Durkheimian Sociology and its Discontents: Why its Time for a New Sociology of Suicide

Since Durkheim showed that certain social structural factors, external to the individual, had a strong positive relationship to variation in suicide rates, sociologists have maintained the argument that suicide is caused by social forces and, therefore, is a phenomenon squarely in the domain of sociology. Yet, western medical professionals (Marsh 2010) and the average person (Lake et al. 2013) continue to “explain” suicidality mainly via psychological factors; primarily mental illness or disorder, or by cognitive appraisals favored by psychology and psychiatry, like depression, burdensomeness, and hopelessness (Cavanaugh et al. 2003).

As is often the case with sociology, sociologists have done little to argue for the value of their science. Since 1980, sociology has published the second fewest amount of studies (405) on suicide; and it’s not even close (psychiatry has published 9951, while molecular biology (!) has produced 1316) (Stack and Bowman 2012:4). When sociologists study suicide, they overwhelmingly favor retesting Durkheim’s 19^th century theses in order to weigh in on the classic’s continued value, as journals love papers that use new data or analytic strategies to test old, foundational ideas (Wray et al. 2011). This does little to help advance the sociological science of suicide and support sociology’s contribution to understanding, explaining, or preventing suicide.

Nevertheless, suicide remains an important phenomenon for sociology. Not only does it constitute a serious social problem—perhaps more urgent today than in Durkheim’s day—it also speaks to theoretical questions central to cultural sociology; particularly one trying to integrate contributions from the cognitive social sciences.

Because suicide is a social act, replete with meanings about why people die by suicide and who we expect to die by suicide, it is fair to ask how people come to acquire proscriptive suicide meanings that make them more vulnerable to suicidality? Of equal importance, are questions about how attitudes become actions: myriad studies show that while ideation is a risk factor for attempting suicide the two are not neatly linked, as most ideators will never attempt suicide (Klonsky and May 2015).

In short, studying suicide presents opportunities for expanding how sociology makes sense of human behavior because it is a performance that evokes meaning in both the actor and her intended/unintended audience. In most cases, the actor, herself, must overcome the severest of prohibitions, ranging from biogenetic safeguards to informal norms and formal laws. And yet, suicide still occurs; it tends to cluster in certain physical and temporal spaces (Haw et al. 2013; Niedzwiedz et al. 2014); and, its diffusion from one person to the next has been empirically verified for nearly five decades, but remains almost completely unexamined in sociology (for exceptions, see my work with Anna Mueller [Abrutyn and Mueller 2014; Mueller and Abrutyn 2015; Mueller et al. 2014], in addition to Baller and Richardson 2002, 2009; Bjarnason 1994).

A follow-up post will offer a new framework setting up what Anna and I have argued and our work suggests as the agenda for a reinvigorated sociological science of suicide. This framework is synthetic and includes leveraging the powerful insights of cultural sociology, social psychology, and, especially, the sociology of emotions. At various points, these subfields intersect in ways that provide pathways for sociology reclaiming its place at the table for explaining suicide and contributing to its prevention. Moreover, because of both the unique and shared qualities suicide has with any other social behavior, it is hopeful that this move towards synthesis will compliment the current debates and discussions surrounding why people feel, think and do what they do.

On the Nature of Habit

Recently, however, some philosophers have begun to pay attention to habits. An example is a series of papers by Bill Pollard starting in the mid-aughts (Pollard, 2006a, 2006b), and more recently Steve Matthews (2017). Pollard tackles some fundamental issues arguing (positively) for habit-based explanations of action as a useful addendum (if not replacement) for folk-psychological accounts (along the lines of previous posts). Here I’d like to focus on Mathews more recent work, which deals with the core characteristics making something a habit.

One useful (implicit) message in this work is that consistent with the modern notion of concepts in cognitive semantics, habits are a radial category. Rather than being a crisp concept with necessary and sufficient conditions of membership, habits are a fuzzy concept, with some “core” or “central” exemplars that share most of the features of habits, and some “peripheral” members that only share some features.

Most anti-habit theorists (with Kant and Kant-inspired theorists such as Parsons being one of the primary examples) equate habit with mindless compulsion and use this equation to expunge habit from the category of action. Critiques of habit theories can thus be arranged on a strength gradient depending on which element of the radial category they decide to focus on. The weakest critiques pick peripheral members, passing them off as “prototypes” for the whole category. Peripheral members of the habit category, such as tics, reflexes, addictions, and compulsions, tend to share few features with action that is experienced as intentional. It is thus easy for these critics to deny habit-based behavior the characteristic that we usually reserve for “action” proper.

