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Deviance and Transgression
Université de Paris 8
Thinking Behind the Course
This is an outline of a course given at the Université de Versailles St. Quentin, for third-year sociology students. There are thirteen lectures, coupled with 13 seminars. You will find indications of the readings used in class ; for copyright reasons, they are not available at this site, but publication details and page numbers are given. Most extracts are from scholarly texts or are written by qualified anthropologists and sociologists, but a few of them are journalistic or fictions.
This course arose out of my growing dissatisfaction with the way deviance is usually treated, and out of my strengthening belief that sociologists will need to come to terms with the insights and accounts provided by anthropology. A criminology which, although it claims Durkheim as one of its ancestors, confines its interests to crime in modern industrialized societies is going to miss much that is of interest.
In the course, I concentrate on four areas :
First, after having looked at the wide variations in behaviours that may be considered 'deviant' in one society or another, I look at what has been, by some anthropologists, identified as the most fundamental of all social rules : the incest taboo. In three lessons, we will look at the various theories of incest, at the way people react to transgressions in this domain, and finally, at the return of incest as a central theme in modern discourse on wrong-doing.
Next, I turn to the question of violence : first we look at a form of violence, which often escapes notice - infanticide. Then we see that in those societies lacking a political centre, violence is an everyday occurrence, and males are expected to defend their interests through personal aggression - we also see that this form of dispute settlement persists in certain social strata today. Finally, we look at the case of the Serial Killer, and come to see that what is important in the shaping of modern discourse on crime is not simply the violence of the criminal, and the danger he represents, but, as the term Moral Panic implies, the reactions that arise in the society within which he commits his transgressions.
In the third place, I look at property and theft : first I put forward one hypothesis about the origins of property, and of the relationship between owner and others, arising out of the observation of the behaviour of the great apes. This approach is confronted with Chris Knight's account of the 'own-kill' rule, which he sees as lying at the centre of sociability, and with Mauss's idea of 'the Gift' and the necessity of reciprocity. From the primatological and anthropological material, we move on to consider how the concept of property evolved under early capitalism, with a particular regard for the gradual distinction in English law between Tort and Crime, and with a look at the struggles over land and hunting rights in the 18th Century.
The last three lessons are devoted to a look at the crime of witchcraft. First we look at some of the evidence, which indicates that a belief in witchcraft is so widespread in human societies as to be virtually universal. We then turn to look at the Great Witch Hunt in Europe during the 16/17th Centuries, and note two opposing visions - there are those historians who believe that faint echoes of the realities of popular culture can be heard in the accusations that were levelled against witches, and there are those who believe that we hear from the oppressed nothing but the account that was placed in their mouths by their inquisitors. Finally, we look back over the semester's work, and ask how the ideas surrounding witchcraft may help us clarify our conceptions of crime and transgression.
Lesson one - Introduction
Text 1 : The Savage Male
Text
2 : Nayar Marriage
Text 3 : Nuer Cattle
Raiding
Text 4 : Azande Witchcraft
This lesson is intended to provide an overview of the problems that we will encounter during this course. In the first place, we will need to clarify why sociologists need to study crime and transgression. The answer is, broadly, that we see this as a pathway into a more general understanding of the ways in which societies work. As Alvin Gouldner, in his introduction to Taylor, Walton and Young's path-breaking 'The New Criminology ; For a social theory of deviance', put it :
Here, then, the proper study of criminology is made thoroughly clear ; it is the critical understanding if both the larger society and of the broadest social theory ; it is not simply the study of some marginal, exotic or esoteric group, be they criminals or criminologists. This study, of what at first seems to be a limited field, is, in point of fact, the occasion for the exhibition of the broadest sociological and philosophical concerns ... what matters is not crime and deviance studies but the larger critical theory on which these must rest.(1)
In this first approach, we will look at four texts, which demonstrate the variety of ways in which different social groups define deviance. We shall read :
1. An extract from from Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches ; the Riddles of Culture by Marvin Harris, Hutchinson, 1975. It is found in the Chapter entitled 'The Savage Male', where you will pay particular attention to pages 66 and 67. Harris uses the work of two ethnographers - Napoleon Chagnon, and Judith Shapiro - to describe what Chagnon has characterized as the 'fierce people'. In particular, in these pages, Harris concentrates on relationships between husbands and wives, in which males typically use high levels of violence to control the women. Wife beating and even wife-killing are considered normal and even commendable male behaviours, which draw no negative sanctions from the wider society
2. We will read a passage from E. KATHLEEN GOUGH, "The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage," (Journal of the Royal Anthropological lnstitute, Vol. 89 (1959), pp. 23-34.) Ms. Gough offers us a picture of the marital practices of the Nayar, a people living on the Malabar Coast. A girl may be married at the age of 7 or 8, to a man with whom she will *not* cohabit. She is expected to remain in the paternal home and to receive a number of lovers. These men would pay her for her services, and one or the other of them would be expected to recognize any child that she bore, and offer gifts. Subsequently, however, the father has no duty to provide for his child. The text suggests, then, that our own way of arranging sexual and procreational matters is by no means the only one, and that practices that would be strongly disapproved of in our society may seem to be perfectly normal and good in another.
