anthropology – Four Cultures

Seasons of Four Cultures

I’ve been hibernating for a while, involved with other projects. So I was struck by anthropologist Franz Boas’s description of seemingly extreme seasonality in culture. Can people change, just as the seasons do? Apparently they can, and dramatically so. Here’s an example of a society that is rigidly hierarchical in Winter, but much less so in Summer. To effect this radical seasonal shift, people’s names would also change from Winter to Summer.

Admittedly Franz Boas was quoted in a book that was itself quoted on a blog I read, so there’s a strange Russian Doll effect here. Quotes within quotes. Sorry about that. I could have pretended to have actually read Boas, but that would be fibbing. And so now you’re reading this on a blog that’s quoting a blog that quoted a book that quoted the book. It’s worse than Inception.

Anyway, here’s the quote:

"reading a particular stretch of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. Therein they describe how seasonality in human social and political life took many forms in Prehistory as well as in particular indigenous peoples. One example they mention is 20th century anthropologist Franz Boas’ research of the Kwakiutl of Canada’s Northwest Coast:

Here, Boas discovered, it was winter – not summer – that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so… Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year." – CJ Eller, Seasons of social possibility

Welcome to Four Cultures

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

She was inspired by earlier thinkers such as the sociologist Émile Durkheim, the social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and the linguist Basil Bernstein, and she worked with a number of collaborators, including Aaron Wildavsky and Michael Thompson.

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

Levi-Strauss for the masses?

I’ve been enjoying Logicomix, a graphic novel about the quest of Bertrand Russell for the logical foundations of mathematics. So it was with delight that I stumbled upon a Claude Levi-Strauss comic in the Financial Times, produced by the same team of writers and artists – Apostolos Doxiadis, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.

I’m also looking forward to reading Prof Marco Verweij’s paper on the links between Levi-Strauss and Cultural Theory, which he’s presenting at the Midwest Political Science Association Conference in April. [He’s the co-editor of an excellent book of what I’ll call ‘applied cultural theory‘.]

Hat tip to Culture Matters.

Switching strategies: if baboons can do it, can’t we?

Robert Sapolsky and friend The work of Robert M. Sapolsky and others on the social life of baboons is interesting in many ways but here it’s significant for two reasons in particular.

First, I think it sheds light on what we mean when we talk about culture.

Secondly, it seems to indicate something about the ability of some primates to abandon, defect from, or otherwise change their ways of operating when faced with changed material circumstances and/or changed social circumstances.

If baboons can do it, why can’t we?

#approvalmatrix – fourfold typologies make it to Twitter

Here’s an older post from the Savage Minds anthropology blog about Mary Douglas’s grid-group typology (the basis of the four cultures explored on this site). It’s basically a mashup of that typology and an alternative scheme deriving from Pierre Bourdieu (if he wrote for the New York Magazine, that is): highbrow/lowbrow; brilliant/despicable.

I like it because I’ve been very interested in the proliferation of fourfold schemes in the social sciences – and here’s another one. In particular I’m interested in whether these schemes are each as radically new as the author or creator always seems to think, or whether there’s some kind of underlying structure that makes superficially different formulations somehow connect.

This particular juxtaposition reminds me of Arthur Koestler’s understanding of creativity, which comes about where

‘a single situation or idea is perceived in two self-consistent but mutually incompatible frames of reference’.

If you’re interested, the approval matrix has been re-purposed and applied to Twitter posts at O’Reilly Radar.

Koestler, Arthur (1964) The Act of Creation. London: Pan. Quoted in William Byers (2007) How Mathematicians Think. Using Ambiguity, Contradiction and Paradox to Create Mathematics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 28.

Magic needs rules

Magic requires rules. Here is what anthropologist Marcel Mauss has to say:

‘Far from being the simple expression of individual emotions, magic takes every opportunity to coerce actions and locutions. Everything is fixed and becomes precisely determined. Rules and patterns are imposed. Magical formulas are muttered or sung on one note to special rhythms …Gestures are regulated with an equally fine precision. The magician does everything in a rhythmical fashion as in dancing: and ritual rules tell him which hand or finger he should use, which foot he should step forward with. When he sits, stands up, lies down, jumps, shouts, walks in any direction, it is because it is all prescribed. Even when he is alone he is not freer than the priest at his altar… Moreover, words are pronounced or actions are performed facing a certain direction, the most common rule being that the magician should face the direction of the person at whom the rite is aimed.’

Marcel Mauss, General Theory of Magic [1950] tr. Robert Brain, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p.58. Quoted in Ian Hunt 2002, ‘Escape Routine’ accessed at http://www.simonpattersonart.com/essays/essays_escape.html