Interview with Mary Douglas

Introduction by Richard Farson
It is a special pleasure for me to introduce our next interviewee, Mary Douglas. Those of you from academia will recognize her as the famous British cultural anthropologist. And you who are old timers with WBSI programs will welcome her back, because you will remember just how fascinating she is. If there were a survey made, Mary would appear on everyone’s short list of the great living anthropologists, for most of us, right at the top. We are proud to have her among us as an ILF Fellow. Her book, Purity and Danger is only one of the classic texts she has contributed to the field. Reading her How Institutions Think changed my mind completely about the kinds of decisions organizations make as a consequences of their structure.

Indeed, it is difficult to spend any time at all with Mary without having one’s mind changed in a fundamental way, as we will surely see in this interview. Educated at Oxford, she has long been on the faculty of the University of London. In recent years she has had visiting professorships in the departments of religion at Princeton and Northwestern. We are definitely in for a treat. Mary is simply one of my very favorite people. She will be participating with us this week from her home in London.

Richard Farson
Mary, I am exercising official privilege in asking the first question. Since, in recent years, your interests have concentrated on the anthropology of religion, can you help us, in our current concern about terrorism, better understand the threat we all seem to fear from religious fundamentalism, not just from groups in the Middle East, but also from the rapidly growing fundamentalist religions in the US?

Mary Douglas
Thank you, Richard dear, for your wildly enthusiastic introduction. I would be very nervous about how to deserve it, if I didn't remember the friendships we made in the early eighties and feel so pleased to know that these clever people who were also always so tolerant and kind are here.

You ask me to think about terrorism and religions. There are mountains of books on terrorism just now, because we are all so worried about it. But I have thought a lot about something we can call 'enclavism', living in a group that has cut off from the main society. You might be interested in the anthropology of the enclave, because some terrorism emerges from it... though not all. And some enclaves belong to fundamentalist religions, though not all.

I am hoping very much that you will know more about it and have more interesting examples that I have, and that you will use your knowledge to make this interview exciting for me, forcing me to change the ideas I started out with. Third hand experience and even odd anecdotes will be helpful.

The act of withdrawal from the mainstream is the start. Some people withdraw to live apart from others, by their own choice. Generally these isolates have a benign out1ook on the world, they are under no pressures, and into no conflicts. Even if their exit was angry, they tend to get cooler. So forget them. It is the angry ones we are interested in.

If a group of people have come together to share a better life than the one they have decided to leave, they make an enclave. It may or may not be a religious group. They may not start in anger at all, but they are going to face a lot of choices and their decisions may turn them to protest against a hostile society outside.

During the lifetime of the founder, he/she will be attracting recruits and everyone will be enthusiastic. In a peaceful environment they can go on being friendly and happy together. Once he dies their problems begin.

There is the question of succession. Who is going to lead them now?

And the question of recruitment? And the question of defecting members? Enclaves tend to be obsessed by fear of defection. And with good reason, they can’t offer big jobs or careers or money to make their life more attractive.

The natural response of the old-timers is to build a strong moral wall against the outside. This is where the world starts to be painted in black and white, saints inside, and sinners outside the wall. It is a strategy aimed at making exit seem frightening. Sometimes they manage to penalise defection by not allowing separate funds. Sharing all the property is not just an act of love, but an additional fence. If you want to leave, you can take nothing with you.

So long as the leadership position is not filled, they are plagued by competing would-be leaders. They develop factions, they may split, they watch each other closely for signs of disloyalty. Enclave life becomes very tense, Even when they do elect a leader, the factions remain, with the threat of splitting off.

Striving to calm the factionalism, they try to block competition. No one should be seen to distinguish himself from the others. They may decide not to have a leader at all, to be an equal band of brothers. Total equality in these circumstances is going to make more problems than it solves. It will block decision-making and thwart leadership. These people are not going to be so happy, after all.

One way to unite the factions is to provoke attack from outside. Then all the reasons for being together are revived. The more they are cruelly and unjustly persecuted by the outside society, the more the integrity of the enclave is saved.

You can see where this is going. At some point the positive feedback is unleashed. An escalating, violent tit-for-tat may lead to terrorism.

Does anyone here know any enclaves that give the lie to this account?

Richard Farson
I can't suggest an enclave that gives the lie to your account, but now that I have heard your description, I can support it with an example. I was involved in the early days of Synanon, a rather well-known California based drug rehabilitation program started on the Santa Monica beach by Chuck Dedrich, a charismatic recovering alcoholic. The program was based on an intensive, highly confrontational group therapy called the "Synanon Game." But while the game's rules permitted lots of verbal abuse, in general the members were treated in welcoming and loving ways. It became a large, successful, full-time, live-in community. Over time, however, as it became increasingly accepted by the outside, all of the dynamics you mention took place. In order to keep the group intact, the outside was increasingly treated as evil and hostile, and Chuck acted as if Synanon were always under attack. I also noted that although newcomers had always been regarded humanely, gradually the newcomer was treated as inferior protoplasm that needed to be handled in more and more harshly disciplined and corrective ways. While in later years I was not close to it, I do know that it became more and more hostile to the outside, and while we didn't call it terrorism then, they did finally resort to putting deadly rattlesnakes into at least one of their "enemies'" mailboxes. Eventually, as Chuck became more autocratic and remote from the rest of the group, and the group attracted more and more attention from the police, the group folded, there was no successon of leadership, Chuck moved to Arizona, returned to alcohol and died (now that I think of it, it may have been suicide--does anyone recall? In one sense it was, of course).

