in the WordPress app feels like a constant battle. I’m not running a content management system here, or trying to scale up a publishing empire, or surprising my customers with a delightful online experience. Sorry, it’s just casual blogging, like in the old days.
So I’m going retro. Either I’ll revert to the old editor, which is an easy option, apparently, or else I’ll try out a few different external editors that connect to the WordPress.com API.
This very post is brought to you by blogbrowser. It’s a simple interface made in Dave Winer’s inimitable outlining style, for exactly my use case: write a quick post then go and do something else. I hate to say it but at this point it’s maybe a little too simple.
Do you, dear reader, have any words of advice on this matter? How do you show your words to the world without succumbing to this particular kind of writer’s block?
From time to time this blog gets preoccupied with religion, which is hardly a digression since we live in seriously religious times.
Furthermore, Mary Douglas, the eminence grise behind the exploration here of cultural theory, had a religious intention. She developed her grid-group typology at least partly to counter the mid-twentieth century claims that Catholic ritual was ’empty ritualism’ in need of modernising, qua Vatican II. She was also concerned in her anthropological work to challenge the idea that ‘primitive’ societies, including their religions, were somehow being replaced by ‘less primitive’ societies and their secularism.
Now I want to explore something written about previously here, the concept of religion as play.
Here’s the issue. As secularisation theory takes numerous king hits from the remarkable political persistence of religion in the modern world it is nevertheless evident that religious organisation is in flux, if not comprehensive decline. Like a balloon being crushed by a determined toddler, it shrinks in one part of the circumference only to pop up unexpectedly in another.
But the proponents of the post-secular seem to jump from a focus on the decline of religion straight to a fixation with its persistence without really examining the other curious phenomenon, its revitalisation in constantly new forms.
The forms envisaged, however, look a lot like the old forms. Proponents of the economic rationalist analysis of religion claim that America, unlike Europe has had a relatively free market in religion, with competing sects as ‘firms’ aiming to meet demand for religious goods and services. They seem to assume, however, that such goods and services, like washing powder and spam, are relatively static and unchanging.
It is as though all that was required was to take the old box of detergent and write ‘New & Improved!’ on it.
According to Rob Hopkins of the Transition Movement, and following David Holmgren, the co-creator of the permaculture concept, sustainability is not enough and we need to move beyond it. But what comes after sustainability? The answer, it seems, is: resilience.
How successful has the paradigm of sustainability been at achieving its aims? It makes an interesting thought experiment to try to assess what your corner of the world would be like today were it not for all the many initiatives that have taken place over the last twenty or so years under the rubric of ‘sustainability’ and its older sibling ‘sustainable development’.
In spite of some clear differences springing to mind (I’m thinking especially of waste recycling, and maybe the end of lead in motor fuel, and some notable biodiversity/conservation gains to set against all the losses – in fact this deserves an article in its own right…), on the whole it surely wouldn’t be all that different, would it?
Travelling everywhere by car unless a plane will get you there quicker? Check!
Buying huge amounts of stuff then throwing it away? Check!
So much of what we do now, we were going to do anyway, and the concept of sustainability has not been a particularly effective tool at getting us to change direction, or even to slow down.
But is there any alternative? Here is a quote from a relevant article:
‘”Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” – putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.’
What are the key differences between sustainability and resilience?
Whereas sustainability implies a ‘steady state’ conception of the world, living within our means indefinitely, resilience recognises dynamism and volatility. Change, for resilience science, is of the essence. Resilience is not about halting change, but about maintaining those things that really matter to us in the midst of great change.
Sustainability has ostensibly reasonable – but in practice vastly ambitious – aims ‘to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ and it is unclear that this is achievable at any scale on which it has been attempted. In contrast, resilience has more modest aims and can be defined as ‘the capacity of a system to undergo disturbance and maintain its functions and controls, and may be measured by the magnitude of disturbance the system can tolerate and still persist’ (Wallington, Hobbes and Moore, 200:4)
Sustainability has a somewhat integrated concept of the way the world works. The three pillars of sustainable development are widely understood to be the social, the ecological and the economic and it is the interactions between these that drive the system. Without denying this, resilience is more integrated because it sees, and tries to study, only one system, the social-ecological, which operates at many different levels of scale so that it makes sense to conceptualise ‘social-ecological systems’. However it does not make sense to split off the social from the ecological. This interaction is the sine qua non of the resilience approach.