3. We will read an extract from E.
Evans Pritchard, The Nuer ; A description of the modes of
livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people,
OUP, 1940, which will be found on pages 125-9. The Nuer is a
Sudanese ethnic group, whose lives revolve around cattle. In this
passage, Evans-Pritchard describes their relationships with the
Dinka, a neighbouring people, whom the Nuer despise and exploit.
In particular, they will, at regular intervals, go out and steal
their cattle. This is not looked upon as in any way reprehensible
- on the contrary, Nuer mythology offers a full justification for
the practice, as God had given the Nuer the duty of taking the
Dinka's cattle from them 'until the end of time', as punishment
for their treachery.
This text suggests that definitions of
property, and hence of theft, may differ considerably from one
society to another, and that behaviour which, in one social
context, will be taken as worthy of praise, may, in another, lead
to a jail sentence.
4. Finally, we will read another text by Evans-Pritchard, this time drawn from his book, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, (abridged edition, OUP, 1976), and to be found on pages 18-23. In this extract, the anthropologist shows how, seen from the point of view of the Azande, another Sudanese people, a belief in the existence of witches appears perfectly logical and necessary. The Azande, like many other peoples, regard as the most serious of crimes a behaviour which most of us do not believe exists.
Lesson Two : The Incest Taboo I
Text 1 : Chris Knight on
Levi-Strauss
Text 2 : Malinowski's
functionalist approach
Text 3 : Leakey &
Lewin on incest avoidance in animals and man
Text
4 : The Kurnai and the impossibility of marriage
We will now spend three lessons looking at one a form of transgression, which has been held by many anthropologists to be deviant in all societies. In this first lesson, we shall examine some of the theoretical discussion of this question. In particular, we shall be interested in whether the incest taboo really is universal, and if it is so, how this can be explained.
1. One of the texts that we shall look at is an extract from Chris Knight's 'Blood Relations ; Menstruation and the Origins of Culture', Yale University Press, 1991. Knight's fascinating book, which is a Marxist retort to sociobiology, returns to the concern with social and cultural evolution which was at the centre of 19th century anthropology. On pages 74-7, Knight sets out the theory of incest of the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, according to whom, the 'invention' of the incest rule lies at the heart of social life, for it forces family groups into relationships of exchange - a man who wants to find himself a wife must get one from another group than his own, and the best way to do this is by swapping his own sister for someone else's.
2. A second text is from Bronislaw Malinowski's 'Sex and Repression in Savage Society', London, 1927. For Malinowski, the incest taboo is a functional device, which makes family life and socialization possible. If a son were to have sexual relations with his mother, he argues, then the necessary relations of authority and distance would not be maintained between them, and the relationship between father and son would also be put under considerable strain. The interdiction of incest permits children to be inducted into adulthood by their parents with a minimum of friction.
3. The third text is from 'Origins ; The emergence and evolution of our species and its possible future', by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, MacDonald and Co., 1977, pages 213-6. Here we learn that incest avoidance can be found even among animals ; among species such as red deer, this occurs through mechanisms of which the animals themselves may not be at all conscious, but among our closer relatives, it appears possible that there is conscious aversion to having sexual relations with blood relations. This may be caused by the long intimate contact between siblings during childhood, which appears to dampen sexual desire in human beings, and may also do so in chimpanzee society. We avoid marrying out brothers or our sisters because we know them too well.
4. The fourth text turns from the realm of high theory to examine how the incest taboo actually works out in practice. In the case that we look at here, the actual social behaviours that surround the taboo are surprising and unexpected in their consequences. The extract from Ruth Benedict's 'Patterns of Culture', RKP, 1935, pages 24-6, reports on the kinship system of the Kurnai, of eastern Australia. Rules about marriage are so strict and so extensive is the taboo that most young men are unable to find a marriage partner who is not forbidden to them. The only way to resolve the difficulty is for marriage to take place by elopement ; all marriages, therefore, begin by breaking the taboo and risking death. Rules, it may appear, are made to be broken.