You have given us a possible picture of Al Qaeda. Since it exists in sixty countries, it might not be considered a unitary enclave. One wonders how it functions, what its relation to bin Laden might be, if indeed he is still its leader, and what might be its future. One might infer from your description above that it might destroy itself from within. And, of course, the organization gains strength by everything we outsiders do to try to destroy it. Is it your impression that the power of religious fundamentalism is strong enough to overshadow the problems you describe? Are there implications from your analysis for the posture the world community might take to neutralize its terror?

(Someday I'll tell you about the fundamentalist Christian religious cult my grandfather started and from which he was eventually banished.)

Kip Winsett
The Amish, the Mormons, Shao-lin temples, Ashrams in India, Hill people of the Phillipines, Tibetan monasteries, early Christian monasteries, the Bounty mutineers on Norfolk island, the 2,000-year-old cultures of Guizhou in China - would any of them qualify as enclaves which haven't followed the path you describe?

Raymond Alden
Mary, it's a real privilege to be able to participate again in a dialogue with you. Welcome back!

I know nothing of community cultures, but do recognize the pattern you describe in some corporations I've known. Not relevant here, I guess.

Sandy Mactaggart
Mary, you are, of course, describing tribalism, a state which we all experience to some degree in family relationships of varying intensity.

I would go beyond Al Qaeda, to the religion started by Mohammed, originally within his family. It grew very much as you have described, with factions forming under divided leadership, becoming more intolerant of each other. While referring within their factions as brothers and equals, they create rituals to exclude the unorthodox. Outsiders are either with them or against them. Their attitudes become more black/ white and intolerant of compromise. They fear and resent change and blame their consequent problems on others. They become incapable of understanding any other point of view. Where there is a threat to their way of life, there is a corresponding enhancement of tribal solidarity.

Am I talking about them or about us?

Harlan Cleveland
Mary, it's delightful to be with you again. Your generalizations about enclaves are fascinating, and obviously relevant to recent al Qaeda history. But one question is: Are there precedents for what's now developing: an "uncentralized" network of terrorists mostly doing their own thing and raising their own money, yet presumably bound together by what they're against (the American Satan and its nearby allies)?

Apropos religion: Some scholars (Sam Huntington is perhaps the most prominent, but not the only, one) have been arguing that a civilizational clash between organized religions is the next step in human history. Others (of whom I'm one of the least prominent) are aguing that what's in store is clashes _within_ each organized religion, between fundamentalists and (what Marc Luyckx and I have called) "postmoderns." Do you want to choose sides in that argument?

And while we're on religion: There seems to have developed a large minority (perhaps 24% of adult Americans) for whom I'm trying to popularize the term "unorganized spirituality" -- that is, people who will tell survey researchers that they certainly believe in God, but they don't feel the need for an intermediary (priest, rabbi, mullah). Is this category as large in Europe as it seems to have become in the U.S.? And is it a category that can be "organized" as a factor in post-modern politics?

I'll look forward to enlightenment on any or all three of these puzzlements.

Mary Douglas
RESPONSES

Great! Thank you for such a brilliant response! This is going to be a terrific opportunity for me to sort out my ideas.

Richard, The Synanon game is a beautiful example, which I didn’t know about.

Your question? Do enclaves tend to die out of their own accord? Well, as far as I know, Yes, they do unless they take measures.

One classic measure is to let the factions split off, the mother house, or cradle keeps in contact with the affiliate sister houses, which go on splitting into new enclaves. In the opposite direction, the temporary merging of separate groups, Steve Rayner coined the word ‘affinity groups’ for the various latent groups that combined as a single lobby to raise the issue of Risk to the Environment. All this says a lot in favour of Sandy’s reading of Islamic history. Of which, more later.

Another measure they can take to prevent splitting is to institute hierarchy. In other words, if they agree to limit the equality principle, they can check unregulated competition for leadership and control.

Dick asks if calling God in will help these problems. Personally I doubt it. Religion can make it worse. Dick, are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside. But watch out!

If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety…. A chilling thought. Or funny. I am impressed by Malcolm Calley’ study (God’s People, 1965) of the Church of God, a Caribbean Pentecostal sect that came over to London. Factional rivalry split it many times, and threatened at all times. Speaking in tongues was the usual way of demonstrating holiness. Their covert competition goes a long way to explain the bitter denunciations and counter blasts of recrimination that mark the internal politics of a sect.

I believe that this applies also to the sectarian community in Qumran, 200 BC, who insisted that in every respect they were keeping the law of God more completely than the Jews in Jerusalem.

