Missing Persons: A Critique of Personhood in the Social Sciences. - Review - book reviews

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1999 by James V. Spickard

by MARY DOUGLAS and STEVEN NEY. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 223 xiv pp. $24.95.

Mary Douglas is always radical and provocative. Her latest book - an anthropological critique of the Western concept of Economic Man - appears at a crucial point in the development of American sociology of religion. Though hindered by a writing style that at times approaches the telegraphic, this volume reminds us of the cultural biases at the root of our discipline. Proponents of the rational-choice theory of religion should take special warning.

Missing Persons is framed as a discussion of welfare policies - particularly those policies built on a culturally biased definition of poverty. People are not poor because they lack goods, say Douglas and Ney; they are poor because they lack the power to use goods for social communication. Western economic theory buries this insight by seeing goods as things that individuals consume. This not only fails to make sense of the famous Trobriand kula ring, in which goods are gifts and individuals are merely nodes for their exchange. It also fails to understand modern contests that use goods for status attainment. One need only listen to one's office mates compare their hard drives to know that more than use-value is involved.

Douglas and Ney do more than criticize. They propose a theory of the person that foregoes neither individual intelligence nor the shaping power of culture. Rather than positing reason as a universal norm and ascribing all deviations to individual emotion or to different cultural frames, they argue that cultures have their own rationalities. Each society finds some things rational and others not. Individuals raised there learn its rationality, not others, though they can later learn other ways.

Yet, there is pattern in this wilderness, for only a limited number of social organizations are stable. Each of these encourages a particular way of seeing the world which, through feedback, reinforces its social rules. Societies gravitate to one of four stable types, marked by extreme hierarchies, egalitarian enclaves, competitive individualists, or social isolates. All sorts of persons live in each society, but each pushes them in different directions. Hierarchies, for example, support regularity and ritual, and so will favor those who cherish tradition, have punctual meals, and save for the holidays. It will regard those unable or unwilling to do so as lacking morals or at least as being too poor to matter. Isolates, on the other hand, do not favor regularity: they celebrate holidays at their own rhythm, eat take-out, and find their hierarchical neighbors stiff and oppressive.

Modern pluralist democracy, of course, makes these four types live side by side and indeed pits them against each other in battles for political control. Each sees the others as at least incomprehensible, if not immoral, and fights to preserve its own holy ways. Far from being above the fray, rational-choice theory comes down on the side of the competitive individualists and sees the interpersonal struggle to succeed as the essence of rationality. It is for individualists, but not for the other three.

How does this affect social policy? Take mental health policy, for example. Hierarchists believe in paternalistic intervention and "doctor knows best." Equalitarians, ever worried by differential power, erase the lines between patients and staff to make "one happy family." Competitive individualists would turn the mental health system over to the private sector to make a buck, while social isolates would get disgusted with the debates and leave. Each stakes its view on its sense of self-evident morality - a morality that its social surroundings reinforce. For is not paternalism valid where "the better sort" are in control? And is not the market a "neutral" way of meeting people's needs? Only if one is already biased to think so - and it is such cultural biases that Douglas sees at the heart of social thinking.

Why is this relevant to the sociology of religion? Not because of its flawless argument, for Douglas and Ney are suggestive where they should be convincing and regularly opt for breadth rather than depth. But they warn us against positing universal motives to actors from different social settings. Where some observers see religious fundamentalism as a response to market opportunity, for example, they see it as a reflection of a social life that moralizes the community. Fundamentalists are indeed "rational," but not in market terms - for as enclavists they find pure markets depraved. We do them no favors by thinking of them as competitive individualists. Culture matters, and not just as a means of framing one-dimensional rationality.

This is not the best book Douglas has written, though it is a summation and extension of much that she has said before. Creatively brilliant as always, she again raises the right warning flags about our accustomed ways of thinking. I only wish that she could - for once - work through her argument with care rather than slide over the details.