Much like American sociological theory post-Parsons (Camic, 1986), habits have been given short shrift in the analytic philosophy of action tradition. As noted in previous posts, one problem is that habit-based explanations, being a form of dispositional account of action, are hard to reconcile with dominant intellectualist approaches to explaining action. The latter, require resort to the usual “psychological” apparatus of reasons, intentions, beliefs, and desires. In habit-based explanations, actions are instead accounted for by referring to their own tendencies to reliably reoccur in specific environments given the agent’s history. This makes them hard to square with typical folk psychological explanations, in which “mental” items are the presumed causal drivers.

Matthews’s argument is that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques. Skilled ways of being proficient at an action, acquired via an enskillment process requiring training and repetition. These include both “behavioral” skills (e.g. playing the piano, typing, riding a bike) and “cognitive” or “mental” skills, although the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people. In this respect, most bona fide habits are mindful, without necessarily being intentional in the folk psychological sense. They also have five core features, which I discuss next.

Habits are socially shaped.- This might seem obvious. However, there is a tendency in some corners of social theory to think of habit-based accounts as somehow imposing an “individualistic” explanatory scheme. Some people decry while others celebrate (Turner, 1994) the alleged commitment to individualism that comes with habit-based accounts of action. This conception is misguided. Matthews is correct in noting that for core (prototypical) habits are hardly individualistic since they comprise culturally transmitted “techniques” for how to do things (Tomasello, 1999). That each person could have their own way (say of typing or swimming) does not make habits purely individual since they would not be constructed or transmitted if people were Crusoe-like isolates. Instead, most true habits, as revealed by recent sociological “apprenticeship ethnographies” require the embeddedness of the individual in some pedagogical context (for most children this being the family). In this way, most habits are “relational” in a fairly straightforward sense.

Habits are acquired through repetition.- Another one that seems obvious. Nevertheless, I believe this point is more consequential than meets the eye. Recent work emphasizing the root of so-called “dual process” models in theories of learning and memory emphasize that routes to cultural acquisition (ideal-typical “fast” and one shot and “slow” and high repetition) are a key way to partitioning different cultural elements. Namely propositional “beliefs” from non-declarative practices. Habits, having only the slow route of acquisition open to them belong to the latter. Hence the relatively harmless analytic equation of habits and practices. This criterion also serves to demarcate degenerate or borderline examples of the habit radial category such as phobias acquired after a single exposure to a threatening object (e.g., fear of dogs after a dog bite), which depend on analytically and physiologically distinct neural substrates. These we can safely rule out as robust members of the habit category based on the acquisition history criterion.

Habits modify people in durable ways.- As Mike and I have noted (Lizardo & Strand, 2010), this criterion serves to demarcates “strong” habit or practice theories from theories who purport to pay attention to practices but from which embodied agents with their own inertia and history of habituation seem to be absent. Commitment to habit as an explanatory category entails commitment to persons as causally powerful particulars who have been modified by habit in a durable way. This makes durable habits a disposition to behave in such-and-such ways under certain circumstances. Durable modification also entails making conceptual room for the fact that, once acquired, habits are hard to get rid of. So it is usually easier to “refunctionalize” a habit (e.g. take an old habit and put to use for new purposes) than to completely retool.

Since habits operate according to a Hebbian “use or lose it” rule, it is possible for habits to atrophy and decay. However, this decay is relatively graceful and gradual, not fast and sudden. In addition, the previous acquisition of a habit entails faster re-acquisition even when that habit has been weakened or partially lost. This is behind the folk idea that many things are “like riding a bike,” so they can come back easier when you try them again even after a period of disuse.

Considering the “second nature” created by habit means we need to differentiate the temporality of habit (acquisition, use, rehearsal or decay) from the temporality of “macro” social life, as these may not always be in sync; habits will try to persevere even under changing or adverse conditions (Strand & Lizardo, 2017). Durable modification also links nicely to classic sociological notions on the power of “cohorts” to enact social change as history is “encoded” in individuals (Bourdieu, 1990; Ryder, 1965; Vaisey & Lizardo, 2016).

Habits are activated by environmental cues and triggers.- This is one of the better documented empirical regularities in the psychology of action (Ouellette & Wood, 1998). Yet, its meager representation in sociological action theory as an explanatory tool is telling, despite sociologists obvious preference for environmental over attribute-based explanations. Perhaps part of the problem if conceptual; thinking of the environment as a “trigger” may bring fears of removing voluntarism (or as we call it today “agency”) out of the equation thus producing a unidimensional theory of action that reduces action to “conditions” (Parsons, 1937). Yet this fear is unfounded.