Emmanuel Sivan’s book on Arab fundamentalist sects is the contemporary classic on religious enclaves. On the role of leader he says that the art is to speak without saying anything. Even when the members try to make up for their weakness in decision-making by giving the leader the right to decide, he can’t himself afford to please one faction and offend another, so he passes the decision-making responsibility up to the highest authority, God, and dips into the Koran, and very carefully interprets the answer that the sacred lottery turns up.

[I can’t understand why anyone thinks that Yasser Arafat has any authority at all over his terrorizing Palestinians. Why are they treating him as a leader with power over his people? He is just a sectarian figurehead.]

By the way, Richard, I would love to know about your grandfather’s church.

And thank you, Kip, for some names of some real enclaves. I will add to the measures they can take to ease their anxiety about defection, and splitting, the main source of their troubles by mentioning the rule of holding goods in common. The Amish instituted this rule, which really barred anyone thinking they could leave and start up their own business. The Bounty mutineers (I think but am not sure) had the same rule, but they didn’t need to worry about defection, because their island was so remote. When they had a chance to go, they chose to stay together. It sounds as if they were happy. That doesn’t mean to say that they don’t compete for leadership, but I don’t know enough about their community. I should add isolation of the community as another factor of success.

Instituting Hierarchy: I am glad you mentioned the Mormons, because they are so strong, they can handle wealth, they are confident. I think it is because they are not bogged down by rules for equality, but have a firmly defined system of relative status and responsible command.

The same applies to some of the Monasteries. The Benedictine rule is supposed to keep the monks firmly apart, (the word monastery is an oxymoron suggesting a community of persons alone). The rules of where they should be and what doing at any time of the day and night effectively keep them apart.

The Shav-in Temples and Ashrams, I confess I don’t know, but I speculate that individual groups are rather evanescent. Can anyone help out here?

Ray, thanks for a nice welcome.

Yes, of course all this applies to corporations. Any good industrial consultant will confirm. I was already on this agenda far off in the good old days of WBSI in La Jolla in the eighties. Bill Johnston will vouch for it, he who always used to sign off with ‘Keep the faith!’ He has a story about Digital’s experience which fitted this scheme. Also Deane Meyer, with a consultancy in Connecticut, had a splendidly insightful computer game based on his own independent version of the culture theory I am talking about now. It applies to any kind of attempt to live in community and to coordinate actions. Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination. Does someone want to disagree?

Sandy, your description of Islamic culture is wonderful, and highly relevant to this interview. Islam is in principle egalitarian, and has always had problems with power.

Well, don’t we all? But trying to seem not to be exercising it makes it worse.

The Christians escaped the dilemma when they accepted to be backed by Constantine, and went hierarchical. (That is another of the four cultures based on forms of organization. No need to talk about it now). This is about fundamentalism, and I haven’t explained the problems of an enclave that make it almost certain that it will embrace equality. It is about being on the outside of a larger, richer, more powerful community, dislike of free-riders, resentment of prowess, and a propensity to drag leaders down. The leaders must succumb because they have no power or wealth to handle the dissidents in their group.

Harlan, you are asking about the past and the future. Precedents: we ought to be able to learn from the past histories of enclaves, to discover what is going to happen to ours. I am not sure about a future in which the organized religions clash with each other even more than before, just when the Pope is going round asking for forgiveness for our past sins, and trying to make friends with Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. I agree with you that the future of religions is more likely to be unorganised, people just failing to be held by the old doctrines and promises; empty cathedrals and deserted shrines, there for the pleasure of the tourists more than for the cult of the faithful. But if that is right, it makes it unlikely that the organized religions will get more sectarian… or is it? I am not at all sure.

But I do think that the spiritually unorganised will be attracted by what Stewart Brand, another friend of the old days, called ‘the joys of sects’.

Every year the progress of advanced capitalist society makes our population consist of more and more isolates. This is because of the infra-structure of the economy, especially electronic communications: since 1970 relationships can be more volatile, jobs more ephemeral, geographical mobility more intensified, stability of marriage weaker. This is what you have been saying. It is what Robert Putnam has been trying to measure in terms of declining leisure club membership in the States. When community flies out of the window it leaves a population of isolated individuals. Boredom assails them. They are easy recruits to the enclaves that offer a new and better life inside a virtuous and loving community.

So I predict that our grandchildren will be joining enclaves in search of a meaningful life, defecting from them in disappointment, and trying to found their own.

Hallock Hoffman
Dear Mary, how wonderful to have you back! Already you are teaching me and intriguing me, and exhibiting your profound wisdom of the nature of "enclaves."

I have lately with some others been discussing cults, and their consequences when they arrive in organizations brought together for other purposes. For instance, in large corporations they can distract workers from their normal work, and usually in the interest of the "leader" and his immediate closely knit leading group. They seem to me to be almost another name for enclaves. They seem to involve a revered leader, a belief system that distinguishes them from others, and an exclusionary attitude.

Does this sound familiar to you? I expect to learn a lot from you, as always.

Hallock

Richard Farson
Mary, do you suppose that it isn't just equality, but pretentions to equality, covering up the actual underlying structures, that eventually cause the breakdowns? In my experience it is the organizations with pretentions to democracy, humanism, equality, that ultimately exhibit the worst behavior toward their members.

