tudor 2003 the sociological review

A (macro) sociology of fear?

Andrew Tudor

Abstract

A proper sociological approach to fear is of both empirical and theoretical signifi-cance in understanding late modern society. Normally fear has been explored psy-chologically, as one of the emotions, but recently a sociology of emotions has begunto emerge. Furthermore, there have also been attempts to examine fear macro-scopically, arguing for the existence of a distinctive culture of fear in contempo-rary societies. Furedis argument to this effect is explored here, suggesting the needfor a more systematic theorising of fear in its social contexts. Via an analysis of theelementary characteristics of fear, a model is constructed of the parameters of fear.This model serves as a guide to the classes of phenomena within which fear is con-stituted and negotiated. It is also used to further examine the virtues and failingsof culture of fear approaches to fearfulness in modern societies.

In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid.Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), fora total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people,making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by atleast one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraidof the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred andforty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped foundand build the company and now own and direct it.

Joseph Heller, Something Happened

How are we to understand fear? As Hellers ironic but pertinent observa-tions suggest, fearfulness in varying degrees is part of the very fabric of everyday social relations. Any sociology, therefore, must find ways of concep-tualising fear and examining its social causes and consequences. More thanthat, if we are to believe countless television, radio and newspaper discussionsof food scares, medical risks, security failings, urban disorder and looming envi-ronmental disasters, that need is pressing. Fearfulness appears to have becomea way of life in modern society. Many of us or so we are told are afraid togo out on the streets of our towns, at night certainly, but even during daylighthours as well. Yet staying at home carries its own threats: a whole industrymanufacturing alarms, locks and surveillance mechanisms has been foundedon our conviction that our homes are wide open to dangerous intruders. We

The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.

view strangers with suspicion and the future with trepidation. Our children areno longer allowed to walk to school, and the landscapes of fear that we paintfor them are populated not with trolls, wolves or wicked witches, but with pae-dophiles, satanic abusers, and generically untrustworthy adults. Of course,none of these fears may be merited. But they have become part of the commoncurrency of late modern society, and we do not have an adequate under-standing of their genesis, their character, or their consequences.

Nor is a better sociological grasp of fear simply an urgent empirical require-ment. The concept itself is central, though sometimes silently so, in several ofthe general themes that have marked modern social and political theory. Risk,for example, a pervasive topic in recent sociological thought, presupposes different senses of fearfulness in the various forms in which it has been theo-rised (Beck, 1992; Beck, 1995; Beck et al., 1994; Douglas, 1985; Douglas, 1992;Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Giddens, 1990). Similarly with the associatedconcept of trust, which has also gained prominence in recent theory, whetheras a constituent of appeals for a more communally oriented or communitar-ian mode of social life or as part and parcel of an analysis of civility (or thelack of it) in the modern state (Alexander, 1998; Carter, 1998; Etzioni, 1995;1997; Giddens, 1990; 1991; Luhmann, 1979; Misztal, 1996; Tam, 1998). Whererisk and trust have been much explored as societal phenomena, however, fearhas remained relatively untheorised.

In this paper I want to examine some of the conceptual problems that confront a sociological analysis of fear. I shall do so first by reflecting on an apparently simple situation of fearfulness, hoping to illustrate, no more, that even in its most elementary forms fear is embedded in a complexof physical, psychological, social and cultural relations. Then I shall move upthe scale of abstraction to examine two of the most common ways in whichfearfulness has actually been conceptualised: as emotion and as culture.Finally, in the light of those considerations, I shall explore some of the ana-lytical requirements of a more macroscopically-oriented sociology of fear andfearfulness.

Feeling frightened

Imagine that you are walking along a forest track, dense undergrowth oneither side, a thick silence emphasising the sound of your own footfalls.Suddenly, no more than thirty metres in front of you, a large gold and black striped cat emerges from the forest to halt on the path ahead. It is atiger. It stands looking intently towards you, its tail swaying slowly from sideto side. You freeze in mid-step. You experience the physical symptoms of fear: your heartbeat accelerates; your breathing turns shallow; your mouthgoes dry. Perhaps you break out in a cold sweat. Then, after that frozenmoment of shock, you turn and take flight back down the path from whenceyou came.