Lesson 3 : Incest II
Text 1 : Malinowski - a case of
ritual suicide
Text 2 : Turnbull's Forest
People punish an incestuous youth
Text 3 :
Sharon Hutchinson on a brother/sister marriage among the Nuer
Text 4 : Spencer & Gillen's account of
how the incestuous can be a useful resource
We have already seen, in Ruth Benedict's description of Kurnai marriage, that we cannot predict the social effects of a legal rule simply by examining the rule itself. Nor can we be sure as to how it will be applied. In the texts to be examined in this lesson, we will look further into this question.
1. We will look at another text by Malinowski - this time, ethnographic rather than theoretical. In this extract from 'Crime and Custom in Savage Society', London, 1926, the anthropologist describes an occasion when a young man was driven to suicide when it was discovered that he was having an affair with a young woman who was forbidden to him by the rules of incest. We shall be particularly interested in why, exactly, the man felt that he had no choice but to kill himself, and what incident it was that precipitated the act. You may also wish to consult 'Fighting Back is not the Way', by Dorothy A. Counts, in which another case of suicide is analysed and may be compared to Malinowski's account.
2. We will also be reading an extract from Colin Turnbull's 'The Forest People'. While living among the M'Buti, Turnbull was witness to an event which is very similar to that reported by Malinowski ; again, a young man is punished for his relationship with a forbidden female. However, on this occasion, the outcome was very different from what happened among the Melanesians. Once again, we will be interested in how the rule is applied, and in the relationship between discourse and action.
3. Our third text is from 'Nuer Dilemmas ; Coping with Money, War and the State', by Sharon E. Hutchinson, University of California Press, 1996. Hutchinson, who had gone to the Sudan to follow up on Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer, records how the strains of modernization and of entry into a wider political order have lead the Nuer to question their traditional beliefs and customs ; in particular, the incest taboo has been subjected to intense questioning. In the extract to be read, Hutchinson recounts how the Nuer courts reacted when a case of full brother-sister incest was brought to their attention. Once again, we will note how the law is treated as a resource, rather than as a set of absolute rules.
4. The last text we will present here is from one of the classics of anthropology. It is taken from Spencer, Baldwin, and Frank Gillen, 'The Arunta, A Study of Stone Age People', Two Vols., Macmillan and Co, London, 1927. In this extract, we follow the fortunes of a vengeance party, a group of men who have walked some hundred miles across the desert in order to avenge the deaths of some of their friends whom, they believe, have been killed by magic. They come across the camp of the members of a tribe whom they think are responsible for the murders ; the old men in the camp agree to allow them to take the lives of three of their number. We will see that witchcraft and incest are linked in a way that makes scapegoating possible.
Lesson 4 : Incest III
Text 1 : La Fontaine on the age
at which children are abused.
Text 2 :
Renvoize on the identity of the abuser.
Text 3
: Loftus & Ketcham on the repression and recovery of memories
of abuse.
Text 4 : Loftus casts doubt on
the accuracy of recovered memories.
In this last lesson on incest, we turn to look at large-scale industrialized societies such as our own. It has been suggested - see Robin Fox, 'The Red Lamp of Incest : An Enquiry into the Origins of Mind and Society' - that modern societies have less and less need for strict laws on incest. However, recent events have shown that the question of incest has not disappeared, and social workers and police officers, as well as various pressure groups, have seen incest as one of the fundamental social problems of our time - although it is more likely to called Child Sexual Abuse (CSA).
1. The first text is from ‘Child Sexual Abuse', by Jean La Fontaine, Polity Press, 1990. Until recently, most people have believed that incest took place between men and their adolescent daughters or between teenaged brothers and sisters. La Fontaine argues that the evidence shows that children are being sexually molested when they are very young indeed, and that the molestation may last for a very long time. One problem, says the author, is that many of the victims suppress the memory of these incidents, and only recall what was happening to them much later. This is a question, which we shall need to examine further.
2. We will also look at an extract from ‘Innocence Destroyed : a study of child sexual abuse', by Jean Renvoize, Routledge, 1993. In this extract, Renvoize examines the identity of the typical child abuser. Most children who are abused are not the victims of strangers, but of members of their own immediate entourage. In the majority of cases, the abusers are men, and are either the child's own father or - and many victims are in father-absent homes - the companion of the mother. Total strangers are rarely the perpetrators of CSA.