From the outset, sustainability was a social-political concept in search of scientific confirmation. It has achieved confirmation spectacularly successfully with the scientific models of anthropogenic climate change, ‘the biggest example of market failure in history’, as Nicholas Stern put it. In contrast, resilience is a scientific approach, specifically an ecological approach, based on the work of ecologists such as Buzz Holling and Lance Gunderson, in search of social-political applications. These distinctions are of course hardly cast in stone, since no science is ‘value neutral’ and ecology certainly isn’t. But resilience arguably carries greater scientific precision that sustainability.
There is a key difference of focus – broad versus narrow – between the two concepts. If you want to improve sustainability there is an almost endless list of actions you could carry out. All of them could be said to make the world more sustainable (since ‘social’, ecological’ and ‘economic’ covers just about anything). Resilience is more narrow. It proposes that a sustainable social-ecological system is simply one that is more resilient rather than less resilient. So by focusing on the resilience of system components rather than other features, the long list of actions that could take priority is somewhat reduced.
There are differences between sustainability and resilience, but is it really as simple as seeing the one replaced by the other? Bossel (1998) sees resilience as only one important aspect of sustainable ecosystems.
I can’t help thinking that the replacement of one worthy concept by another equally worthy concept is a distraction from the main event, which is ongoing, accelerating destruction in the name of progress or of profit. To take just one example of many, I would like to live in a world where koalas weren’t threatened with extinction, but even such a modest aspiration is made to appear unreasonably ambitious. I don’t think either sustainability or resilience will get me there.
What would it be called, then, this deep desire to live with other species without eliminating them? Living within our means? Not exactly. I think part of the problem is that my culture doesn’t really even have the words, much less the possibility of co-habitation in its repertoire.
Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, writer and anti-colonialist
Frantz Fanon has much to teach about the power of new media.
Technology in transition
During the COVID-19 lockdown everyone I know was using their webcam to meet via video-conference. Or not.
Many had poor Internet access, and others wanted to resist yet another attempt to steal their privacy. For some the pandemic opened a new era of ‘working from home’ and made video conferencing normal. For others, the jump to Zoom, Teams and the like just widened the gap between tech insiders and outsiders.
This situation of rapid change got me thinking about the complex ways in which adoption of new technology impacts society.
The drive to do so much more online in 2020 is having very significant impacts in the longer term – both for the participants and for those excluded. We’ve crossed a transition point, where technological adoption is accelerating beyond our collective capacity to grasp the implications.
Such transitions have happened many times before, and one of the more recent shifts took place in the early 2010s. There has been plenty of interest in the role of social media in that series of revolutions known as the Arab Spring (2010-2012). It was a time when reformist values seemed to travel extremely rapidly via the mobile phones that had become ubiquitous in the Middle East, and everywhere else. But the focus on the role of media in times of rapid social change goes back a long way. In the Arab world, the Algerian War of the 1950s was a key period for understanding the ways the media influence the course of history.
Radio and Independence
A key text is Frantz Fanon’s essay, This is the Voice of Algeria. Fanon wrote about the changing understanding of radio in colonial Algeria during the 1950s.
At first the indigenous Algerian population saw the radio as a foreign entity, destructive of traditional family relationships. Back in France, the image of a family gathering around the wireless set at night was a cosy, socially reinforcing one. But in Algeria it was widely seen as socially suspect, because it threatened to mix genders and ages in non-traditional ways. To overcome this the French colonial broadcaster identified certain radio programmes as particularly suitable for family listening.
This strategy did not work.
In the population at large radios were neither bought nor listened to. Meanwhile the radio diffused news of unrest to the colonial farmers. For them, the radio was a voice of security and normality, “the only way to still feel like a civilized man”. It was a bulwark, Fanon claims, against ‘going native’.
The wireless: a cosy, socially reinforcing image?
Ironically, the European farmers would hear the news then gather their workers to celebrate victories against an insurgency of which the workers, being without radios themselves, would otherwise have known nothing.
Fanon’s argument is that the classic sociological rationale for a lack of radio listening among Algerians was ‘a mass of errors’. The standard line was that “Traditions of respectability are so important for us and are so hierarchical, that it is practically impossible for us to listen to radio programs in the family”. Fanon’s gloss on this is:
“Here, then, at a certain explicit level, is the apprehension of a fact: receiving sets are not readily adopted by Algerian society. By and large, it refuses this technique which threatens its stability and the traditional types of sociability; the reason invoked being that the programs in Algeria, undifferentiated because they are copied from the Western model, are not adapted to the strict, almost feudal type of patrilineal hierarchy, with its many moral taboos, that characterizes the Algerian family.”