Donald Straus
Mary: as another old-timer from the 80's, I welcome you here with fond memories.

I am not as much a scholar as most of the active ones in these discussions, but have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.

I grew up in a prominant Jewish family that, for the most part, did not "practice" religion but did take leadership roles in Jewish charities and had high levels of family-taught ethics.

I have had one thought that grew out of this experience on which I would like your comment: Religion for our species was a necessary and useful practice as we grew more aware of the mysteries of life and surroudings but without scientific theories and proof about them. But as our scientific understandings grew, the "teachings" of religiouns became less relevant. At the same time, most of the scientists with whom I was privileged to know intimately seemed to me to be "religious" in their appreciation of "some" force that created and organized our life and surroundings. Appreciation of these "myteries" seems to me to capture the necessary ethics of living on this fragile planet better than most organized religions in a way that might encourage brotherly love rather than sectarian hate.

Mary Douglas
Dear Hallock,

It is lovely that you have joined us.

I am hoping for more comments that will challenge my views. You may have given me one. ‘Cults arriving in a secular organization’ and acting subversively? Are they enclaves? This comes in between the religious enclave and the industrial corporation examples. I would think that what we say about enclaves would apply if they are exclusionary.They hardly need to be religious cults, or to arrive from outside. My life’s experience has been in academic departments. Some that I have been in have been very sectarian though fully secular. I guess I haven’t quite answered you. Could you let out a bit more about those cults you sketched?

Richard, I agree with you, pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive. Would it help the conversation to separate two levels of behavior, one which is organizational, such as a real institutional of equality, the other level is asserted values and pretensions. Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other. Some starry-eyed sociologists really think that other people are easy to get on with. That’s at the organizational level. I tend to see the pretensions as strategies in trying to win in conflictful situations. The enclave strategy is to push the conflict to the border between insiders and outsiders. Other kinds of culture have other problems and solutions.

Don! I remember you affectionately too!

I like your basic approach to religion, I think you are agreeing with Clifford Geertz’s famous definition, which focuses on a belief in a transcendent reality. It is very reasonable to worry about the harm done by organized religion, and to prefer looser and more private arrangements. Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion. Most of the sects and fundamentalist groups originate in protests against an organized religion, which they accuse of corruption, artificiality, over-complexity, hypocrisy.

As a Catholic, I can’t help knowing that the history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such break-away cults, which go on splitting. When we are reflecting on terrorism we can grieve for many things we do and have done. It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel (rightly) under threat. So in modern times its different denominations withdrew into their fortifications, and became much more sectarian, perhaps just at the moment when the opposite behaviour would have been strategically better. I don’t know. But it is a good background for understanding the exponential growth of violence between religions, specially when there is question of one poaching members from another. I keep going back to the anxiety about defection.

What do you think, Don, about living in a society in which the ideal of community becomes ever more difficult to realize? The enclaves don’t mind losing the pageantry of the grand calendrical rituals, losing the colour, the grand music and poetry of common worship. Nor do the individualists. It would be nice to think we are trading a duller world for a more peaceful one, but no, there will always be some injustice to be angry about --- and the protesting enclaves.

Kip Winsett
Mary, a couple of questions:

Since some enclaves produce hostile and volatile behaviors directed at outsiders, and some don't, might the determining factor that shapes the group's psyche be the personality of the person who starts the enclave?

Joseph Tainter in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" describes the process of "opting out of society" (which the enclaves do) as resulting from such a loss of benefits in the social structure that cooperation is no longer worth the effort. Do you consider this a valid deduction, and perhaps an important part of the explanation for why enclaves occur?

Mary Douglas
Kip, thank you for two questions.

Second one first:

Yes, I am sure it must be true that people opt out of the mainstream society because they feel (probably rightly) that there are going to be no rewards for them, if they stay on/in. I must get hold of Tainter's book. Does he take notice of these two ways of opting out?

One, the loners, who opt out as individuals; the other, these groups with anger in their hearts, which become so dangerous? And does he say anything about the anger? Since I believe that violence against the enclave group only sets off the positive feedback process, which escalates the anger and violence on both sides, I want to know what he thinks we should do about them.

To me it seems to be of paramount importance to seek out what they consider the injustice that has forced them out.

Your first question, about personality, is difficult for me, as I am convinced that living in an enclave shapes the personality, and living alone shapes the personality too, and living in a hierarchy, or in a market environment.

I am not sure Ibelieve in an unacculturated personality

Richard Farson
Mary, I worry a lot about the rapid growth of fundamentalist religions here and abroad. It seems to me that they are breeding grounds for superstitions, exclusionary practices, literal acceptance of the "truths" in their sacred literature, these truths justifying all kinds of terrible actions here on earth, including severe ethnic discrimination, the politicization of the Christian fundamentalists in league with the conservative and bellicose political right wing, it's deadening anti-intellectual and anti-scientific posture, its cruel policies on abortion, death penalty, etc. In short it represents just about everything that I find oppressive and limiting in our American society, let alone the horrors committed in its name in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet, when you and I were discussing your doing this interview, in passing you indicated that this growth of fundamentalism did not worry you, that you were more concerned about how we relate to it. At least that's the way I remember what you said. Could you explain for us now how you do regard this recent massive growth of fundamentalist religions?