3. As we have seen, a number of alleged victims suppress the memory of their abuse, and only recall later, in adulthood, what happened to them. In an extract from ‘The Myth of Repressed Memory", by Elizabeth Loftus & Katherine Ketcham, we learn that some therapists claim that about half of the victims of CSA do not recall what happened to them, and that these repressed memories are believed to be behind many cases of mental illness. It is believed that victims need to bring these memories to light, to work on them with their therapist, in order to be able to go on to lead normal healthy lives.
4. However, Loftus is extremely sceptical about these arguments. In a second text, published in the Scientific American, September 1997, vol 277, p75., she suggests that many of these memories are in fact artefacts of the therapeutic process itself. They are, in fact, she claims, false memories. Loftus, who is a psychologist who specializes in the way human memory works, believes that many of the cases, in which alleged victims may spend years and large amounts of money on therapy, or start legal proceedings against those they believe to have abused them, the facts upon which the accusations are based are fabrications.
Lesson 5 : Violence I (Infanticide)
Text 1 : Daly & Wilson on
infanticide among the Ayoreo.
Text 2 : Text
on female infanticide in India - to be found by students.
Text
3 : Cohen on strategies of birth and population limitation in
different societies.
Text 4 : Boswell on
child abandonment in early Modern Europe. (Yves
Labbé's talk on this text is here)
All societies appear to offer parents some means of limiting the number of births. In our own societies, many of these means have been criminalized at one time or another - many people still regard any form of contraception as sinful, and by no means everyone is willing to countenance abortion. Even more shocking to our minds is the act of infanticide. And yet, as we shall see, in some societies, infanticide is simply a private matter, and a mother who kills her new-born baby may do so without fear of punishment. Under what circumstances does this particular form of violence appear to be a normal behaviour?
1. The first text we will look at, from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's 'Homicide', Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1988, (pages 37-9), gives an account of infanticide among the Ayoreo, a South-American people, who have frequent recourse to this means of population control. We will see that the mothers who kill their babies give rational explanations for their decisions, and do not take them lightly. In another extract from Daly and Wilson (Table 3.1, p. 48) we will have a look at the circumstances in which infanticide is likely to occur.
2. The second text
will be a recent article or articles from the Indian Press, taken
from the WWW in the weeks preceding the course. Finding this
article and presenting it to the class will be a task for a group
of students following the course. A good place to start your
search is here..
In some parts of India, there is a very high rate of female
infanticide, and the ratio between the sexes is unbalanced as a
direct result. The ratio has become even more uneven of late, as
prenatal sex-determination has enabled couples to seek abortions
on discovering that the expected child is female. Students will be
asked to find what explanations are given in the Indian press, and
to critically analyse these explanations.
3. The third text is extracted from Mark Nathan Cohen's 'Health and the Rise of Civilization', Yale University Press, 1989 (pages 198-200). It deals with the various measures that have been taken, historically, and are being taken to limit births. Infanticide and abortion are considered, along with other methods, in both hunter-gatherer societies and modern Europe and America. We will see that the killing of either young children or of the foetus has been a widespread practice, often affecting a large proportion of all conceptions.
4. The fourth text, taken from John Boswell's 'The Kindness of Strangers : the Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance', Penguin, London, 1988, looks at early modern European practices which enabled parents to get rid of unwanted children without killing them. We remember that Rousseau had five children, all of whom he abandoned on infancy, an action that, although he came to regret it in later years, seemed perfectly natural to him at the time. The question then arises of how it came about that, in our own times we look upon such behaviour as morally repugnant.
Lesson 6 : Violence 2 - Interpersonal Aggression
Text 1 : Evans-Pritchard on the
reasons for interpersonal violence among the Nuer.
Text
2 : Evans-Pritchard on how the Nuer deal with the assassin.
Text 3 : Humphries on violence among
working-class adolescents in the U.K.
Text 4
: Buford on the pleasures of violence.
Interpersonal violence, particularly between males, is quite common in many, if not most, cultures. In those societies in which a powerful central authority is lacking, disputes are often settled through violence. As Daly and Wilson put it (op.cit., p. 221), in such societies, "Victims of injustice had to rely upon what legal scholars refer to as 'self-help'; if aggrieved parties did not take the initiative in redressing their grievances, nobody else would'. In this lesson, we look closely at how this kind of violence arises, and how it is regulated.
1. The first text is, once again, taken from Evans-Pritchard's ethnographic account of the Nuer. From it we learn under what circumstances a Nuer male is expected to fight - Evans-Pritchard also looks at how the young boys are socialized into violence. He also shows how such conflicts are rule-bound, with levels of violence being modulated according to the relationships between the warring parties.