First, most people can prospectively plan to enter an environment they know will trigger a habit. For instance, we may set up our work space in the office in a way that facilitates the evocation of the “writing” habit. Second, agents can actively perceive that certain situations have certain “moods” or affordances and they welcome that these trigger reliable (usually pleasant) habits. For instance, a social butterfly can actively perceive that a cocktail party will be good for triggering the complex of habits making up their “outgoing” personality. These have “negative” versions; we avoid certain environments precisely because we know that they’ll trigger a habit we may want to atrophy or decay. There’s no reason to think of the triggering function of environments in purely mechanical ways.

Second, that habits are automatically triggered by environmental cues does not impugn their link to goal-oriented action. In fact, habits can be thought of as a way to facilitate the pursuit and attainment of goals. It is a Parsonian prejudice to presume that the only way to pursue goals is to “picture” them reflectively before the action is initiated and then deploy “effort” to get moving. In fact, this effortful control of action may be subject to more disruption (and thus failure in the attainment of goals) than when agents “offload” the control of action to the environment via habit. In the latter case, goals can be pursued efficiently in a way that is more robust to environmental disruption and entropy.

Habits partake of certain conditions of “automaticity”.- That habits are “automatic” also seems self-evident. However, this can also be conceptually tricky. The problem is that automacity is not a molar concept; instead, it decomposes into a variety of features, some of which can vary independently (Moors & De Houwer, 2006). This can lead to semantic ambiguity because different theorists may actually emphasize different aspects of habitual action when they use the term “automatic” to refer to it.

As already intimated earlier, for prototypical habits, the automaticity feature that most people have in mind is efficiency. After acquiring a habit via lots of repetition people gain proficiency in performing the action. This means that the action can be performed faster and more reliably. Another feature of efficiency is that we no longer have to monitor each step of the action; instead, the action can be performed while our attention resources can be freed to do something else. For instance, experienced knitters can become so efficient at knitting they can do that while reading a book or watching TV.

However, other theorists may take efficiency for granted and point to other features of automaticity as definitional of habitual action. The most controversial of these is the link to intention. For some habits are automatic because they are patterns of behavior that, via the environmental trigger condition mentioned above, bypass intention. This leads to a sometimes counterproductive dualism between “intentional action” and “habit.” I believe a better solution is to think of habitual action as having its own form non-representational “intentionality” (Pollard, 2006b). Driving a car, or riding a bike is intentional action with its own feel, the difference from reflexive intentional action being that representing each step in the action is not required (Dreyfus, 2002).

As noted earlier, the feature of automacity that makes the weakest criterion for defining prototypical habits is (lack of) goal dependence. Most habits are not automatic by this criterion since most habitual action is action for something. Habits without goals (e.g., twirling your hair, tapping your fingers) exist, but they are actually fairly peripheral members of the category. In accord with the pragmatist conception, most habits exist because they help the agent accomplish their goals. As mentioned earlier, most goals are reached via habitual action rather than by reflexive contemplation of ends and effortful initiation of action.

Other features of automaticy are even more peripheral for fixing the nature of habit. For instance, the feature that Bargh refers to as “control.” This refers to whether the agent can “stop” an action sequence once it is started. In this sense, prototypical habits (playing the piano, specifying a regression model) are “controlled” not automatic actions (Pollard, 2006b, p. 60). Skills and procedures, especially those that are narratively extended in Matthew’s (2017) sense, are all “stoppable” by the agent so don’t count as automatic by this criterion. Complete incapacity to stop a line of action only applies to peripheral members of the habit category (e.g., reflexes, phobias, etc.) and probably pertain to habitual actions with short temporal windows.

Note that this refers to whether habits are “intentional” as described above. Most habits may fail to be intentional (in the classical sense) because they are triggered by the environment, but they can be controlled because the agent (if they have the capacity) can stop them once triggered. This is why it is useful to keep different features of automacity separate when thinking about the nature of habit.

Nevertheless, the issue of controllability brings up interesting conceptual problems for habit theory. These have been sharply noted in a series of papers by the philosopher Christos Douskos (to be the subject of a future post). The basic issue is that categorizing an action as a “habit” may be separable from its status as “skill.” Basically, we have lots of skills that do not count as habitual (remaining in “abeyance” so to speak), and some habits that are not skillful. Overall, the ascription conditions for calling a pattern of action a habit, may be more holistic, and thus empirically demanding, than pragmatist and practice theories suppose because they do not reduce to features inherent to the action or its particular conditions of acquisition.

How about the feature of the “unconscious” nature of some automatic actions? Only degenerate or peripheral members of the habit category are “unconscious.” This refers to whether the person reflexively knows whether they are performing the action. Once again, for some peripheral members of the category (cracking your knuckles while engrossed in some other activity), this may apply but it is unlikely to apply to prototypical skills and procedures (we are all aware of driving, typing, etc.). Some people point to “mindless” habit-driven actions as having this feature, such as driving to work when we meant to drive to the store. Here, however, it is unlikely that the person was unconscious of performing the action. So the lapse seems to have been one of failure to exercise control (e.g. stopping the habit because it was not the one that was properly linked to the initial goal) rather than lack of consciousness per se.

