The Nature of Deference and Demeanor

of modern society have learned to look for the symbolic meaning of any given social practice and for the contribution of the practice to the integrity and solidarity of the group that employs it. However, in directing their attention away from the individual to the group, these students seem to have neglected a theme that is presented in Durkheim's chapter on the soul (1954: 240-272). There he suggests that the individual's personality can be seen as one apportionment of the collective mana, and that (as he implies in later chapters) the rites performed to representations of the social collectivity will sometimes be performed to the individual himself. 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 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