2. In yet another extract from 'The Nuer', we will discover what occurs when a murder has been committed. Even a society that has as little formal organization as the Nuer recognizes the need to have some mechanism whereby disputes can be settled, and which can put an end to bloodshed. In this case, the 'leopard-skin chiefs', as Evans-Pritchard calls them (the label is unsatisfactory, for these men have nothing of the authority that we would normally expect of a chief) will attempt to break the chain of homicide, and to persuade the different groups to settle the argument peacefully.
3. The third text is taken from "Hooligans or Rebels ; An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth", by Stephen Humphries, (Blackwell, 1995, pages 188-93), and offers a series of vignettes of working-class life in Britain at the beginning of this century. It is interesting to compare these with the material on the Nuer. At this time, police presence in the working-class districts of the big cities was light, and battles over territory, or other disputes, were fairly frequent. Once again, however, it is clear that these battles were regulated and controlled, and that the violence of the young males was only tolerated up to a certain degree.
4. The fourth text is an extract from Bill Buford's 'Among the Thugs', Secker and Warburg, 1991. Buford, an American, decided to find out what made football hooligans tick ; he spent a lot of time hanging around with the young men whose weekends were given over to violence on the terraces, following the crowd of England supporters to Turin, where he was beaten up by an Italian policeman, and drinking large amounts of beer with Manchester United fans. He also took part in the violence himself, and in this text he attempts to describe the feelings that this violence aroused in him, and explain why it is that people seek it out.
Lesson 7 : Violence III - the Serial Killer
Text 1 : Anne Rule offers the
portrait of the typical serial killer.
Text 2
: Philip Jenkins casts a critical eye on the statistics concerning
serial murder.
Text 3 : John Clarke looks
at the way the serial killer has been presented in popular
fiction.
Text 4 : Goode & Nachman
present Cohen's classic case of a Moral Panic.
Text
5 : Extract from film or book to be chosen by students
Transgression, as we have seen, takes place in a social context. Understanding crime involves understanding the relationship between the criminal on the one hand, and those social agencies, which are charged with processing crime, on the other. Since the publication of Stanley Cohen's "Folk Devils and Moral Panics ; the Creation of the Mods and Rockers", sociologists of crime and deviance have had an interest in how institutions such as the press, the police, the courts and the legislature may amplify deviance in their own interests. Cohen showed how a few scuffles at a seaside town over Easter weekend in 1964 were depicted by the press as a major confrontation between two clearly identified groups - the Mods and the Rockers - and how this image then looped back on itself, to provide a series of increasingly large-scale staged confrontations, in which the ultimate victims were not so much the innocent holiday-makers or shopkeepers, but the lost youth who found themselves hauled up before the magistrates to be made an example of. A more recent - and perhaps more sinister - moral panic has been the attention shown to the serial killer, and that is the question we shall address today.
1. The first text is taken from Ann Rule's 'The Stranger Beside Me', Warner, 1989. The book is an account of the life of one of the best-known of 'serial killers', Ted Bundy, whom Rule had known before his activities became known. The passage we are to read is a letter that the author wrote to Bundy when he was in jail awaiting execution. By this time, Rule had, because of her popular writings on murder, come to be seen as an expert on these matters, and had worked with VICAP. In the letter, she sets out the typical profile of the serial murderer as constructed by the FBI and the press. We shall see in class that almost all of her defining characteristics can be challenged.
2. The second text is taken from Philip Jenkins' 'Using Murder : The social construction of Serial Homicide', Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1994. In this set of extracts, Jenkins looks at the way the statistics on serial murder were constructed in such a way as to inflate the danger, and offers some suggestion as to why this should have occurred. He particularly notes the role played by the FBI and by its Behaviour Science Unit.
3. The third text is an extract from 'Crime and Social Order : Interrogating the Detective Story', by John Clarke in 'The Problem of Crime', John Muncie and Eugene McLaughlin (eds), Sage, London, 1996 (pages 82-4). Clarke looks at the serial killer as he has been depicted in crime fiction. (A more extended treatment, concentrating on Thomas Harris's 'The Silence of the Lambs', will be found in my own essay on The Serial Killer). Clarke sees this kind of story as inverting the traditional structure of the detective story.
4. This is a summary of Cohen's study, cited earlier. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (Moral Panics ; The Social Construction of Deviance', Blackwell, 1994, pages 24-9) present the different actors in the construction of the Mods and Rockers saga : the Press, the public, law enforcement agencies, politicians and legislators, action groups or 'moral entrepreneurs' as Howard Becker calls them, and the Folk Devils themselves. We will want to see how well this model fits the reaction to the serial killer that we have looked at in the other texts.