Other theorists emphasize unconscious cognitive habits, and maybe for these, this feature is more central than for more prototypical behavioral habits and procedures. Even here, however, unconscious cognitive habits may have the potential to become “conscious” (e.g. the person knows of their existence qua habits) without losing the core automaticity features defining their habitual nature (e.g. the fact they are efficient means to the accomplishment of certain cognitive goals). Overall, however, while most habitual action does rely on subpersonal processes embedded in the cognitive unconscious, most habits are performed in a “mindful” manner (without implying reflexive self-consciousness). As such, they are not automatic actions by this criterion.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

Dreyfus, H. L. (2002). Intelligence Without Representation–Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mental representation the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 367–383.

Lizardo, O., & Strand, M. (2010). Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions: Clarifying the relationship between different approaches to cognition in cultural sociology. Poetics , 38(2), 205–228.

Matthews, S. (2017). The Significance of Habit. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 14(4), 394–415.

Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326.

Ouellette, J. A., & Wood, W. (1998). Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts future behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 124(1), 54.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

Pollard, B. (2006a). Action, Habits, and Constitution. Ratio, 19(2), 229–248.

Pollard, B. (2006b). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Ryder, N. B. (1965). The cohort as a concept in the study of social change. American Sociological Review, 843–861.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2017). The hysteresis effect: theorizing mismatch in action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 47(2), 164–194.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Human Adaptation for Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28(1), 509–529.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press.

Vaisey, S., & Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change. Socius, 2, 2378023116669726.

Culture, Cognition and “Socialization”

Culture and cognition studies in sociology are mainly concerned with the construction, transmission, and transformation of shared stocks of knowledge. This was clear in the classical theoretical foundations of contemporary work in the sociology of culture laid out in Parsons’s middle period functionalism (Parsons 1951) and in Berger and Luckmann’s decisive reworking of the Parsonian scheme from a phenomenological perspective (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In both traditions, the process of the transmission of knowledge and, with it, the creation and recreation of both conventional and novel forms of meaning was thought of as of the utmost importance. This was usually referred to, in its intergenerational aspect, as “socialization” (of newcomers into the established culture).

Despite its acknowledged importance, contemporary culture and cognition scholars in sociology have seldom laid out explicitly what are the consequences of taking cognition seriously for understanding socialization processes. The result is that sociologists live in a conceptual halfway house, with some misleading remnants of the functionalist and phenomenological traditions on socialization still forming part of the core conception of this process. This is coupled to the fact that, save for some signal exceptions (Corsaro and Rizzo 1988; Pugh 2009), sociologists seldom study children and primary socialization processes directly and thus lack a consistent body of empirical work to move theorizing forward. This is in contrast to the growing body of “apprenticeship ethnography” work that does deal with the issue of “secondary” socialization of adults (usually the ethnographer themselves) into new settings (e.g. Wacquant, Mears, Desmond, Winchester, etc.).

Outside of sociology, there is work, done under the broad umbrella of “psychological” or “cognitive” anthropology, that has dealt with the relevance of cognition to primary socialization processes in a more or less direct way. This work, despite its limitations, can serve as a good exemplar for sociologists as to the analytic benefits of this approach to the socialization process. Here I would like to focus on the exemplary work of anthropologist Christina Toren (2005) who provides one useful example of how a cognitive approach to the study of culture and socialization can be deployed in a profitable way. In particular, Toren’s work challenges the hegemonic account of socialization that pervades sociological thinking on the culture and cognition link while providing valuable starting insights to build on.

Toren notes that traditional anthropological and sociological theories of socialization presume that “with respect to cognition, to their grasp of particular concepts, children simply become—with perhaps some minor variations—what their elders already are” (1993, 461). Toren castigates this account for being “a-historical.” She points to studies of language acquisition that call into question the assumption that socialization consists in the transmission of ready-made models of adult culture to children. These studies show that children not just acquire the linguistic categories of the parental generation ready-made, but rather, engage in their own creative reconstruction of these categories (for recent work on this score see Tomasello 2005). In Toren’s view, “human cognition is a historical process because it constitutes—and in constituting inevitably transforms—the ideas and practices of which it appears to be the product” (1993: 461-462).

