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2 Psychological foundations and mechanisms of reproduction

2 Psychological foundations and mechanisms of reproduction

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their worth that is sometimes called ‘(high) self-esteem.’ Praise and other signs of

respect and admiration will generate feelings of pride. Experiences that tend to

undermine self-esteem —being treated with contempt, shunned, ridiculed, reviled

—are commonly accompanied by feelings of shame. Expectations that people

will respond either with ridicule or contempt are attached to various ways of

acting, and the feelings of shame that are generated by these responses are often

felt by people when they are acting in this way, even though no one is present to

witness them. They may even experience the feeling of shame from no more than

contemplating action of a sort they know will be greeted with contempt.

Contempt is not the only form of rejection that people may experience. The

feeling that one has done something that if discovered would earn the reproach,

hostility or anger of others is known as guilt (self-reproach). Anger normally

involves the desire to see its object suffer in some way that goes beyond being

made to feel small or ridiculous. Hostility will likewise give rise to efforts to

inflict suffering, if only in order to drive the object of this attitude away.

Reproach, rebuke and blame serve to warn people that their actions are tending

to elicit hostility or anger, that they deserve (or are close to deserving) being

made to suffer for their conduct. Guilt, like shame, may be felt by people whose

misdeeds are not known to other people.

Individuals who are in this way sensitive to other people’s attitudes toward

conduct, whose anticipations of either contempt or reproach bring about

conformity, are said to have internalized those attitudes. A sign that people treat

a custom as having validity is that they have internalized the attitudes of reproach

and contempt and feel either guilt or shame. Otherwise, their anticipations of

rebuke or ridicule from others will elicit indifference, resentful fear, or defiance.

Blame and guilt (or self-reproach) are, according to Williams (see Section 1.1)

the characteristic reactions of the morality system—the responses to failures to

fulfill one’s obligations. One aspect of the ethical life that the morality system

tends to overlook is the importance of contempt and shame —responses to

failures to live up to expectations. Weber (1978:31) held that customs had

validity or legitimacy to the extent that people accepted them as obligatory

(verbindlich) or exemplary (vorbildlich). To accept something as obligatory is to

believe that one is bound or tied by that thing. To accept something as exemplary

is to treat it as something one should try to approximate, imitate or emulate.

Someone whose efforts to follow what is exemplary are pathetic will be held in

contempt; people who hold themselves to higher than minimal standards—who

want to excel—may feel shame even when no one else is inclined to hold them in


The ethical life, moreover, is by no means entirely a matter of living so as to

avoid the external sanctions of contempt and reproach and the internal sanctions

of shame and guilt. Exemplars offer people something to live up to and afford

them both the satisfaction of achievement and the means of assessing their

efforts. Obligations may bind, but they also indicate to people, who want, more


often than not, to do their part and give what is due from them. Thus the

vocabulary of duty interlocks with and reinforces that of obligation.

There is a positive side to internalizing a climate of attitude that needs to be

stressed. The central Sanskrit ethical term, dharma, which in many contexts is

translated ‘duty’, has no corresponding etymology that suggests something is

‘owed.’ The root verb, dh , means to hold on to or to carry, and the noun may

be applied to anything concrete or abstract that is capable of being carried—but

not necessarily in the sense of a burden. One may carry a thing for guidance, for

comfort, for reassurance. Another meaning of dharma is doctrine or teaching,

what one is given by a teacher to be held on to. In Buddhism, the Buddha’s

teaching, the dharma, affords a refuge—the Sanskrit root of the word for

‘refuge’ suggests a source of help, preservation or a safe place in which to reside

(Saddhatissa 1970: 35, 42–3). A concrete morality is more often a source of

comfort and guidance than an imposition or a burden—something that is held on

to by people as much as it holds them.

How individuals acquire a sense of the climate of attitude around them is not

as easy to understand as one might at first expect. People do from time to time

openly express their approval and disapproval either directly to individuals

behaving in the manner in question or indirectly to third parties by way of

commentary, and people learn about the prevailing climate of attitude from

seeing how others are regarded as well as from experiencing the approval and

disapproval of others. But this appears not to happen often enough to account for

the full complexity of the sense that people have of this climate—just as direct

and indirect correction of children’s speech patterns, although common, is hardly

enough to account for their evident mastery of the grammatical complexities of

their native language or dialect.

