Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory

Overview
Mary Douglas assembles essays that probe how cultures shape perceptions of danger, fault, and accountability. Rather than treating risk as a technical calculation, the collection foregrounds social meanings, showing that what counts as hazardous or blameworthy depends on shared classifications and institutional arrangements. The essays trace patterns by which communities convert misfortune into moral judgment and convert uncertainty into social order.
The argument positions risk and blame as instruments of social organization. Hazards and harms become intelligible through symbolic systems that allocate responsibility, reinforce boundaries, and reproduce hierarchies. The result is a sustained critique of assuming risks are purely objective problems awaiting technical fixes.

Core Concepts
Central to the analysis are cultural grids and groupings that structure perception and conduct. "Grid" captures the degree of constraint and rule-governed roles, while "group" describes the strength of collective boundaries and loyalties; together these dimensions predict how a social formation will label events as risky or assign blame. These conceptual tools link everyday moral intuitions to institutional logics.
Purity, pollution, and classification recur as motifs. Drawing on earlier work about disorder and matter out of place, the essays treat contamination metaphors as a widespread vocabulary for dealing with uncertainty. Such metaphors shape policies, rituals, and rhetoric, turning statistical probabilities into moral narratives.

Risk as Cultural Classification
Riskful phenomena are not merely physical possibilities but cultural categories that command attention selectively. Whether attention is paid to technological hazards, environmental contamination, or behavioral dangers depends on what a society values and fears. Risk perception is thus a mirror of social priorities and anxieties rather than an impartial index of danger.
The essays show how different institutional arrangements produce distinct risk agendas. Bureaucratic systems emphasize calculable, controllable risks compatible with hierarchy. Market-oriented settings foreground consumer choice and individual responsibility. Alternative solidarities prioritize collective harms and systemic inequalities. Each configuration channels public concern into particular kinds of responses.

Blame and Responsibility
Assigning blame is a social operation that sustains moral boundaries and social order. Blame identifies a causal and moral target and thereby defines acceptable behavior going forward. Who is blamed, an individual, a category of people, an institution, or fate, reveals underlying cultural templates for authority, trust, and culpability.
The essays investigate how blame is strategically deployed to manage uncertainty, preserve reputations, or shore up legitimacy. Scapegoating can deflect systemic critique, while procedural accountability can legitimate institutional power. Douglas emphasizes that attributions of blame are less about discovering truth than about maintaining social coherence.

Method and Evidence
Evidence combines ethnographic sensitivity with comparative analysis and historical examples. Close readings of institutional rhetoric, public inquiries, and ritual responses illuminate how categories are mobilized in concrete settings. Attention to language and symbolic practice complements an interest in policy consequences and material outcomes.
Rather than privileging quantitative risk assessment, the methodology treats narratives, classifications, and institutional norms as primary data. This inductive stance links micro-level meaning-making to macro-level patterns, showing how everyday categorizations scale up into public policy and collective memory.

Implications and Legacy
The collection challenges technocratic approaches to risk management by insisting that cultural frames cannot be neutralized by better data alone. Effective responses require attention to the social logics that shape perceptions and incentives. Reforms that ignore cultural patterns risk producing perverse consequences, including misplaced blame and ineffective remedies.
Long-term influence lies in reorienting debates toward the cultural politics of uncertainty. The essays supply tools for diagnosing why different communities respond so differently to the same dangers and for anticipating how institutions will allocate fault. The result is a durable framework for understanding the moral architecture behind policy disputes, scandal, and public controversy.