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

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

Simpler editing for WordPress

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?

This is not a game: religion in the 21st Century

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.

Continue reading This is not a game: religion in the 21st Century

What comes after Sustainability? Resilience?

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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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)
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

Sustainability. Resilience.

We’re clutching at straws.

More on resilience:

A Month of Resilience