Leadership Quote by Mary Douglas

Enclaves sell themselves as refuge, but Douglas is interested in the social bill that comes due once the door closes. “Very tense” is almost understated: the pressure isn’t just external danger, it’s the claustrophobia of sameness enforced. In Douglas’s world, groups don’t become harmonious by agreeing on a boundary; they become obsessive about policing it, because identity has to be continually performed and defended.

The line about electing a leader is the knife twist. Leadership is supposed to resolve conflict, yet Douglas suggests it can’t touch the real problem: factions aren’t a glitch in enclave life, they’re its operating system. The very act of choosing a leader formalizes differences, makes camps legible, and gives dissent a target. Even “democratic” procedure becomes a stage where internal purity tests play out.

The subtext is classic Douglas: classification creates anxiety. When people define themselves by what they are not, any internal ambiguity feels like contamination. Factions are then not mere ideological disagreements but rival systems of order, competing ways to declare who belongs. The “threat of splitting off” reads less like melodrama than structural inevitability: schism is the enclave’s release valve, a way to restore coherence by shrinking the circle.

Contextually, this fits Douglas’s broader anthropology of risk and group boundaries: tight, high-commitment communities generate solidarity, but they also generate surveillance, moralization, and hair-trigger conflict. The quote works because it punctures a comforting fantasy: safety through separation doesn’t end politics; it concentrates it.