5. A student or group of students will be expected to present their analysis of a novel or film centred upon the serial killer. You may wish to look at the novels of Patricia Cornwall, Thomas Harris or Sherman Alexie's 'Indian Killer', or discuss 'The Silence of the Lambs', 'Seven', the British TV programme 'Prime Suspect', or any other material that you can find.
Lesson 8 : Property I
Text 1 : de Waals on food-sharing
among the social apes.
Text 2 : de Waals on
how food-sharing may be used to gain and maintain dominance.
Text
3 : Knight looks at the mythology surrounding the
own-kill rule in Australia.
Text 4 : Knight
considers how the own-kill rule is carried out in practice.
All societies have rules governing the distribution of scarce goods, and determining who has the right to enjoy them or dispose of them. It may be, however, that the idea of property as a social category develops out of the act of giving, out of sharing with others, rather than with the act of taking something to be one's own. During this lesson, we shall look first at the evidence from primate societies - as we shall see, there is no unanimity over this amongst anthropologists and primatologists, and the picture which emerges of altruistic behaviour among primates is ambiguous. So we then go to look at how property is controlled and distributed in hunter-gatherer groups ; in particular we look at Chris Knight's investigation of what he calls the 'Own Kill Rule', which, he claims, prevents the hunter from himself consuming the animals which he has slaughtered.
1. Taken from Frans de Waal's "Good Natured ;The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals", Harvard University Press, 1996. de Waal, a primatologist, claims that whereas chimpanzees appear to be incapable of sharing vegetable food, such as bananas, over which they will fight each other mercilessly, they will share meat amongst themselves. This, he suggests, is because the hunt is normally organized collectively, so that even those who catch no prey have contributed to its success. If they were not to be rewarded, they would refuse to participate in the future.
2. A second extract from de Waal's book. In this, he looks at how food sharing may be used to further the political ambitions of one or another member of primate society. He examines the cases of two individual apes, one of whom maintained his dominance by sharing out meat according to a set of quite Machiavellian principles, the other who used his ability to obtain scarce resources to rise from a junior to a dominant position within the group hierarchy.
3 & 4. In these two texts, both from Chris Knight's 'Blood Relations' (op.cit.), we look at first the mythology, and then the practices of Australian peoples concerning the sharing of meat and the 'own-kill' rule. We see that the practice of allowing others to consume the animals brought down by the hunter is sanctioned both by the sacred texts, and by the everyday demands and reactions of his fellows. Knight sees this taboo as central to the development of social life, arising at first on the initiative of the women, and resisting as a social practice even once patriarchy had been fully established.
Lesson 9 : Property II - the Thief
Text 1 : Turnbull offers an
account of how the M'Buti dealt with a thief in their midst.
Text
2 : Geerz gives an example of a conflict over property rights
in colonial Morocco.
Text 3 : Mead
describes the careers of two delinquent girls in Samoa.
Text
4 : An account of how property rights were redefined in
colonial Australia.
If there are rules about the distribution of goods, then there will also be ways of enforcing those rules ; identifying and dealing with such infringements of property rights is one of the fundamental tasks of all political and judicial systems. Some anthropologists see any diversion of goods from the primary producer to others as a form of theft - they then distinguish between 'tolerated theft', which is understood as that part of his or her goods that an individual or group will allow others to appropriate without overt punitive or restitutive reaction, and non-tolerated theft. The key idea here is that the 'owner' perceives that the costs of defending his goods against certain persons, and up to a certain limit are too high to make it worth his while to do so. The hunter allows his neighbours and kinsmen to partake of his kill because they could make life difficult for him if he were not to do so, rather than because he feels any great degree of altruism. These interests are usually encoded in rules of social behaviour ; a person will be recognized and treated as a thief if it is worth the owner's while to pursue them and either recuperate his goods or dissuade them from continuing. Bearing this model in mind, let us look at some examples.
1. In another extract from 'The Forest People', Turnbull describes how the M'Buti dealt with a case in which one of their number consistently infringed against the rules of distribution. Compare this with what might happen to a similar character in our own society ; useful here would be some consideration of labelling theory as advanced in the works of Becker or Lemert. Note at what point negative sanctions were imposed upon the deviant, and whether the sanctions were purely punitive or if they did not have a reintegrative effect.