Hallock Hoffman
Dear Mary,

I want to echo Dick's concern with fundamentalist groups of believers. My question is, how big is an enclave? What establishes its borders? Is the Catholic Church an enclave? or does catholicism promote enclaves that are somehow contained within the international organization? When does a group grow out of being an enclave and become a (I wish I know the right word for a non-enclave) social organization? Is it the rigidity of the required belief system that distinguishes an enclave from a non-enclave group? Is it the acceptance of the leader's control? Is there a distinction between an enclave and a defined culture--say, the culture of an IBM (at least in the old days, when the corporation had a culture that included specifications of ways of speaking, dressing, etc.)

These may seem silly questions but I have been struggoing with them in trying to define the extent and nature of a cult in a business organization. There the defining quality seems to be adherence to a specific belief system and a particular leader. EST is a good example. But when the belief system seems to pervade the entire organization and the corporate hierarchy seems to expect the same sort of faith in their righteousness and powers as is granted to cult leaders--is their whole outfit at cult?

Sandy Mactaggart
Two days ago I was given an interesting book "Daughter of Persia" by Sattareh Farman Farmian, published in 1992 which describes the life of an Iranian Lady born into the Iranian royal family, Pre Sha Reza Pahlavi. The narrative covers the years until the time of Ayatollah Khomeini when the author moved permanently to the United States. I have only just started to read it, but a paragraph caught my eye which may be relevant to this discussion. I quote it because there is always a great danger that we bring our own set of attitudes with us to any discussion distant in geography or in time. It is almost impossible for the average person brought up in modern North America to understand what was important to a thirteenth century English villager. I submit that for all our intelligence, it is equally difficult to understand what it is like to live in the Middle East today, and to understand why those who live there feel as they do.

Here is the paragraph, somewhat edited:

"Condemned by geographical circumstance to be the victims of many successive conquests, Iranians became experts at the art of survival. They learned to make the best of new situations that came along, clinging to the sustaining memory of our great past, and learning, first and foremost, the ancient wisdom of the Middle East, .... never trust anyone but your own family.

Taught from childhood to be quick witted and alert to others moods, that they might know better who was a friend and who was an enemy, Persians learned to admire those who were wily and good at dissembling, since cleverness and diguising ones true feelings, often served as the only way to survive against a stronger force. One could never be certain of the future, Good fortune never lasted, and by next week we might all be dead or ruined. My mother would say firmly, "Just worry about today and let God take care of tomorrow."

What would our society be like if we could never trust anyone but our own family? That seems to me to be what the terrorists are attempting to do to us. Perhaps more important to the current discussion is, "How do you change that belief in an enclave as big as the Middle East"?

Kip Winsett
Mary, Tainter doesn't address the anger factor, nor distinguish between individual and group drop out (I have to smile as I suddenly recall Timothy Leary's mantra of a few decades ago). Tainter focuses on the underlying process that forces people to opt out.

The anger is an interesting area of inquiry.

Mary Douglas
Richard, on horror of Fundamentalism!

Yes, it is horrifying. Everything you say is right and rings loud bells. Especially the attempts to control information.

How do we deal with it? How do we explain its tremendous growth?

About the growth, a mystery, specially to Europeans, though in the States you had such a huge outcrop of small communes and enclaves of a religious kind in the 19th century, that it can’t be new to you. Wasn’t there a group called ‘The Don’t Knows’?

My own personal explanation is based on the theory of cultural bias, the idea that a culture is based on a particular form of organization. It can’t be transplanted except to another variant of that organization. The anthropology of Culture simplifies by working out four different kinds of organization, that is, ways of coordinating, and sees how each generates its feasible cultural type.

So, according to this theory, all of the four kinds of culture are in competition and in conflict with each other, vilifying the others and recruiting malcontents from them. With the exception of the Isolates who never say anything because they have no one to talk to. So three:

Individualists: competitive, thrive in a society organized on market principles.

Hierarchists: Non-competitive, organized by status, hereditary principles.

Enclaves: group-drop outs, in protest against the injustices of hierarchy and spiritual inadequacies of individualism.

So, why are the enclaves winning out? (If they are).

First because the hierarchists are completely without good standing, no one has a good word to say about them, they are the bloodless bureaucracies where members wear out their boring lives in big business or government offices. Their rules block our attempts to improve our lot. (More about that later if you want).

Second, because market principles are very competitive, there are more losers than winners, and the losers are in pain and sorrow. It doesn’t console the losers (low paid) that they have a better standard of living if they can’t get education for their children or leave them any wealth.

And third, because our technological infra-structure alienates us from each other. No need to form a work-place community, everybody there will be out in a year or two, and so will you, looking for a better place. We said all this earlier, about the effects of mobility on community. That is quite well documented by surveys.

I have to say this in a didactic way, because I can’t persuade any of the national survey people to work out how to assess the distribution of cultural bias. A bit of research on these lines is just starting. (More later, if wanted).

So many reasons for being angry or unhappy, no wonder the enclaves have got recruits beating down the path to their doors.