For Toren, to move beyond the restrictive account of socialization as the reproduction of the adult world, it is important to incorporate the inherently embodied essence of mind into our theorizing. This requires the recognition of the fact that, empirically, socio-mental and cultural phenomena are not exhausted by explicitly articulated knowledge processes and contents (see e.g. Bloch 1991). These language-mediated processes—which makes up the bulk of empirical material in contemporary sociology of culture—are just “the tip of the iceberg as against those unconscious processes we constitute as knowledge in the body—e.g. particular ways of moving” (1999: 102).

Toren point of departure is the proposition emphasized in Bourdieu’s (1990) work, that “we literally embody our history that is the history of our relations with all those others whom we have encountered in our lives” (1999: 2). She notes an implicit model of the nature of mind and cognition is essentially inescapable and such a model informs the underlying theory of cultural acquisition and a theory of cultural transmission used by the analyst.

Traditional accounts of socialization inherited from the Parsonian and the phenomenological traditions, in excluding the body as a locus of signification, reinstate the mind/body dualism squarely in the center of the theoretical toolkit of sociologists. In this respect, it is not surprising that a formalization of the Schutzian and Parsonian accounts of the functioning of culture and institutions can be done by drawing on the tools of cognitivist, disembodied artificial intelligence, such as the “production-system” formalism (Fararo and Skvoretz 1984). In this respect, there is an indelible link between disembodied approaches to cognition, mind, and cultural transmission and the metaphor of mind as “computer.”

For Toren, the disembodied socialization account relies on an untenable “copy” theory of knowledge acquisition, providing no plausible mechanisms as to how the complex set of categories comprising adult knowledge is acquired by the child undergoing the socialization process. This theory is suspiciously silent on (distributed) differences in the cultural understanding of agents at different (developmental) trajectories in the socialization process (i.e. children and adults or adolescents and children). Socialization theory presumes a passive agent which records this external culture.

These suppositions are dubious in the light of contemporary accounts of knowledge acquisition by infants. Toren argues that given these developments, “the process of physical development, the meaning—or knowledge-making process should be understood as giving rise to psychological structures that are at once dynamic and stable over time” (1999: 9). To refer to these psychological structures she—like Bourdieu (1990)—uses the Piagetian term of “scheme.” As Toren notes the notion of scheme is a “brilliant and essentially simple idea” (1999: 9). Schemes are self-equilibrating wholes simultaneously capable of being structured and of structuring reality by the dual processes of accommodation and assimilation (see e.g. Lizardo 2004)

Embodied and embedded socialization

Toren shows the payoff of this embodied and embedded approach to culture and cognition in her analysis of the acquisition of cultural categories regarding status and gender among Fijian children (Toren 1999: 50-55). According to Toren, designations of power and status rather than being available as discursive linguistic representations, are encoded in the physical arrangement of artifacts and persons in the interior of Fijian domestic and ceremonial dwellings. This is in line with Bourdieu’s (1971) analysis of the physical embeddedness of cosmological principles in the material structure and spatial arrangement of the Berber house, Schwartz’s classic work on vertical classification (Schwartz 1981), and with recent experimental work on the role of embodied perceptual symbols in the perception, understanding, and external signification of power (Schubert 2005).

In Fiji,

all horizontal spaces inside buildings and certain contexts out of doors can be mapped onto a spatial axis whose poles are given by the terms ‘above’ (i cake) and ‘below’ (i ra). Inside a building, people of high social status ‘sit above’ and those of lower social status ‘below’. However, this distinction refers to a single plane and so non-one is seated literally above anyone else…hierarchy in day-to-day village life finds its clearest physical manifestation in people’s relation to one another on this spatial axis and is most evident in the context of meals, kava drinking and worship (2005: 51).

Toren notes that “meals in the Fijian household are always ritualized” which makes the domestic group the primary face-to-face environment in which hierarchical distinctions are enacted and constructed. During meals, the cloth in which persons sit “is laid to conform with the above/below axis of the house space.” Household members proceed to take their place at the table “according to their status: the senior man sits at the pole ‘above’ others are ‘below’ him males in general being above females.” In this manner “the seating arrangements and the conduct of the meal are a concrete realization of hierarchical relations within the domestic group” (2005: 51, italics added). Through the habitual enactment of positioning of male and female bodies across the spatial axis, hierarchy is both practically enacted and transmitted, without the need to engage in “explicit teachings” transmitted through language. This involves the dynamic construction of an analogical mapping linking spatial locations, rank, and (gendered) bodies, which then becomes culturally conventional.

The same system is used to materialize and communicate hierarchical relationships based on village rank among men during the Kava drinking ritual. The drinking of Kava, which is associated “with ancestral mana and the power of God…is always hedged about by ceremony” (2005: 55). Thus, Toren points out that “however informal the occasion, the highest status persons present must sit ‘above’ the central serving bowl.”