A great deal of the mastery of the climate of attitude in one’s social

environment must rely on assuming that what people are observed to do meets

with general approval, just as what they are heard to say conforms to how they

regard it as proper to speak. How individuals internalize knowledge of the

principles of the climate of attitude around them, as distinct from internalizing

the attitudes themselves, is an aspect of a general problem encountered

elsewhere, that of understanding how people extract general concepts, rules or

principles from their experience of particulars.

The two, internalization of knowledge and internalization of attitude,

however, do not commonly occur separately; if a person knows a climate of

attitude but does not share it, it is because the attitudes of others conflict with

attitudes which that person acquired from somewhere else. This happens, for

example, when young people who have been brought up in a distinct subculture,

say of immigrants or religious dissenters, are exposed to the wider culture around


Since climates of attitude are shared forms of habitual or customary response

and hence are aspects of a culture or subculture (Section 1.2), the process by

which attitudes are recognized and internalized is an aspect of the phenomenon


known as cultural reproduction. Cultures change over time, some radically, some

hardly at all, but where there are similarities in the cultures of a biologically

continuous population at different times, a transmission from the older to the

younger generation is assumed to have taken place. The population has

reproduced itself culturally as well as biologically.

Apart from pointing again to the fact that human beings have a strong

tendency to acquire the habits of behavior and attitude of those around them, not

much can be said to clarify the process of cultural reproduction, except to point

out some of the less obvious features of the cultural environment that embody

the principles that younger members of a population must internalize for cultural

reproduction to take place. We have already noted some of the obvious features:

expressions of approval and disapproval directed at individuals or at third parties

in the course of casual conversation or gossip. Students of social phenomena also

stress the extent to which information about cultural attitudes is found encoded in

rituals and in oral and written narratives such as myths. A Sri Lankan scholar

offers this personal testimony to the importance of both of these: ‘We

participated in Buddhist rituals and ceremonies…and listened to many, many

Buddhist stories. That is how we learned to be Buddhists’ (Obeyesekere 1991:x).

Myths and other narratives often identify certain characters who are worthy of

admiration and imitation, while other characters represent traits that are

disapproved of or condemned. Where the guidance embodied in a story is this

obvious, it constitutes an extension of the phenomenon of gossiping about third

parties, an extension that is less constrained by reality and hence more readily

admits elements of the magical and fantastic. A character held up to Hindus as the

ideal of womanhood is Sita, the wife of Rama:

From earliest childhood, a Hindu has heard Sita’s legend recounted on any

number of sacral and secular occasions; seen the central episodes enacted

in folk plays like the Ram Lila; heard her qualities extolled in devotional

songs; and absorbed the ideal feminine identity she incorporates through

the many everyday metaphors and similes that are associated with her

name. Thus, ‘She is as pure as Sita’ denotes chastity in a woman, and ‘She

is a second Sita,’ the appreciation of a woman’s uncomplaining selfsacrifice. If, as Jerome Bruner remarks, ‘In the mythologically instructed

community there is a corpus of images and models that provide the pattern

to which the individual may aspire, a range of metaphoric identity,’ then

this range, in the case of a Hindu woman, is condensed in one model. And

she is Sita.

(Kakar 1978:64)2

Sita endures not only an ordeal by fire to prove her innocence and purity

following a kidnapping episode but also repeated bouts of mistrust and jealousy

from a husband who, although a god-like hero, is prone to take gossip seriously

and to conform readily ‘both to his parents’ wishes and to social opinion. These


expectations, too, an Indian girl incorporates gradually into her inner world’

(ibid.: 66).

Myths, however, do not always encode information in a straightforward way.

Folklore gathered from around the world, as well as from ancient traditions,

commonly tells stories of gratuitous violence and brutality (not infrequently

involving rape and sodomy, incest and the cannibalism of close relatives), where

any apparent ‘moral to the story’ is not likely to strike members of our culture as

particularly edifying. But, as Robert Darnton explains, comparative folklorists

‘do not expect to find direct social comment or metaphysical allegories so much

as a tone of discourse or a cultural style, which communicates a particular ethos

and a world view’ (1985:23).3

Darnton applies his own knowledge of French social history to the folklore

collected from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and offers some

generalizations about the ‘characteristics, overarching themes, and pervasive

elements of style and tone’ (26) of French folk tales, whose ‘elements stand out

as distinctly as the garlic and mustard in a French salad dressing’ (24).

Without preaching or drawing morals, French folktales demonstrate that

the world is harsh and dangerous… They show that generosity, honesty,

and courage win rewards. But they do not inspire much confidence in the

effectiveness of loving enemies and turning the other cheek. Instead, they

demonstrate that laudable as it may be to share your bread with beggars,

you cannot trust everyone you meet along the road.