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Or do you? Although the flight or fight reaction to fear, pace Darwin, hasoften been seen as a natural or evolutionary response that we share withanimals, its realisation in concrete circumstances is profoundly conditioned bysituational factors. Perhaps you do not recognise the beast ahead of you as atiger, lacking the appropriate cognitive map to identify it as aggressive andcarnivorous. Nevertheless you might still be frightened. This is a large, unfa-miliar creature, the behaviour of which you may presume to be unpredictable.But it is at least conceivable that your cognitive apparatus will be such as toencourage you to approach the animal rather than flee from it, to indulgecuriosity rather than caution. Or perhaps you are a hunter, appropriatelyequipped for just this exigency. Your route down this particular forest trackwas chosen in the expectation of this meeting, for the big cat has been fol-lowing the path on a regular basis as part of a pattern of terrorising a localvillage. In a complex social exchange involving reciprocity and moral legiti-mation, you have been retained to eliminate the threat. Even then, you may still be experiencing some of those physical symptoms of fear, but theadrenalin associated with them is now channeled into the concentration of thehunter face-to-face with the hunted.

Or perhaps you are not alone. Although you are unarmed, you are incompany with those who are. Not hunters, say, but guides, engaged to facili-tate encounters in the wild for affluent tourists whose everyday world is a farcry from this state of nature. The group encountering this solitary tiger, then,has a culture, a division of labour and a clear hierarchy; it has carried its socialworld out into the forest with it. In these circumstances the adrenalin gener-ated by the tigers much hoped for appearance feeds into exhilaration as muchas fear. You are here for the spectacle, secure in the knowledge (as far as youcan be) that you are protected, that the tiger will not cross the interveningthirty metres without being brought up short by your armed guardians. Thistrust, which has been generated in a set of pre-established economic and socialrelations (themselves constructed within a larger socio-cultural context), over-comes the fear response. You hold your ground rather than flee; raise yourcamera rather than a gun.

All this is no more (or less) than to say that even the most seeminglystraightforward situation of fearfulness is heavily mediated through the phys-ical, psychological, cultural and social environments in which it is located.Although we can analytically deconstruct the elements of that mediation and later I shall seek to do so more formally in a concrete situation, theyare inextricably intertwined in a skein of interconnected threads. Out of thistangle emerges our emotional response, and, in turn, the further actions con-sequent upon it, for our emotions are, of course, constituent elements in ouractions. In that sense, fear has an important temporal demension, for, as Barbalet (1998: 155) writes, the object of fear is not adequately conceptu-alised as a threatening agent who or which should be avoided. Rather theobject of fear is an expectation of negative outcome. Perceived (and thussocially mediated) danger of a future state of affairs is constitutive of a present

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240 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2003

state of fear, and then that emotion itself may in turn be constitutive of furtherdanger as it is, for example, in William James (1979: 80) well known accountof the climber faced with the terrible leap whose ultimate success or failureis as much a function of the confidence or fearfulness that he experiences asof his physical ability.

This temporal dimension is important, because it extends the range of phenomena to which the term fear is customarily applied from the superfi-cially immediate physical experience of, say, the encounter with the tiger tothat generated in the larger time-horizon of anticipated states of affairs. Thisrange is reflected in the differing emphases found in common-sense usagessuch as terror and anxiety. But care is required here. It would be a mistake,though a common one, to view terror as somehow natural and immediatewhile anxiety is predominantly social and deferred. Both are socially consti-tuted in similar ways, though, as will become apparent, it is the extended tem-porality of anxiety which may prove of most sociological interest. Foralthough all fear is significantly moulded by its socio-cultural environments,fear experienced and articulated over an extended period is likely to be moreopen to socially patterned processes of reinforcement and routinisation, andit is such sustained anticipation of negative outcomes across time and spacethat is the stuff of what we will later discuss as the culture of fear.

Now, of course, we are straying away from the elementary forms of fear-fulness and into the domain of what is much more clearly social fear, wherefears relate not to aspects of the natural environment (mediated by the socialthough they may be) but to attributes of our and others social worlds. Suchfears, large and small, are significant features of many social situations andhave complex ramifications for the ways in which we live our lives. To examinethis, however, it is necessary to put into some clearer analytic order the ele-mentary features of fearfulness that we have encountered thus far. How, then,shall we conceptualise fear?

Fear as emotion, fear as culture

Traditionally fear has been understood as one of the emotions (often, indeed,as a primary or basic emotion) and thus consigned to the tender mercies ofpsychology. Contrary to sociologists worst stereotypes, however, that has notmeant that the prevailing conceptualisation of fear, and of emotions moregenerally, has been little more than a behaviourist gloss on an emotionalblack box. A glance at, say, Izards (1991) textbook or Ekmans and Davidsons (1994) collection is enough to suggest the considerable variety of psychologically grounded accounts of the emotions. What the appropria-tion of the study of emotions by psychology did mean, though, was that formany years there was little attempt to develop a distinctively sociologicalapproach to the subject. Of course that was not simply a consequence of psy-chological imperialism. The mainstream sociological tradition neglected a



range of what are now recognised as important subject areas, some of them the body, for example closely related to the emotions. How these lacunaecame about, and how ramified were their consequences, need not concern ushere. Suffice to observe that until the last couple of decades the combinationof psychologisation and neglect meant that sociology remained conspicuouslysilent on matters emotional.