Because hierarchy is structured and encoded in material space, it seldom fails to signify: “on the axis of social space, one is always ‘above’ or ‘below’ others, according to one’s position relative to the top, central position.” The explicit axis of hierarchy changes according to the occasion and the composition of the group of assembled persons (i.e. age, gender, rank, etc.). Accordingly, “the image of an ordered and stratified society exemplified in people’s positions relative to one another around the kava bowl is one encountered virtually everyday in the village o Sawaieke.” In addition, the schemes that are used to materially produce hierarchy are not only productive of action, but they also bias perception. This is shown by the fact, that as Toren notes, the arrangement of sitting positions in The Last Supper (ubiquitous in most Fijian household because of missionary activity and conversions to Christianity) is interpreted according to the same above/below axis.

Why Culture is not purely ‘symbolic’

The limitations of the usual “symbolic” approach to the study of culture and ritual is seen most clearly in Toren’s study of the lay categories with which children conceptualize gender and status hierarchy in Fiji. According to Toren, “we should give up the lingering notion that to understand ritual is to analyze its meaning [purely] as relation between metaphors.” Instead, Toren argues that the specifically “symbolic” aspect of culture and ritual is something that emerges from a “process of cognitive construction in persons over time.”

For young children, “ritual is not symbolic in the conventional anthropological sense” (2005: 87). Instead, “young children take ritualized behavior for granted as part of the day-to-day material reality of their existence” (italics added). Fijian children, rather than taking ritual practices as representational, take them rather literally: “the ritualized drinking of kava is, for children, merely what people do when drinking kava. The activity is of the same material and cognitive order as…house-building.” For Toren, even the claim that it is only for adults that ritual comes to have a “symbolic” aspect in the strict (i.e. ritual practices as “referring” to non-empirical meanings) is half true. Instead, “it is only when we understand the process through which ‘the symbolic’ is cognitively constructed” on top of an embodied basis, “that we can also understand the coercive power of ritual” (2005: 87).

Toren asked a sample of Fijian children ranging from five to eleven years old to examine a prepared drawing and provide the identity of unlabeled figures sitting around a table during the kava drinking ritual and during meals in the household, and to provide their own drawings identifying were different persons (mother, father, chief, etc.) would be seated in similar circumstances. Toren finds (2005: 88-90) that by the age of six, Fijian children can reproduce the structural correspondence between gender and rank hierarchy and the above/below spatial axis discussed above, although younger children produce less ranking gradations than do older children. Toren concludes from these data that “an understanding of above/below in terms of its polar extremes occurs just before school age” (2005: 94). For these children, the position of mother below “is the anchor for situations within the household…for prepared drawings of meals, all children chose the figure below to be mother…By contrast, the figure said to be above was either father, father’s elder brother, father’s father, mother’s brother or a ‘guest’.” Toren asks:

But how does this merging of status with spatial categories come about? Piaget has always emphasized that a child’s early cognitions are tied to concrete referents, a point also made by Bourdieu (1977). This is as much the case for my own data concerning a so-called ‘symbolic’ construct as it is for the so-called ‘logical’ constructs investigated by Piaget and his co-workers. What emerges most forcefully from the children’s data is the crucial importance of the spatial axis given by above/below as this is made manifest in concrete form in houses, churches, at meals and in kava-drinking (2005: 94).

The danger of taking an adult’s linguistic and conceptual elaborations (and justifications) for cultural practices, is exemplified in Toren’s account. When asked about the reason for the hierarchical seating arrangement of persons in the kava-drinking ceremonies, the adults’ discursive elaboration is in effect a reversal of that of children. While children provide explicitly tautological responses to the question of the ultimate reasons the Chief is the person who sits on top, adults provide elaborate descriptions regarding the superior mana of different persons, and in particular of the chief. Thus, “adults notion include [in addition to the notion of mana] ideas of…legitimacy, personal achievement, the significance of mythical relations of ancestors of clans…and so on” (95). This speaks to the fundamental difference in both format and phenomenology between culture as acquired in embedded and embodied forms and more explicit forms of articulation of embodied personal culture into explicit public cultural forms.

References

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday.

Bloch, Maurice. 1991. “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.” Man 26 (2): 183–98.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Corsaro, William A., and Thomas A. Rizzo. 1988. “Discussione and Friendship: Socialization Processes in the Peer Culture of Italian Nursery School Children.” American Sociological Review 53 (6): 879–94.

Fararo, Thomas J., and John Skvoretz. 1984. “Institutions as Production Systems.” The Journal of Mathematical Sociology 10 (2): 117–82.

Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4): 375–401.

Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press,.

Pugh, Allison J. 2009. Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. University of California Press.