As no discernible morality governs the world in general, good behavior

does not determine success in the village or on the road, at least not in the

French tales, where cunning takes the place of the pietism in the German.


The trickster heroes stand out against a negative ideal, the numbskull. In

the English tales, Simple Simon provides a good deal of innocent

amusement. In the German Hans Dumm is a likeable lout, who comes out

on top by good-natured bumbling and help from magic auxiliaries. The

French tales show no sympathy for village idiots or for stupidity in any

form, including that of the wolves and ogres who fail to eat their victims on

the spot.


Drawing conclusions about a climate of attitude from a body of narratives that

represents a culture is sometimes a far from straightforward matter.

This is perhaps even more true of ritual or ceremonial practices. Many

activities that humans engage in (alone or together) involve significant portions

that are structured sequentially in advance like a narrative. (In stories, one thing


is told after another, even when the episodes are not told in the same order they

have in the plot; in ritualized ceremonies, the actions of some individuals take

place simultaneously, but there is a recognized place in a sequential order for

each constituent action.) The function of ritual, according to one student of

religious practices, is ‘first and fore-most, a mode of paying attention… A ritual

object or action becomes sacred by having attention focused on it in a highly

marked way.’4

Donald Swearer offers an important type of Buddhist ritual, consecrating an

image of the Buddha, as an illustration of this claim. The all-night ceremonies in

northern Thailand that Swearer studied not only serve to concentrate attention on

a material object, thereby effecting its transition to a living representation of the

historical figure who serves as the supreme moral exemplar in this culture, but

also offer an occasion to rehearse important narratives as the image is instructed

(‘trained’) in the life of the person it is to represent. ‘Coincidentally, of course,

the assembled congregants have also been “trained”’ (Swearer 1995:275). In the

course of the ceremony, some participants rehearse roles they are expected to

perform every day in rural Thai society. Monks ‘renowned for their attainment

of extraordinary power associated with trance states’ are invited to meditate (274);

‘sweetened rice is cooked in the early morning hours over a wood fire stirred by

young, prepubescent girls and then divided into forty-nine bowls symbolizing the

seven days the Buddha spent at each of seven sites after his enlightenment’ (275–


The attitudes embodied in venerating a man who achieved perfect detachment

from the world provide a striking contrast to the exemplars of ruthless cunning

that Darnton finds in French folklore. Whereas ‘good behavior does not

determine success in the village or on the road, at least not in the French tales,’ a

significant portion of the narratives recited in the consecration ceremony are

devoted to the Buddha’s defeat of the forces of M ra, who, in the text Swearer

translates, confront the Buddha in a ‘procession eighty-five miles in length and

breadth and sixty-three miles in height’:

Then by their magical powers M ra’s army assumed awesome forms that





Northern Thai customs thus offer (280) an illustration from a different, albeit

Therav dan, Buddhist culture to that of Obeyesekere’s testimony above, to the

‘immediacy, concreteness and ethical saliency’ that ritual and story give to ‘the

abstractions of Buddhist doctrine.’

But where aspects of a climate of attitude may be gleaned from literary and

ritual traditions that highlight and focus attention on ideals and exemplars, as

well as from observing explicit expressions of approval and disapproval, there


are aspects of such climates that are conveyed in other fashions. Laughter

accompanies some of the mechanisms of cultural reproduction across the whole

spectrum from explicit to implicit. Derisive laughter and ridicule are direct ways

of expressing disapproval; jokes and humorous anecdotes are part of folklore

that embody a range of attitudes toward actual and potential ways of behaving.

Ribald humor (and forms that are sometimes labeled ‘sick’) serve to both

communicate attitudes and vent anxieties.

Some matters, ‘taboo subjects,’5 are shrouded in silence—either never openly

discussed or spoken of with evident discomfort or embarrassment. This too

communicates an attitude; it may indeed focus attention, particularly on matters

that people otherwise have reason not to overlook, in a way that is every bit as

powerful as ritual. It is important to appreciate how attitudes toward something

are shaped when the matter cannot be discussed in ‘polite society,’ is greeted

with embarrassment within the family circle and is the subject of ‘off-color’

jokes within circles of gender peers. One effect is to sustain interest in matters

that (although not everyone may realize it) serve to encode symbolically

anxieties or obsessions.