How do we deal with it?

Personally I believe that violent attack just strengthens commitment, it is just what the enclave needs to stir up their faith, and refuel the sense of injustice.

So what to do?

I have only got one idea: to enquire seriously into the particular forms of injustice that rouses their anger. And be seen to be trying to make redress.

That is a horrendous can of worms to open if instead of hating enclaves and fundamentalists we have to ask ourselves why they hate us.

Hallock, thank you for raising many important questions.

Is the Catholic Church an enclave? Does size determine enclavism?

I don’t think it is useful to think of it as a matter of size. Remember we mentioned the affinity groups or daughter colonies that spin off from an enclave that splits. An enclave, for the purposes of this argument, is a group that has separated itself from the mainstream society, closed its boundaries, and suffers specific organizational problems in consequence. These stem from fear of leakage: the problems of authority, leadership, decision-making, organizing. The only project they can be sure of securing their members’ support for is attack against the outsiders.

We need the word ‘sectarian’, to describe the effects of general secularisation on the organized religions. The Catholic Church is essentially hierarchical in its structure, it expects to exert authority, and its channels of command are clearly defined. But it can show distinctly sectarian cultural trends when it is so afraid of losing the confidence of members that it/she dare not come out and denounce its failures (like the recent cases of child-abusing priests), and is really concerned to attack outsiders rather than to love them.

There is a favorite story about Saint. Peter acting as tour guide round paradise: at one point he stops and asks the tourists to go very quietly for a bit; then he says they can talk again, but explains they just passed the place where the Catholics are gathered, they like to think they are the only people here and as this is paradise we don’t want to disabuse them.

Any great organization can go through sectarian phases. Any great organization has all four kinds of culture in its different compartments.

I am glad you mentioned IBM. Has any one ever done a cultural audit on them? Some parts will be very bureaucratic, probably the finance and budget sections, and the administration, but in the interstices there will surely be scope for individualism, specially in sales. And surely there will be enclaves inside its ranks. The question is, How does its overall distribution of cultures compare with other big corporations?

The great quote about the Persian family’s struggles to survive is typical of the culture of the isolates, they can’t trust anyone except immediate family, they can’t plan, they think the world is a stitch-up. You can’t help them by preaching a more active cultural attitude. They need to have a more supporting social environment.

Kip, I do think you are right, none of the commentators on the current scene is saying anything about anger and its causes. And yet, it is specially interesting in modern times, because the hierarchical buffers that stop one person from walking on another’s toes, are gone. Each kind of culture has its own justification for what it encourages its followers to do, and enclaves put anger against flagrant injustice high up on their list of justifications. As Dick says, it is a bad show. Very frightening.

Richard Farson
As you well know, Mary, Americans, and probably many Europeans too, grew up on the idea of individualism, that individual differences are the important predictive influences. Hence, we spend a lot of print citing the special qualities of leaders, etc. While that concept continues in the popular press, among some of us it has changed radically in recent decades, in no small measure because of your own work, as we have taken the power of the social context, the group, the organization, the culture, into consideration. You particularly helped me to understand that the way a group is organized can determine the kinds of decisions it makes.

Forgive me if I misreport, but as I understand it, to compare just two of your cultures--I guess you would classify them as hierarchical and enclave--if a group is organized hierarchically, emphasizing tradition, with stable leadership and membership, and clear boundaries, it is likely to make decisions that are predictably very different from a group that is organized more democratically, with broad participation, changing leadership and blurred boundaries.

I recall as examples the differences between two California environmental groups: The Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth. The former, because it is an hierarchical group, will therefore be more measured in its responses, more likely to see the problems in local terms, see them as more managable, more likely to use mainstream actions like legislation, letter writing, meeting with politicians, etc. while the other will see the situation in global, apocalyptic terms, more likely to use protest and demonstrations, etc. even though they have the same environmental concerns, and even the same membership.

I always sensed that, even though you disparage hierarchies somewhat in your comment above, you feel we haven't given the hierarchical systems enough credit as solid, plausible ways to organize. Am I wrong about that?

And if I'm not, what does that say about our US and British democracies (do we have democracies?) vs. the ways in which our potential enemies are organized? On the one hand we seem to be facing enclaves (Al Qaeda) and on the other, hierarchies (Iraq). Or do I have those misidentified? Are there implications for how we might address them differently?

Kip Winsett
Mary, in considering anger as a fundamental motivation for behavior in the context of this discussion it seems that there are 3 possible scenarios to look at:

1. Real injustice which provokes a predictable angry response. Theoretically easy to defuse this anger as one has only to right the wrong.

2. Perceived injustice which provokes an angry response that is unpredictable since the transgressor hasn't done anything they can identify as wrong. Open to possible solution by increased understanding of the parties involved.

3. General anger or personal agenda driven anger which deliberately seizes upon any event and describes or defines it as an injustice. Seemingly little possibility of reducing or mitigating such anger or its behavioral expression.

Do you have an opinion as to the frequency of occurrence of these 3 in today's conflicts? And, any suggestions for how to deal with #3?

