1

Wayward Puritans: A study in the sociology of deviance

• Deviance isn’t a property inherent in any behavior, it’s conferred upon a behavior.

• Why does a community assign this behavior to the deviance category?– Deviance exists to define boundaries. – Deviants ‘patrol’ these borders, and policing agents monitor the deviants.– Statutes are often informal, if ever articulated.– “Morality and immorality meet at the public scaffold…”– Expectations constrain and also shape behavior. – Both variety and similarity are products of the same society: it’s a division of

labor.

• “The deviant and the conformist, then, are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination” (p. 21)

• Boundaries are never fixed, and as borders ‘expand’ new forms of deviance and conformity need to be defined.

– These definitions occur in public formal ceremonies. – There are few rites of passage that denote leaving a deviant status, and some of

those are equally suspect.

2

The Puritans

• Part of the US mythic heritage. • The Puritans emerged in the English battle for theocratic power

between the Catholic Church (pomp & circumstance, connection to deity via intermediaries) and the Church of England (less pomp, more informal connection).

• Saw only one way to the true word, they knew it, and needed therefore to go where they could just be their own austere, humorless, intolerant selves.

• When they left England, they uprooted themselves from the known world of social control – away from familiar norms and values.

• ‘Reality originated in the imagination of Gd’ (but there was no more revelation): so it would be even harder to know what is.

3

Puritan Paradoxes

Identifying causes of deviance-definitions may mean looking for cultural paradoxes.

• Puritans were both austere as medievalists, and rejecting of pomp as the newer forms.

• Were both prideful and of a sort of low spiritual self-esteem. Had the only ‘way’ and yet very worried about sin.

• Doubt their own perception but be darn sure about their fundamental precepts. .– “if a persuasive argument should jar a Puritan’s certitude…he had every

right to suspect devilish mischief”

Their challenge was to bring it all together. But these beginnings also set the foundation for the American

paradoxical identity of individualism and suspicion of differences.

4

Law and Order

• They had no clear legal code.• Magistrates (clergy) settled legal disputes.• Non-magistrates (business and shareholders) wanted

stable definitions: more than a power play but a core understanding of the Puritan experience.

• Codifying a law revealed the inner inconsistencies.

– One of the surest ways to confirm an identify for communities as well as individuals is to find some way of measuring what one is not.

– And so, we had the ‘crime waves’ of New England.

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Antinomianism - The crisis of “Hutchinsonism”

• Individualism versus conformity to established leadership hierarchy.– Who had authority to determine ‘true conversion’ and ‘state of grace’?– They needed to create their society, they weren’t English anymore, but what

were they? Who could define if they were a community of saints in the howling wilderness, or individual entrepreneurs in the pursuit of spirituality?

– The followers pushed too many buttons though, and provoked censure.– Plus, Mrs. Hutchinson was a woman. – But the theological case against her was largely political (another American

tradition):• How do you do the right thing if you know it’s not what the authority tells you is right,

and if enough reject this authority, then you need a new authority, or a new social/political structure.

• Or, if rejection and individualism earns sainthood, how can the same things earn the opposite? (Covenant of grace was an individual experience, but it was seen through conformist behavior).

– Logic doesn’t work in these kinds of crime waves.– In the end, Mrs. H. provoked the magistrates so much that they had no room to

move except to censure her.

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The Quaker Crisis

• The Quakers came in and challenged the Puritans by minor differences. Hats, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, their own style of ‘meetings’. Also, they were missionizing, although it’s not clear to what.

• These differences were enough to provoke fear and then violent outrage. • Quakers asked for ‘subjective’ freedom, and tolerance. • The Quakers symbolized change and leaving behind the past and it freaked

out the Puritan colonists (after all, the Puritans came to be themselves, and so did the Quakers).

• “…they indicate very clearly how small tokens and insignia can come to mean a great deal when a community begins to label its deviant members.” (p.127).

• In the end, the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ reference changed for the Puritans. It wasn’t Us vs ‘England’ it was ‘Us, whatever we are’ against ‘Other Americans, whoever they are’.

• (p.128) seeking “inner reliance” can turn into seeking ‘inner possession”

7

All hell breaks loose: The Witches of Salem

• Occurred in a time of political uncertainty … future of the colony and its rule was at stake, and the certainty of earlier years was now eroded by societal change and relative diversity.

• Their ‘city on the hill’ in the howling wilderness was replaced by a city in civilization with everyone else, and so the best enemies were those of their imagination.

• With their moral universe and its definition preoccupying their minds, the appearance of evil spirits flew out of their nightmarish concerns.

• Thus…– Girls acting weird (collective hysteria)– Beyond medical understanding so it must be of religious cause (what would it be

now?)– Black slave from the Caribbean with voodoo roots?– Girls got power from the reactions, and were rewarded for it. – Got out of hand, accused so many that finally, the evidence had to be evaluated

by those still standing, and the evidence was found to be faulty, and that was that.

– No one who confessed was executed.

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Cultural Wars: Symbolic Crusades

• Conflict Theory – Status Conflicts– Class = socioeconomic– Prestige – value, having more cultural worth and being able to

define what is valuable– Often has economic power, but not necessarily.– So when threats to status occur, there are reactions– Status politics – hostility to others, ultra-dogmatism, extremist

attacks on democratic process. (more common in growth)– Class politics – arguing about allocation and access to

resources (more common in recession)– When values become challenged, then the dominant class may

lash out by deviantizing the challengers, and do so by symbolizing their fears in something the challengers does, says, or professes.

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Symbolic Crusades

• Gusfield’s argument is useful in many contexts.– Immigration in late 1800s and early 1900s introduced many eastern

european and mediterranean peoples, who tended to be Catholic (or Jewish) and were more liberal with drinking.

– This influx of labor occurred also during the emancipation, and also during a solidification of the ‘old middle class’ around temperance, which was seen as a symbol of prestige. Eventually, because these movements go extreme, became Prohibition. (see the note on status politics previous slide). However, Prohibition, Abolition and Nativism were all part of the Republican Party ideas in the earlier 1800s.

– And Alcohol is a socially controlled substance, with problematic properties (addictive, drunkenness) and thus an ideal symbol for deviance.

– With Temperance movement, US sought to redefine itself as a moral Christian climate. (even though both teetotalling and heavy drinking behavior is more common in Protestant groups than in Catholics).

– Lyman Beecher ‘activist preacher’ stated that upper classes needed to impose moral restraint on themselves, and on the lower classes as well.

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Symbolic Crusades

• But values have economic links…(Rumbarger’s Power, Politics and Prohibition)

• Remember we also have the movement from farming to industrialization (and from beer to coffee).

• Industrialists wanted to control Labor. • Disgruntled labor sat in saloons and schemed unionization, hence

the anti-saloon movement espoused by industrialists. (“misery is caused by strong drink, strikes and communism.”) Henry Ford wanted workers to dream the American dream as he dreamed it.

• Industry had few safeguards for workers, so focusing on the drinking problem was a way to avoid focusing on the high rate of death and injury in the workplace.