Apart from intensifying anxieties and obsessions, another likely consequence

is confusion. An illustration of how a code of silence can foster false

assumptions about what attitudes actually constitute a prevailing climate appears

in Kristen Luker’s discussion of why the US Supreme Court decision legalizing

abortion (Roe vs Wade 1973) came as a shock to many Catholics, who had

regarded abortion as abhorrent. They assumed that everyone felt about abortion

as they did:

In particular, they interpreted the relative social invisibility of abortion

prior to the 1960s as proof that their opinion was the common one. And in

a way, their assumption was plausible. If people didn’t talk about abortion

very much (or talked about it only in hushed tones in back rooms), wasn’t

that because most people believed it was the taking of an innocent life,

hence morally repugnant? What these early pro-life activists did not

understand was that for many people abortion was ‘unspeakable’ not

because it represented the death of a child but because it represented

‘getting caught’ in the consequences of sexuality. Sex, not abortion, was

what people didn’t talk about.

(Luker 1984:128–9)

To point out the consequences of a climate in which there is disapproval of

talking about something is not necessarily to approve of speaking openly. There

are also consequences of discussing matters openly, not all of which may be

salutary. The important point here is that information about what a climate of

attitude is may be contained in a variety of forms, ranging from explicit to implicit.

The latter, however, entail risks of misunderstanding as well as the failure to


reproduce a climate of attitude, because one set of attitudes may under the cover

of silence simply replace another without anyone noticing.


Manners and morals

Etiquette, diet and fashion as moral phenomena

We have approached the notion of a concrete morality, what people live by

rather than norms and ideals to which they merely pay lip service, via a version

of Weber’s notion of ‘convention’—a version that leaves the notion of validity to

one side and focuses on ‘causally efficacious climates of attitudes of approval

and disapproval.’ A quick survey of what counts as a climate of attitude will

reveal instances that people might hesitate to count as having anything to do with

morality, particularly if they are accustomed to thinking within the framework

provided by the ‘morality system’ (see Section 1.1). These instances fall into the

categories of fashion (ways of dressing), etiquette (ways of interacting with

people), diet (what is eaten), taste (what one enjoys), and even ways of speaking

and writing.

There are groups of people where a preoccupation with fashion leads to

approval or condemnation of certain ways of dressing, and as a consequence of

these attitudes being recognized, some ways of dressing are reinforced and

others discouraged. The same applies to the observance of some social rituals,

for example those associated with dining. Poor table manners are frowned on,

and the effect is to discourage some forms of behavior and reinforce others.

Neither of these phenomena seems to fit comfortably under the notion of a

‘concrete morality.’ It is not that people do not live, or at least allow their

conduct to be influenced, by these attitudes; it is rather that such matters do not

appear to fall within the sphere of what is thought of as ‘moral concerns.’

What people eat as well as how they eat is subject to climates of attitude that

encourage individuals to eat or be seen eating what is known to be approved,

attitudes that often last longer than mere fashion. That something is not eaten—

even where there is a palpable climate of disgust at the thought of eating such a

thing—may be nothing more than a cultural prejudice. Westerners recoil at

reports that people in the Far East eat dog meat. The British find the thought of

eating horse meat distasteful, and the attitude is one more difference that

separates them culturally from the French, who raise horses for meat. At the

same time, we recognize that some dietary taboos (pig meat for Jews and

Muslims) unquestionably belong to their concrete moralities.

If we accept that a concrete morality may include food taboos, a little

reflection will reveal that how one dresses is not entirely outside the sphere of

what we regard as morality. Breaking the custom of keeping certain parts of the

body covered in public will result not only in very severe disapproval but also

likely interference from those charged with ‘maintaining public decency.’

Questions of where a hemline should fall or how much cleavage to display


provoke from time to time conflicts with evident moral overtones. There are

societies with notions of decency in dress more restrictive than ours (e.g. for

women in many Islamic countries); others have been far less restrictive (e.g. the

tolerance of male nudity when exercising in ancient Greece, which scandalized

neighboring peoples—see Plato’s Republic: 452c). These customs (both

conventions and laws in Weber’s sense) clearly fall under that part of a culture

that constitutes its concrete morality.