Richard Farson
I would add one more to your list, Kip: The anger, or discontent, that comes not from something having gone wrong, but from rising expectations resulting from improvements in one's situation, or from thinking that others somehow have it better. This kind of anger is what typically leads to revolutions. They come after reforms have been introduced. I am writing a book now that suggests, among other things, that divorce is often rooted in the same dynamic.

Mary Douglas
Hierarchy, I am glad to try to say what it is.

In the present day, it is much reviled. Its meaning is simplified to a travesty. It is supposed only to show a strong up/down social dimension. Whereas, if you want a real culture to contrast with individualism, you need to compare them both, and realize that a culture of individualism also has a strong up/down dimension. Behind a leader there must be followers, but they should always be on the look out for the main chance and ready to change sides if the current leader doesn't deliver.

Individualism, as Dick said, produces leaders, relies on them and gives them a lot of responsibility, but because they have little to say or do except to follow, that doesn't make them inhabit a hierarchy. The culture that produces strong leaders is one of individualists who are entrepreneurial at every level, taking opportunities as they come, serving self-interest when they can, without inhibition. That is one kind of culture. It is very good for surviving in certain environments, crisis for example, perpetual change, for example. It works with a very short memory, doesn't need to worry about tradition, and makes its decision in a short time span.

Dick, I remember how surprised our dear Geographer, Walter, was when he wanted to interest business people in climate change, but found that 20 years ahead was as far as they wanted to look.

Hierarchy, on the other hand, works well in a stable environment, and helps to make it more stable. The two cultures are always found in any community, each defining itself as opposed by the other, by what it is not. All the town-meeting debates aligning the community into those for tradition, stability, looking to the long term, and those hurt by the static position, needing change, and only seeing the short term. …They, the individualists, the source of innovation and inventions.

I am saying this to be fair, at heart I like hierarchy best. It would be so good if everyone had to look in his heart and discover a private cultural preference. The hierarchy only works if there is a lot of trust, but it makes trust credible. We keep undoing hierarchy when we see it creeping in, and then we wonder why we are so dominated by the media, and why they only see the short term.

Hierarchy has a lateral organisation as well as the up-down one. It has multiple peaks, which hold each other up by rivalry. Its institutions balance each other in a recognized rivalry. And this goes on down through all the levels. Its institutions are not all hereditary, there is a lot of voting here, so Church and State, Pope and Emperor in medieval Europe, were balanced against each other, Rajah and Brahmin in Hindu kingdom, husband and wife at the family level. Sometimes one is up, sometimes the other. At all times hierarchical top leaders are constrained by the rules which secure the balance. Their instituted factions are in competition to get the support of the rest of the system.

Richard, you made a mistake when you thought that individualism has wildly apocalyptic visions of the future. On the contrary, it is rational, pragmatic, and thinks up to the mid-term. It recruits its supporters by appealing to their self-interest. No, it is the enclaves who have an apocalyptic sense of the future, and they use the threat of imminent disaster to recruit their followers.

Then we have got the loners, on their own, not engaged responsibly in politics or anything else. Let's forget them for the moment.

This gives three political cultures, and one of isolates. Take any major dispute you know about, it is not difficult to locate the distribution of cultures round the disputed issues, and to hear them accuse each other.The four positions in the society, on the edge of, or at the top of it, are always in tension with each other and disagreeing on what the big problems are, and what to do. The society would collapse if the debate between its cultures was silenced. The cultures need each other, they can't recognize themselves unless they can see and disapprove of the others.

Richard, with due respect for your view, I maintain that that is why it is a serious mistake to imagine that Saddam Hussein is a hierarchist. He is a despot, he is not even an individualist. He silences all opposition, he controls everything by force. That is not culture in action. In Iraq culture has been squashed out. That is the trouble. No trust, no judicial solutions, no certainty.

Kip, Your three scenarios of injustice intrigue me. I am sure I do believe in real injustice. But I also believe that each of the four cultures takes a different view of injustice on any important issue. Have you read Benjamin David's "Essential Injustice", where he uses cultural theory to trace the development of disputes about risk and land appropriation? Each of the opposing parties to a dispute believes it has the real view of justice and that the others are oppressors. It is hilarious. It could be that none of them has got the fully just solution, because of political commitments.

Kip and Richard, Yes, disappointment over perceived unfairness, injustice, promises not kept, tends to go hand in hand with increasing prosperity. Expectations are dashed. What can I say!

Kip Winsett
Mary, in light of your last comment (VERY informative) would I be jumping the gun if I were to begin looking at the whole world as, in a sense, a more or less single society with distributions of these 4 cultures - even though each smaller society would have its own distribution of these 4 cultures within it? If that were the case, then the dynamics of interaction between various countries might take on a different timbre. Especially if, within a specific country, one of the 4 cultures happens at any moment to be dominant but interacting with another country in which a different one of the 4 happened to be dominant. Am I way off base here?

Mary Douglas
Thank you very much Kip, for all the support you have brought to this interview. Everyone has been marvellous, but you have always been two jumps ahead.

