Depth of Shallow Culture by Albert J. Bergesen

Author:Albert J. Bergesen [Bergesen, Albert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594512742
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2007-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Mixing Model

To understand the essence of the Western model of making monsters, we can begin with a simple question: Why is a monster so frightening? Without thinking too much about it, it would seem that there is something about monsters that is dangerous or frightening. But this only begs the question, What makes something dangerous, or induces fright? For example, a wolf can be frightening, as can, under some circumstances, a man, but the combination of the two, a “wolfman” or “werewolf,” seems more frightening than the portion of fright contributed by either wolf or man. But why? Where do the added degrees of fright come from that are above and beyond the sum of their partial fright components? There are any number of possible explanations, but let me introduce some ideas from Durkheim on the distinctly social origin of ideas of deviance, danger, scariness, and fright.

There is a calm security that arises from a clearly defined and more or less well-ordered social universe. (Anthony Giddens [1990] calls this the sense of ontological security.) This derives from the classic sociological notion that individuals inhabit a social world that involves both forms of physical association—social groups—and socially constructed universes of meaning—culture, broadly conceived. This symbolic universe of received knowledge is categorically divided into various taxonomies of things and states of being. Whether we call it our “habitus” (Bourdieu 1984), “sacred canopy” (Berger 1969), “socially constructed reality” (Berger and Luckmann 1966), “definition of the situation” (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Mills 1940; Goffman 1959), or system of “primitive classification” (Durkheim and Mauss 1963), it refers to the cultural construction of a universe of types of beings and their psychological dispositions, a universe within which humans meaningfully act and interpret the world. It is within such a symbolic universe that human life is experienced as normal and legitimate, and as such stable and secure.

But when that categorical order changes, when definitions of creatures vary from the norm, when there is a mixing of categories that violates the socially agreed upon definition of the world with things in their place, then a sense of unease, danger, fright, and anomic terror has been hypothesized to arise (Durkheim 1933; Douglas 1970). If, following this reasoning, there appear types of creatures that violate standard categories, they would constitute a breakdown of, or challenge to, the received category system and, as such, generate anomic feelings of danger and fright.

For example, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) takes the simple idea of “dirt” to unveil how a sense of danger is generated by the larger cultural system of cosmological classification. Following her logic provides us with some ideas as to why certain creatures and not others are considered monsters. The core idea goes back to Durkheim (1933), whose argument about the moral status of being a criminal or deviant is applicable to the status of being a monster. He reasoned, “We must not say that an action shocks the common conscience because it is criminal, but rather that it is

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