2. This passage is taken from Clifford Geertz's 'The Interpretation of Cultures : Selected Essays', Fontana, 1973 (pages 7-9). The extract we will read is taken directly from Geertz's field notes, written at a time when he was working in Morocco, and is the account of an event, which occurred in 1912. In this passage, we will need to trace the fortunes of a flock of sheep, as they pass from one set of hands to another, and to consider what the concept of 'ownership' might be in the circumstances described. You should also read Geertz's own comments on the affair through the rest of the essay from which it is extracted.
3. In 'Coming of Age in Samoa ; A Study of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies' (Penguin, 1975), Margaret Mead (pp. 141-7) describes the careers of two 'delinquent' girls, branded as thieves and liars, and gradually outcast from the everyday sociality of their peers.
4. When one society comes into contact with another, there are often conflicts over the rules of property distribution. Such conflict is particularly acute when one of the parties is far more powerful than the other. In this extract from an article published in the Townsville Herald in 1907 (reprinted in 'Dispossession : Black Australians and White Invaders', by Henry Reynolds, Allen & Unwin, 1989, pp. 56-8), one of the men who colonized Australia describes how the theft of meat by a group of Aborigines was punished by the white settlers.
Lesson 10 : Property and Theft III - Tort, Crime and the Huntsman
Text 1: One Law for the
Rich.
Text 2 : Tort and Crime.
Text
3 : The Bloody Code and the protection of property.
Text
4 : Saints and Roughnecks.
As societies become more complex, so the rules governing the distribution of goods become more problematic. Just as the Moroccan pastoralists found themselves confronted with the different and opposing interests and conceptions of property of the settler and the French administration, so the local communities within European society found themselves more and more likely to enter into conflict with those of broader-based and more powerful groups. Disputes were no longer settled by recourse to local institutions, but became the concern of the state : it is with the growth in power and influence of the centralized state that we see the development of the concept of 'crime'. In this lesson, we shall look at the way in which the modern state gradually implemented a distinction between private grievance, on the one hand, to be settled by recourse to the civil courts, and public wrong, or crime, on the other, which is held to be an offence not solely against the individual, but against the state itself.
1. Steven Box, in 'Power, Crime, and Mystification', (Routledge, 1983, pp 7-12) considers some of the ways in which the law is framed so that the ills committed by the poor and powerless are far more likely to be identified as crimes than are the ills - often far more devastating in their effects - of the rich and powerful.
2. Hester & Eglin ('A Sociology of Crime', Routledge, 1992, pp. 169-72) examine the distinction between 'crimes', which are dealt with by the criminal law, and 'torts', which are the province of the civil law. In the former, wrongs are looked upon as a public matter ; they are offences against society as a whole. In the latter, disputes are considered as being a purely private affair. But, argue the authors, the distinction is more a reflection of the interests of the powerful than one that is given in the nature of the wrongs themselves.
3. Douglas Hay (Property, Authority and the Criminal Law, in Albion's Fatal Tree : Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, by Hay, Linebaugh, Rule, Thompson & Winslow, Penguin, 1975, pp. 17-65) sees the evolution of the Criminal Law in England during the 18thC as following naturally from what he calls the 'deification of property'. In this extract, he illustrates his contention by examining three pieces of legislation passed in mid-century (pp. 20-22).
4. 'The Saints and the Roughnecks' by William J. Chambliss (Society, Vol. 11, No. 1, Nov/Dec, 1973, reprinted in 'Deviance : The Interactionist Perspective', Fourth Edition, Rubington & Weinberg (eds.), Macmillan, 1981) is an account of the activities of two groups of young males, one of which was made up of middle class youths, the other of lower-working class. Although both were involved in illicit or illegal activities, the social treatment of the two groups was very different, as were their ultimate careers.
Lesson 11 - Witchcraft I - Witchcraft in small-scale societies
Text 1 : Malinowski on
witchcraft in the Trobriand Islands.
Text 2
: Witchcraft among an Indian people.
Text 3
: Robin Fox on fear of witchcraft among the Pueblo.
Text
4 : The fairy/witch in early modern Sicily.
As we saw in our introductory lesson, in many societies the idea of witchcraft is taken very seriously indeed. All evils which befall a member of our social group, from a bad day's hunting to the death of a relative, may and often are explicated through witchcraft, and a person who feels that they have been wronged will do their utmost to ensure that the witch is revealed and punished. We have here a most interesting case for the sociologist, for we may see the most vigorous reaction to crime in a case where we know full well that the criminal cannot be guilty of the offence with which s/he is charged.