Yes, that is the grand new concept that connects culture with politics. In every community, at every distinct level of organization, there are these confrontations between the four voices. The different levels may have totally different cultures according to how they are organized. Culture is always a set of values reflecting the form of organization. If one voice dominates it has a basic system of organization, power and resilience, to support it.

Inside a religious body you get sects and hierarchies, inside an information network you get bazaars and cathedrals, it is the same, call them what you like. They survive by pointing the finger of blame at each other. This does bring a new slant to political studies. It stops the policy analyst from seeing everything through the lens made by his own culture.

Thank you to Don, Harlan, and Hallock, for bringing religion into the matter. After all, we were talking about terrorist sects. It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on. The kind of religion is the kind of society, and we are making them both.

Thank you, also, Ray and Hallock, for introducing corporations and secular life in general. This theory of culture trashes the favourite idea of business schools of the 70’s: ‘Firms should get the right culture’. The advice was mostly telling them to give signals, friendly, supportive etc. But we say: You cannot fail to have the right culture for your type of organization. The culture will be hierarchical if you have a hierarchical company, sectarian if a group hives off and hangs onto the outskirts of power and authority... etc. Smiles and other supportive signals just look hypocritical if they don’t fit the organization.

So if you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization. And as to the staff, if they put up with never having a chance to criticise or no chance to band together, the management will get a culture of apathy. One day the isolates will be tempted to join a sect that puts their sense of injustice into words. And the sect may even give them a chance to do something about it. Watch out!

Sandy, you have contributed a lot about Islam. In the English midlands there is a huge population of Moslems, poor and unemployed, who see no meaningful future for themselves or their children. It is the predicted culture of apathy. The young men are bored stiff and everything is pointless. So they line up to go to fight the Russians in Chechnya. It is more exciting and noble. Striking a blow for justice is close to heroic suicide. But some young people feel their lives are not worth living. It is a generation issue.

This kind of analysis exposes unbearable questions. Why do they hate us? Where was the original injustice that twists their guts? What did our nation ever do to provoke these madly vicious enemies? What is seen as injustice in one place is seen as just requital in the other. And you know about the positive feed backs and the tit-for-tat of oppressor and oppressed.

Only when we have faced those issues can we move to the first question Richard put. He asked: What can we do about it? The fundamentalist sects won’t come to the negotiating table. If they come they will concede nothing. If we flatten them with guns or missiles we inflame their rage and give more proof of our essential injustice. What ought we to do? What would work?

Thank you very much for joining me, and forcing me to try to be coherent about such terrifying and real issues. I would always prefer to dodge them.

Thank you Richard, first and last.

Mary

Richard Farson
Mary, we can't thank you enough for your dedicated participation in this interview, your enlightening answers to our questions, your opening up a very different way to think about the desperately urgent issues that face us. Your responsiveness met and exceeded my highest expectations. I first asked you to give us a week, and you have generously extended it to accomodate our questions. When all that you have told us, in such straightforward, non-jargon language, with every sentence making an important point, has a chance to sink in, and we increasingly see more relevant applications of culture theory to the situations we face, we will be very glad not only to have had these weeks with you, but to know that you remain within reach as a Fellow of the ILF. I know that I will not be the only one to desire a return visit. Again, our deepest thanks.

Richard Farson
Mary, sometimes when I am conducting a face-to-face interview, say, recruiting a staff member or questioning an employee of a company I am studying, I ask my interviewees to imagine that the interview is over and they are on their way home and they are saying to themselves that they wished they had said something more in the interview. What might that something be? Now that your last comment and mine have essentially terminated this interview, perhaps there is something more you wish you had said, some question you wished we had asked, and if so, will you tell us now?

Mary Douglas
Richard,Yes, this has been so intense an experience, I didn't dare say what was in my mind. I thought it was perhaps already obvious. Then I worried that it might give annoyance or distress. And then I worried that I had pulled my punches and not spoken out about the main question, why is terrorism so much more in evidence now than before?

So there is something that I now wish to add. Thank you for giving me the chance.

One explanation of the new terrorism (that I think I did say once already), is that the kind of society we are going to be living in more and more tends to make isolates of us all. This means obviously an impoverished cultural life, narrow horizons, the sense of meaninglessness, futility, in short an apathetic culture. Soon we will all become ready to be recruited to the competing enclaves. The only thing that may save us is the benign cosmos of the apathetic isolate. It is hard to make those people really angry.

The other reason is the history of the middle east. The anger comes from there and is aimed at us, America and Britain, and Israel. The initial injustice was the holocaust and the need for a territory for the Jews of central Europe. The blatantly obvious injustice that currently inflames the anger is focused on Israel's encroachment on Palestinian land, with the support of the US, and focused on the way that Israel treats the Palestinians. And above all, the money that is still being poured into Israel. And the perceived hypocrisy about human rights and the rule of law, indulgent to Israel's breaches and harsh on other nations. Without that assured American largesse Israel would have been obliged (like everyone else) to come to an accommodation with her neighbours. She couldn't have gone on defying them for half a century. That is the second part of the answer to: 'Why terrorism now? Why against us?'

I am sorry for the bleak conclusion. It puts a different slant on the question: 'What can we do about it?'

Mary,
Thank you all,