The Nature of Deference and Demeanor

Abstract

In this paper I want to explore some of the senses in which the person in our urban secular world is allotted a kind of sacredness that is displayed and confirmed by symbolic acts. An attempt will be made to build a conceptual scaffold by stretching and twisting some common anthropological terms. This will be used to support two concepts which I think are central to this area, deference and demeanor. Through these reformulations I will try to show that a version of Durkheim's social psychology can be effective in modern dress. Data for the paper are drawn chiefly from a brief observational study of Maryland mental patients in a modern research hospital.' I use these data on the assumption that a logical place to learn about personal proprieties is among persons who have been locked up for spectacularly failing to maintain them. Their infractions of propriety occur in the confines of a ward, but the rules broken are quite general ones, leading us outward from the ward to a general study of our Anglo-American society.