So what changed?
Contested hierarchies
Fanon claims this argument about family traditions is bogus. The evidence? As soon as a nationalist radio station appeared, it was so popular that all the radios sold out in a matter of weeks and batteries for them were almost unobtainable. If this was really a matter of traditional family values, how could these values have been abandoned so comprehensively in the space of a month or two?
Only with the start of nationalist radio broadcasts did the radio become a tool of decolonization. The French authorities strongly objected to the German supply of radios from the Telefunk company. The Germans ignored the French. So the French colonial powers jammed the unauthorised broadcasts, whereupon, according to Fanon, families would actively listen to the static and imagine the news of nationalist victories that were surely what the French were trying to suppress.
“He had to enter the vast network of news; he had to find his way in a world in which things happened, in which events existed, in which forces were active. Through the experience of a war waged by his own people, the Algerian came in contact with an active community. The Algerian found himself having to oppose the enemy news with his own news.”
One interpretation of this version of history is that the real hierarchical distinction the radio emphasized was not between traditional family relations such as man and woman, father and child. There was, to be sure, Fanon pointed out, hierarchy in Algerian society, but it was first and foremost between colonizers and colonized, between the oppressor and the oppressed. This dominant hierarchical relationship was actually what the new technology foregrounded and made even more problematic.
Another interpretation of this situation might be that technology finds its own uses, as the saying goes. At first the Algerian nationalists had no need of the radio if all it could tell them was the French were in charge. They were already painfully aware of that information.
It took a while for the Algerian nationalists to realise that radio, previously the voice of the oppressor, could instead become the voice of the independence movement. Or perhaps they always recognised this but it took time to organise the resources to start broadcasting for themselves. Either way, the technology had to be re-imagined and then re-purposed in order for it to be adopted by the mass of the population for their own ends.
“With the creation of a Voice of Fighting Algeria, the Algerian was vitally committed to listening to the message, to assimilating it, and soon to acting upon it. Buying a radio, getting down on one’s knees with one’s head against the speaker, was no longer just wanting to get the news concerning the formidable experience in progress in the country, it was hearing the first words of the nation.”
Information environments: quantity or quality?
An interesting spin on this discussion comes from research investigating the much more recent uses of electronic communications in regime change during the revolutionary period known as the Arab Spring (Benkirane, 2012; Howard and Hussain, 2013).
Researchers calculated that there is a play-off between the sheer amount of information available to the population on the one hand, and its quality on the other.
A larger amount of information supports the status quo – it may well be propaganda. After all, the Nazis successfully subsidised the mass distribution of radios in the 1930s in order to promote their message. But, conversely, higher quality information supports change – telling it like it is, warts and all. It really is quality – not quantity – that matters.
This typology of information results in four ideal-type information environments. The high quantity – low quality environment benefits a repressive regime. Plenty of information is available, but it’s mostly propaganda. A high quantity, high quality information environment promotes moves for change because it becomes easy to see that the regime isn’t working.
In the light of this scheme what are we to make of Fanon’s interpretation of radio-listening?
The farmers without radios were in an environment of low information, and low quality. They knew almost nothing of what the radio was telling them and if they did listen in, it didn’t tell them anything they recognized as worth knowing. They had to resort to other media for their news.
In contrast, the Algerian family sitting around the radio listening to the static of the jamming signal were in an environment of low quantity, but curiously high quality. The jammed signal told them almost nothing, but what it did tell them was the most important thing of all: that there existed somewhere out there a signal that the colonists needed to jam. All the other details were filled in by the listeners’ imaginations.
This was not the only impact of radio on the progress of Algerian independence. In 1961, towards the end of the Algerian War, a group of hardline French nationalists took over the main centres of Algeria and attempted a coup inside France against President De Gaulle. They opposed the President because he had already established that by now the majority of both the French and Algerian populations wanted Algerian independence.
Unluckily for the plotters, the transistor radio had recently been invented and mass produced. Now the French all had portable radios. As a result, De Gaulle’s desperate and determined broadcast to the nation was heard by many, many people. This was to some extent an accident, since de Gaulle actually appeared on television, although TV sets were not yet widely distributed. In particular, army conscripts who were not part of the coup heard it on their new portable radios. This was determinative for what became known as ‘the battle of the transistors’.