1. In the first text, Trobriand Witches from ‘The Sexual Life of Savages', Bronislaw Malinowski describes the image of the witch held by the Trobriand Islanders. It is instructive to compare this with the European picture of the typical witch.
2. David Gellner, in 'Witches in India' from 'Witchcraft among the Newar', describes the four contexts in which a member of this Indian people might expect to encounter a witch.
3. Robin Fox spent some time among the Pueblo Indians in the USA. In 'Fear of witches among the Pueblo', from 'Witches, Clans and Curing', he shows how witchcraft is an ever-present reality for these people, and that fear of the witch is one of the basic formative influences upon social behaviour. (You can see Adrien Caillotés commentary on this text here).
4. In The Sicilian Fairy Cult from The Ladies from Outside, by Gustav Henningsen (in 'Early Modern European Witchcraft : Centres and Peripheries', Ankarloo & Henningsen, eds., pp.191-218), we meet a more benign, although still ambiguous, image of the witch, uncovered by the Inquisition (without fatal consequences) in Sicily in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Lesson 12 : Witchcraft II - The Great Witch-hunt
Text 1 : Brian Levack on The
Size of the Witch-hunt
Text 2: Fighting
with witches - the Benandanti - a presentation of Ginzburg's
ideas.
Text 3 : Robert Muchembled
counter's Ginzburg in Myth and Persecution.
Text
4 : While in Witchcraft and popular culture, he
attempts a closer analysis.
The opening of the modern epoch in Europe was announced by what must now seem to be a moment of regression - the Great Witch-hunt of the 16th and 17th centuries. Men and - most especially - women, as well as children in many cases, were pursued by the church and by the magistrates of the civil power, accused of committing the most horrible crimes. It is clear today that those who were found guilty, of whom many were burned at the stake or hanged, cannot have done the things, which they were believed to have done. Yet historians today still argue over whether there was or was not, behind the accusations and the hysteria, a real secret sect, dating back to the world before Christianity, or not. And consequently, historians still argue over what the root causes of this episode were.
1. In this first text, taken from ‘The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe', by Brian P. Levack, (Longman, 1987), we survey the numbers of those who were accused of witchcraft, and who paid the penalty. Levack believes the figures have usually been exaggerated, and gives an estimate of some 100,000 prosecutions and around 60,000 executions - earlier estimates went as high as 9 million. Both prosecutions and executions were not spread evenly throughout Europe, but were particularly concentrated in France and Germany.
2. In the second text, Robert Rowland, (Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons, in Ankarloo & Henningsen, p. 161-190) sets out the case made by Carlo Ginzburg, pinned upon his discovery of a group of 'Benandanti', who would fly out at night to combat witches, that the tales told in the torture chambers of the witch hunters, centred on the idea of the nocturnal Sabbat, were at least partly based upon beliefs held by ordinary people themselves.
3. Robert Muchembled, however, believes that the whole idea of the Sabbat was foist upon the peasantry by the élite, and that the confessions extracted under torture were the products of the fantasies of powerful clerics and aristocrats, rather than any true reflection of popular witchcraft beliefs. (Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality, in Ankarloo & Henningsen, pp. 139-60)
4. This is not to say that the poor did not believe in witches - they certainly did. In a second extract, Muchembled shows how the elite version of the Sabbat did have some resonance with peasant ideas of the witch. However, he also shows how it was that the powerful used the idea of witchcraft in order to pursue and break practices of which they disapproved : night-time dances and the playing of music were to be seen with suspicion.
Lesson 13 : Conclusion - Witchcraft as central metaphor?
Text 1 :
Text
2 :
Text 3 :
Text
4 :
It has emerged over the weeks that for transgressions of the social rules or laws to have a full meaning involves the interaction of a variety of different agencies, groups and individuals. The criminal does not make the crime ; the rules themselves are not given in the nature of things, but arise out of a continual struggle between different groups and different interests. Their application at any one time depends upon a number of factors, not all of which are directly explicable in terms of the harm that the acts may cause to society at large. Moreover, the relationship between the harm itself, such as it is, and the person or persons who are held guilty cannot be immediately understood through an examination of their behaviour : the peasant woman accused of attending the Sabbat, and burned or hanged by the authorities for her trucking with the Devil manifestly could not be responsible for the evils of which she had been accused. In this final lesson, we will look back at the semester's work, and see whether the lessons we have learned from our study of witchcraft may not help us towards a wider theory of transgression.
4.
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1. Alvin Gouldner, in Taylor, Walton and Young, 'The New Criminology', RKP, London, 1973, p. x.
Thinking Behind the Course
Lessons :