Schubert, Thomas W. 2005. “Your Highness: Vertical Positions as Perceptual Symbols of Power.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (1): 1–21.

Schwartz, Barry. 1981. Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge. University of Chicago Press.

Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Toren, Christina. 1993. “Making History: The Significance of Childhood Cognition for a Comparative Anthropology of Mind.” Man, 461–78.

———. 2005. Mind, Materiality, and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. Routledge.

What’s Cultural About Analogical Mapping?

Analogical mapping is a cognitive process whereby a particular target is understood by analogizing from a particular source. For example, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have observed that people often reason about love metaphorically as a journey. In a previous post I discussed some experimental evidence supporting the claim that activating a particular metaphor over another may be consequential for reasoning by encouraging certain outcomes over others (for an excellent review of this literature, see Thibodeau et al. (2017)). For a cultural sociologist, these findings may well be interesting but may seem somewhat esoteric. In this post, I make the case that analogical mapping (this term is used interchangeably with “conceptual metaphor”) is an inherently cultural phenomenon relevant for cultural analysis.

Analogical mapping is cultural in at least two senses. First, analogical mapping is cultural because knowledge of sources is learned. While many sources may be universal or near-universal because they are learned through universal experiences, others may be more idiosyncratic. For example, in this clip from Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, sardine fisherman Tim Lockwood tries to comfort his young son with a fishing metaphor, with poor results.

The uneven distribution of source domain knowledge opens important questions for cultural analysis. For example, how do analogical mappings from rare or privileged sources affect the formation, perpetuation, or dissolution of interpersonal ties? Does analogical mapping sometimes facilitate group solidarity and boundary-making? In the sitcom Brooklyn 99, for example, the police captain Raymond Holt becomes familiar with the sitcom Sex and the City in order to quickly win the trust of a certain aficionado of the series. When meeting this person, Holt casually discloses, “I’m such a Samantha,” conveying a wealth of information about himself to his interlocutor and instantly creating rapport. In such cases, metaphorical usage may convey worlds of meaning because the chosen source domain suggests certain background experiences.

via GIPHY

Cultural analysts might also investigate if/how the uneven distribution of source domain knowledge contributes to inequality. It is possible, for example, that there are certain metaphors whose meaning is clear among certain classes because of a shared familiarity with the source domain, but which might be obscure to those in other classes. If these metaphors are located at crucial points, they could be consequential for the meting out of rewards.

Second, analogical mapping is cultural because the mapping of a particular source to a particular target is learned, such that a person may be predisposed to a particular source-target mapping over another when a particular situation arises. These metaphorical predispositions can have far-reaching consequences. For example, Johnson (1987) argues that a medical revolution was brought about by changing the metaphor used for thinking about the body. The old metaphor, which he calls THE BODY IS A MACHINE, structured medical diagnosis and practice through its various entailments. If the body is a machine, then “the body consists of distinct, though interconnected parts… breakdowns occur at specific points or junctures in the mechanism… diagnosis requires that we locate these malfunctioning units” and “repair (treatment) may involve replacement, mending, alteration of parts, and so forth.” Johnson elaborates: “The key point in all of this is that the BODY AS MACHINE metaphor was not merely an isolated belief; rather, it was a massive experiential structuring that involved values, interests, goals, practices, and theorizing. What we see is that such metaphorical structurings of experience have very definite systematically related entailments” (p. 130).

The key cultural revolution in medical practice entailed developing a new metaphor, which Johnson calls THE BODY IS A HOMEOSTATIC ORGANISM. The medical researcher Hans Selye developed this new metaphor in response to the machine model’s inability to explain why different stressors triggered the same bodily reaction. Following the old model, symptoms were specific and traceable to particular breakdowns, and treatment entailed localized repairing of the faulty part(s). Within the HOMEOSTATIC metaphor, however, disease was understood as “not just suffering, but a fight to maintain the homeostatic balance of our tissues, despite damage” (p. 134). For more examples of shared mappings and their consequences, see Shore (1996) on foundational schemas.

Recognition of these two cultural dimensions of analogical mapping leads to an important theoretical observation: cultural variation can result from mapping universal building blocks (i.e. universally shared knowledge of sources) differentially to particular targets. There is a difference between not being able to understand a metaphor because you are not familiar with the source, and finding a novel metaphor surprising or unusual, but perfectly understandable. Much of what may count as cultural variation in conceptual thought may result from different mappings from the same universal stock of sources (i.e. image schemas), rather than differential mapping rooted in idiosyncratic, group-specific sources. It is an empirical question, but we need not assume that because people are using different sources, they are indecipherable to one another.

In sum, analogical mapping is not just a cognitive process; it is inescapably cultural. Source knowledge and source-target mappings are socially learned, and because of this, we have reason to believe that in at least some cases, analogical mapping is consequential for the organization of social life.