The coup ultimately failed, because the radio enabled De Gaulle to connect directly with soldiers of all ranks and with the wider French population. He didn’t need to say much for his message to be understood. It was low-quantity, but extremely high quality.
The President’s key message comes in the final three seconds of a historic twenty-minute speech:
“Aidez-moi!”
Perhaps you will be able to consider these four quadrants of information when you next devise your important message. High and low quantity; high and low quality. If you want things to stay the same, your best strategy is to flood the channels with quantity. Sit-coms, soap operas, adverts, shock-jock phone-ins. It’s all endlessly the same and this is its essential value. There is only one real message in this mass of repetitive material: things are the same today as they were yesterday. And tomorrow the same power-holders will be gripping it even more tightly.
Remember, though, that those seeking change will keep on looking for the quality of information they need until they find it.
See also:
Baucom, Ian. 2001. “Frantz Fanon’s Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora, and the Tactics of Listening.”Contemporary Literature42 (1): 15. https://doi.org/10.2307/1209083.
Benkirane, Reda. 2016. “The Alchemy of Revolution: The Role of Social Networks and New Media in the Arab Spring.” GCSP Policy Paper 7, no. 1.
Fanon, Frantz. 2016. This is the Voice of Algeria. In: Fanon, F. (ed.), A Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press.
Gibson, Nigel C. 2003. Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Cambridge, U.K. : Malden, MA: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Pub
Howard, Philip N., and Muzammil M. Hussain. 2013. Democracy’s fourth wave?: digital media and the Arab Spring. Oxford University Press.
Stevens, Anne. 2016. The Government and Politics of France. London: Macmillan Education, Limited. (On the ‘battle of the transistors’ see p.80).
How it is possible to persuade people who just don’t want to be persuaded?
The answer, from a Cultural Theory perspective, is fairly straightforward. People and institutions with different cultural biases create, fund, support and pay attention to four very different types of evidence. What matters then, if you want to persuade large numbers of people, is to produce and shape a variety of evidence. Here are some suggestions for what climate change might look like, viewed four different ways.
Just before we begin, note that science communicators seem to be ridiculously bad at doing this. Their so-called evidence and so-called solutions are almost always heavily weighted towards the Egalitarian version of climate change alone, which is why their views are contested. As we’re about to show, there’s much more to life than egalitarianism, but since that’s how much of the climate discourse is presented, that’s where we’ll start.
Egalitarian Climate Change:
On this view you should demonstrate with science and/or emotive rhetoric (whichever appeals best to hearts and minds, the Elephant and the rider as Jonathan Haidt would say) that our very civilization is in danger unless we change our profligate ways. Changing our energy sources is to be depicted as only a preliminary step to changing our values. Peter Preston said we need an ‘eco-prophet’ to show us how to believe but this is emphatically wrong. Such Egalitarian eco-prophets as have arisen – Al Gore in the US, George Monbiot in the UK, and many others – have been shot down in flames, derided as extremists.
Egalitarian authority comes most authentically not from prophets but from the masses. Common sense, what everyone knows, is what is true. That’s why ‘scientific consensus’ is so much more important to Egalitarians than it is to scientists themselves (scientists themselves rather like arguing and starting feuds).
The reason science communicators shouldn’t just bang on about deadly threats and fragility and about changing our values is that most people don’t warm to these egalitarian signals. For example, many people are more in tune with an Individualist worldview, which is quite different.
Individualist Climate Change:
From an Individualist perspective you should provide information and examples on how to make a profit from climate change, appealing all the while to visceral self-interest. If it turns out you actually can make a profit from climate change, and do so better than your competitors, then climate change must surely exist.
Alternatively, and inversely, demonstrate concrete (not hypothetical or future) impacts on the bottom line of those institutions that have ignored Climate Change.
On this view scientists who make photovoltaics competitive with coal fired power stations are doing more to combat climate change than any amount of hand-wringing by the likes of James Hanson, who is simply discounted as a crypto-religious or crypto-communist ‘fanatical environmentalist’. A figurehead Individualist expert would be someone like Shi Zhengrong, China’s first solar billionaire. Money doesn’t lie.
Hierarchical Climate Change
Paying attention to the Hierarchical perspective you should develop and promote management theories of climate change. If you can reconfigure governance to take account of climate change in ways that enhance management functions, and if it makes evident sense to have a Minister for Climate Change, then climate change must certainly exist.