Not knowing which fork to use may not be a moral failing, but manners at the

table and elsewhere are ways of expressing consideration (or lack of it) for other

people present. Someone whose lack of consideration for others manifests itself

in extreme ill manners may come under what is clearly a species of moral

condemnation. In some societies, notably those with a strong Confucian tradition,

a great deal of social interaction is structured by ritual forms (governing etiquette,

dress and a great deal more), forms that are treated with such respect that not to

observe them is regarded as a serious moral failing. Confucians treat as morals

what strike others as matters of mere etiquette. Strict Muslims insist that women

keep their heads (and in some countries their faces) covered and allow a man up

to four wives; North Atlantic societies forbid polygamy and regard head

coverings as strictly a matter of fashion. Hindus regard the cow as sacred and

will not injure it, let alone eat it; Americans treat ground beef as a commodity to

be marketed around the world with something close to missionary zeal.

If concern with dress, diet and etiquette appeared initially to be distinct from

moral concerns, further thought has revealed that they sometimes overlap, even

in our own culture. What marks the difference? What is it that distinguishes a

moral from a non-moral attitude? When does a concern with something count as

a moral concern? It may well be that nothing useful can be said in response to

these questions. Max Weber was of the opinion that sociology could not

generalize about this matter:

From a sociological point of view an ‘ethical’ standard is one to which men

attribute a certain type of value and which by virtue of this belief, they

treat as a valid norm governing their action. … Whether a belief in the

validity of an order as such, which is current in a social group, is to be

regarded as belonging to the realm of ‘ethics’ or is a mere convention or a

mere legal norm, cannot, for sociological purposes, be decided in general

terms. It must be treated as relative to the conception of what values are

treated as ‘ethical’ in the social group in question. What these are is, in the

relevant respect, not subject to generalization.


Weber seems to assume that even if he cannot say in advance what it is that

constitutes a value as ‘ethical,’ he can nevertheless recognize one when he

encounters it. Can we say nothing in general about the type of value that gives


validity to a custom of dress or diet, even if what is accorded this value varies

from culture to culture?

The reluctance of a Western gentile to partake of a plate of stir-fried dog meat

and that of an observant Jew faced with a plate of stir-fried pig meat clearly do

not have the same significance. The first is the product of a distaste that arises

from unfamiliarity and differs little from the distaste that children commonly

have for unfamiliar food. It has nothing one might be tempted to call ‘validity’;

there is no sense in which eating the dog meat would be a mistake. The second

reluctance persists, even if the plate seems appetizing, as it would be a mistake

for an observant Jew to partake. The observant Jew accords a validity to this

reluctance that is tied to Jewish cultural identity and is underwritten by what is

believed to be the will of God.

It is possible to make mistakes about fashion and etiquette—advice can be

sought and experts relied upon for guidance—but the validity of the advice

extends no further than the fact that this is what people will accept or reject,

approve or condemn. People may follow the customs because this way of

dressing is ‘in fashion’ or this way of behaving is ‘good manners,’ but they are

‘in fashion’ or ‘good manners’ for no other reason than that people follow them.

By contrast, the Confucian’s attention to ritual detail in matters of dress and

conduct is underwritten by authoritative texts set down long ago by individuals

who are believed to have been exceptionally wise. The validity that raises a

convention to the level of the ethical life seems to need a source beyond the mere

thought that ‘this is what people around me expect.’ At the very least, there has

to be some possible reason for assigning importance to doing what people around

one expect. This may arise from no more than an inability to think outside the

framework constituted by what is expected of one—a failure in effect to grasp or

apply the concept of a mere fashion or mere matter of etiquette. But it commonly

involves the thought that the reason for conforming lies in a source—nature, God,

exceptionally wise human beings—that cannot be challenged.

There are thus, embedded in various cultural traditions, answers, both implicit

and explicit, to the question, ‘what basis is there for approving or condemning

the conduct of other people?’ In the next chapter, we will survey and catalogue

some of these answers, but something farther needs to be said in this section

about the type of value that gives ethical validity to a custom. Even where one

might reject the basis of their practice offered by participants in a concrete

morality, because one conceives nature differently or does not accept the

religious faith invoked or rejects the authority of the founders of its tradition, one

can nevertheless recognize the function performed by the climate of attitudes

that constitutes it as a concrete morality. For certain customs structure a society

in ways that, if taken away, threaten to leave its members feeling lost, disoriented

and unable to find their way around their social environment.6

An individual’s social environment is structured by the attitudes and

expectations of other people—individuals who do not recognize and render what

is due from them as ‘their part’ in the constitution of that environment are


marginalized and find themselves subjected to discomforts ranging from neglect

to physical abuse. Here we find concrete instances of the abstract obligations to

which the ‘morality system’ (see Section 1.1) reduces the ethical life. But we

also find the sources of people’s goals and aspirations, their sense of what it is

for them or others to do well or badly, as well as the well-springs of their

admiration and contempt for various individuals around them.