References

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford University Press.

Thibodeau, Paul H., Rose K. Hendricks, and Lera Boroditsky. 2017. “How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21(11):852–63.

Habits in a Dynamic(al) System

In this post I try to show that the theory of action implied in Swidler (2001) is an inherently dynamic theory that is unfortunately couched in terms of comparative statics. Here I unpack Swidler’s action theory by re-translating the relevant terms into the language of dynamical systems theory. I show that properly understood, the distinction between settledness and unsettledness and the description of the different associations between culture and action in those two states actually refer to the differences between social action that occurs within dynamic equilibria and that which occurs when equilibria are broken and there emerges a sharp transition between states.

A key problem in the theory of action concerns the issue of what are the conditions under which we should expect to observe behavioral stability versus those under which we should expect to observe change. Theories departing from a conceptualization of action as practice, tend to presume that there is a tendency towards stability in human action. To put it simply, the basic claim is that most persons tend to work very hard to bring a semblance of order and predictability to their lives. This is what Swidler has referred to as the tendency for persons to fall into settled lives.

While the notion of “settled lives” may bring to mind a tendency towards stasis and lack of change, actually the opposite is the case: persons must work very hard to sustain settledness; as such the attainment of a settled existence is an active accomplishment on the part of persons, who invest a lot of time and energy fighting against entropy-inducing environmental conditions pushing their lives towards unsettledness. In that respect, we may think of the observation that persons are able to (within limits) approach the idea of living a settled life as implying that on the whole, settledness emerges as a dynamic equilibrium or as an attractor state in social behavior.

Swidler notes that under a settled existence, persons are able to draw on their existing “toolkit” of behavioral routines and habits to get by. There is thus an implicit linkage between action and motivation here, a linkage that deserves to be made explicit. We can begin by proposing that persons are motivated to choose those states that allow them to maximize performance given their already existing capacities. People avoid those environments and situations that call for skills that are different from those they already possess and which would thus bring unsettledness to their lives. This active avoidance of environments in which there is a mismatch between existing competences and called-for performances and the active seeking of environments calling for competences that persons already possess, lead to forms of positive feedback increasing the deployment of these same behavioral dispositions in the future.

These forms of positive feedback between persons, situations, and competences are very common. A paradigmatic situation is that which obtains between the fluency and effectiveness of a given skill and the frequency with which that skill is “practiced”: by regularly deploying a given set of competences and skills, persons get better at them, which means they are more likely to deploy them in the future. Conversely, skills that stop being called upon, fall into disrepair and, subsequently, into disuse. Another source of positive feedback is the relationship between current skills and those potentially novel skills not yet acquired. In honing in their existing set of skills, persons miss the opportunity to acquire new ones (this is the standard notion of opportunity costs as applied to skill acquisition). Thus, the more persons enact their competences, the more likely they are to stick to those competences and the less likely they are to abandon those competences in order to acquire new ones.

The existence of positive feedback between use and refinement of dispositions, however, may result in the creation of conditions in which alternative “settled lives” exist for the same set of dispositions. If this is the case, it is possible that gradual changes in external conditions, especially changes that make it harder for persons to deploy their existing competences, may move them closer to a critical regime shift towards “unsettledness” in which the resolution of these unstable unsettled states is achieved not by returning to the old settled life but by moving to a radically different (but also settled) existence.

In the standard approach to action theory, thinking of social action as being governed by habit is usually thought to constitute a sufficient explanation for behavioral stability. The implication is that a theory of action that claims that most action is habitual is ill-equipped to explain sudden or radical transformations in behavior, thought and action. This leads analysts to suppose that habit-based theories of action need to be supplemented with some other way of conceptualizing action (e.g. a “non-habitual,” reflexive, or purposive addendum to the habit-based theory) if we are to explain radical behavioral change.

This stance is misguided. Instead, I would argue that a habit-based theory of action, implies a conceptualization of stable action as (relatively) temporary equilibria or attractors in a dynamical system. This means that it is precisely because action is by its very nature habitual, that the opportunity for radical qualitative transformations exists. These transformations are the result of regime-shifts and stand as evidence that the same set of incorporated habits can be the drivers of action in qualitatively distinct action regimes.

Thus, “conversions” do not necessarily imply retooling; that is distinct behavioral regimes and sudden transitions from one to the other are, as a rule, premised on continuity of the underlying habitual dispositions and competences. When looked at in terms of the switch from one regime of action to another, this phenomenon can be mistaken for a gradual “transposition” of schemes, so that there is continuity in change. Instead, what has happened is a global reorganization of behavior around the same set of underlying capacities productive of action.

References

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.