Alternatively, demonstrate (perhaps by means of case study) real and damaging governance failures of those institutions that have ignored Climate Change in their management structure. What risks demonstrably increase when you don’t have a Minister for Climate Change or a framework for global climate change governance? Ideal Hierarchical experts will be at or near the top of the tree. It will be their status that speaks loudest. If Prince Charles and the Pope both worry about climate change, who are we to argue? Failing the biggest guns, the Head of the Royal Society will do at a pinch, unless you can find someone more senior.
Fatalist Climate Change
With reference to the Fatalist perspective you should demonstrate the randomizing impact of climate change on the status quo. Fatalism thrives by enhancing and systematizing the luck of the draw and turning it into policy (explicit or, more often than not, tacit), or reward (the lottery). Fatalists tend to say ‘climates change!’ with the twin implications that it was always like this and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Fatalist institutions tend to make a virtue of doing nothing about it, and try to make sure no one else does anything about it either.
What not to do
If you keep using only one of the four perspectives described by Cultural Theory, your message will appeal to some people but deeply antagonise many others. It will be welcomed in some social settings but shunned in others. Don’t keep doing this, because so far it hasn’t worked.
There is nothing wrong with professing the view that in light of dangerous climate change problems what the world needs now is global governance. But to expect that this will not be seen as politically inflammatory is to be naive in the extreme. The global governance line works well before Hierarchical audiences (bureaucrats and some heads of state, for instance), but really badly before audiences with the other three cultural biases.
Simply put, any media release about a new piece of climate research could do with not one but four different versions, each targeted at a different cultural bias. A more sophisticated version of this would be to develop a communications strategy which includes interaction with all four cultural world views, not just with one or two, as at present.
A little help from Aristotle
But that’s not quite enough. Prof Dan Kahn at the Cultural Cognition Project has suggested that any message about science really has two channels: the content itself, and the cultural meaning attached to that content. He rightly suggests communicators need to be aware of both. But his model reminded me of Aristotle, who thought there were three, not just two, channels of communication.
In presenting an argument, Aristotle’s classic rhetorical concepts of ethos, pathos and logos still have a great deal to contribute (Gottweis in Fisher, Miller and Sidney, 2007: 237-250). Too many presentations rely almost exclusively on logos, the actual ideas and concepts, the contents of the presentation. This is certainly important but in some ways overshadowed by the other two. Pathos refers to the emotions evoked and ethos refers to the character of the person delivering the message. These are both highly important but often underused. The implication of Cultural Theory is that all three, ethos, pathos and logos, are configured according to the main cultural biases. An egalitarian logos, for example, may work best when it is supported by Egalitarian pathos and Egalitarian ethos. On the other hand, a speaker trying to appeal to an Individualist audience may keep some of the Egalitarian logos, while appealing to an Individualist pathos and using an Individualist ethos.
Edit: changed the title of this post from ‘make up’ to ‘assemble’. See the discussion in the comments. And edited 16th October 2023 to link the egalitarian and individualist sections a bit more clearly.
Is there a cultural theory perspective on the COVID pandemic of 2020-21? Of course there is:
Davy, Benjamin. “Social Distancing and Cultural Bias: On the Spatiality of COVID-19.” Journal of the American Planning Association 87, no. 2 (2021): 159-166. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2020.1824617
When Mary Douglas published her groundbreaking work, Natural Symbols in 1970, journals of anthropology, sociology and philosophy reviewed it. Although Douglas was an anthropologist, her work had implications well beyond that single discipline.
Chapter 4 of the book, ‘Grid and group’ summarised an approach to social analysis that has been greatly extended and widely adopted in a variety of disciplines in the nearly fifty years since publication. The implications of the work of Douglas and her collaborators are still being worked out.
2019 has been a strong year for publications exploring and making use of grid-group cultural theory, (or the cultural theory of risk, or cultural cognition). In the next few months I intend to use the Fourcultures website to point to some of the more interesting examples I have come across.
I did wonder if there is to be a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Natural Symbols, but haven’t found any such information – so if anyone can let me know in the comments, I’d be grateful.
Seeing that Google’s management (now called Alphabet) is at serious odds with its employees over working in China on Project Dragonfly, it appears that the Google Dilemma is very far from over. I wrote a short series of posts about the cultural misunderstandings between Google and the Chinese Government, and it’s still going on. To keep its own Individualist culture, and to avoid being co-opted by the Hierarchy of the Government security machine, Google must drop Dragonfly. The difficulty is that the Individualist culture impels Google to look for a profit at any cost, and so it doesn’t appear possible to drop Dragonfly.
Four Cultures 