Accepting the expectations that tie one into a social network gives an

individual a place in the social environment and allows other people to identify

who a person is. Shared sets of expectations of this kind constitute the social roles

that shape interactions between individuals who stand in lifelong relations (male

to female, parent to child, sibling to sibling), or in transitory relations (buyer and

seller, team-mates, fellow jurors) as well as relations that may vary in length

(superior and inferior, business partners, friends). Roles are key components of

the structure of the social environment, and each is circumscribed by behavior

that is customary for that role.

Females may not only have to dress and conduct themselves in certain ways to

distinguish them from males but they may also be expected to use distinctive

forms of speech, or be assigned a different diet. Social class, status or caste is

also marked by forms of speech, diet, dress and etiquette—the caste system in

India is sustained by a bewildering complexity of all of these kinds of custom. If

how one speaks and what one eats or wears does not set one above or below others,

it can still set one apart—as does the diet and head covering of the observant Jew

and the speech and dress of the Amish—and serve to mark one’s identity as a

member of a subculture.

The intensity with which people insist on a custom being observed is a

measure of the centrality of the distinctions and relations that these serve to mark.

A woman who is offered no way of assessing herself as a woman except by the

size of her feet will ensure the place of her daughter in society by restricting the

development of the girl’s feet. A person who measures social standing by some

possession or privilege may display intense hostility toward any move that might

result in the loss of these and the resulting shame associated with loss of

standing. People who rely on one another to perform some service or to keep a

trust will be critical of those on whom they feel they cannot rely to perform in

the required roles, whether the roles be permanently assigned or temporarily

adopted. The more that is at stake, the more likely it is that the pattern of

behavior assigned to a role will qualify as part of the concrete morality of a

group of people. How much is at stake in the observance of any custom varies

from society to society.



Law and morality

Rough music and rough handling

Recall that for Weber customs that count as ‘conventions’ are regarded as

possessing ‘validity’ and are reinforced by expressions of approval (for keeping

them) and disapproval (for breaking them). Expressions of disapproval may

involve spontaneous violence. In the south of India until the mid-nineteenth

century, untouchables (men and women alike) were forbidden to wear clothes

above the waist, and well into this century an untouchable man risked a beating

for wearing a jacket (O’Malley 1932: 149). Unless the enforcement of these

customs rests in the hands of some recognized group of people, however, these

are still in Weber’s terms matters of convention rather than law. All over India,

on the other hand, there are caste councils that see to the enforcement of customs

within castes and that may penalize or excommunicate offenders (ibid.: chapter

II; Hutton 1963: chapter VI), and this qualifies a caste’s own customs as law in

Weber’s sense. But these councils are largely autonomous, and if members of

one caste (Rajputs) spontaneously (even if violently) prevent members of

another caste (Chamars) doing what their own (Chamar) customs do not forbid,

but which the former see as their privilege (wearing gold ornaments; ibid.: 85–

6), the privilege is not a matter of law in Weber’s terms.

Even an informal power structure that organizes or carries out measures, either

violent or non-violent, to enforce a custom is enough to qualify the custom in

Weber’s terms as a ‘law’ (Recht). Until the nineteenth century in European

societies, neighbors took it upon themselves to enforce domestic peace on

households where disharmony reached the point that quarrels came to public

notice. In colonial New England, ‘Quarreling couples were subject to gossip, and,

when this did not bring peace to the household, they were visited with ritual

shaming in the form of the charivari, which in the Anglo-American world was

known variously as “rough music,” “shivaree,” or “skimmingtons”’ (Gillis 1996:

142). It was not uncommon for village elders to arrange for ‘rough music’—a

parade in front of the offending household, including beating on pans and

blowing horns, effigies and crude parodies—and leave it to the young people to

carry it out (Gillis 1985:76–81). Behavioral expectations enforced by groups

whose recognized role is to authorize and orchestrate sanctions, whether of

shame or violence, count as matters of law in Weber’s sense.7

The unfamiliarity of the notion of ‘law’ that appears here was noted in

Section 2.1, as well as the special connection of the German word that it

translates to the application of coercion. To count as law in Weber’s sense, there

do not have to be written statutes or ways of settling disputes based on recorded

precedent or even much in the way of recognized forms of procedure. There have

been and still are societies without written laws but which nevertheless had

recognized authorities to whom individuals or households could appeal if their

neighbors were treating them badly or encroaching on what they regarded as

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