More recently the discipline has woken up to the need to understand emo-tions as something other than a residual category, and various new perspec-tives have emerged (for a summary see Lupton, 1998: 1038). Unsurprisingly,many are distinguished by their emphasis on the constructed character ofemotion. In reacting against the perceived reductionism of essentialistapproaches, whether biological or psychological, it was to be expected thatsociology would want to insist upon the importance of human activity in thesocial construction and reproduction of emotion. As Harr (1986a: 3) opti-mistically observed early in the development of such views: the overwhelm-ing evidence of cultural diversity and cognitive differentiation in the emotionsof mankind has become so obvious that a new consensus is developing aroundthe idea of social construction. A certain evangelism was apparent in the toneof many of the essays collected in Harrs (1986b) pioneering volume, anunderstandable desire to establish the credentials of the constructionistapproach as an alternative to the entrenched views attributed to psychology.With the passage of time and the growth of research that tone has moderatedsomewhat, as can be seen, for example, in the essays assembled recently byBendelow and Williams (1998). Indeed, even Harr now appears to subscribeto a more multi-dimensional approach, at least as that is represented in theintroductory overview to the 1996 sequel to his earlier volume (Harr andParrott, 1996: 20). Human psychology is a complex pattern of cultural prac-tices, discursive conventions, and physiological processes, the editors write.None has priority since each interacts with and shapes the others.

Nevertheless, an element of constructionism must inevitably distinguish asociological perspective on the emotions from others more directly concernedwith physiology and psychology. How else could it be sociological? This is notto suggest that physiological and psychological features have no place in asociological discussion; clearly they do. But, whatever other positions it mightespouse, a sociological account must of necessity deal in the socio-culturalmaterials and circumstances through which social agents emotions are pro-duced and channelled. There may be, as some have argued, a physiologicalsubstrate to emotional responses. We may, as humans, exhibit certain dispo-sitions which remain a constant backdrop to the culturally variable articula-tion of emotions in social action. But to inquire into emotions sociologicallyis, minimally, to address those structuring and constituting resources which weutilise in expressing our own emotional states and in responding to those ofothers.

Of course, there are strong and weak constructionist cases. Armon-Jones(1986: 37), for example, makes such a distinction, defining the strong thesis

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as one which claims that for any emotion, including the primary emotions,that emotion is an irreducibly sociocultural product. The weaker case allowsthat there may be a degree of natural emotional response, but still affordsto the socio-cultural domain a significant role in both channelling this affectand, in some circumstances, in actively constituting it. I have no wish to inter-vene in the dispute between strong and weak cases, the distinction betweenwhich has, in any case, become increasingly blurred since Armon-Jonesadvanced her formulation. However, the strong case does exemplify a keydanger of the constructionist position. As Lyon (1998: 43) observes, whollyconstructionist approaches can obscure our view of the phenomenon ofemotion in the larger sense, that is, the understanding of the importance ofemotion not only in culturally produced and mediated experience, but insocial and bodily agency as conceived in terms of its foundations in socialstructure. Because it affords ontological primacy to the cultural materialsthrough which emotion is socially constructed, the strong case excludesserious consideration of the complex interweaving of the various parameterswithin which emotions function. In effect, it can prove as reductive as the psy-chological or physiological perspectives against which it was a reaction. Andwhile the weak case avoids some of these difficulties in as much as it does notin principle exclude other variables, in practice it often falls back into anotherform of reductivism because of its contingent tendency to focus analysis at themicro level. It is as if the very concept of emotion binds discussion to theindividual in whose person emotions are presumed to be located. Hence, evena weak constructionist formulation is inclined to ask: in as much as individu-als experience this emotion, from what social and cultural materials is it constructed?

As far as it goes, of course, that is a fair question. Emotions are in certainrespects individual experiences par excellence, and sociological analysis mustrecognise that. But it is also essential to think macroscopically, to view par-ticular social formations as conducive to, and reflective of, specific forms ofemotionality. Or, even more generally, to characterise whole societies asbeing emotional in distinctive ways in the sense that their members typicallyexhibit certain emotional attributes in specifiable societal circumstances. Overgiven time periods and in particular socio-cultural contexts, specific modes of emotionality are widely practised, actively traded upon, and routinelyexpected by members of a social collectivity. The so-called outpouring ofgrief that the British media diagnosed (and amplified) at the death of PrincessDiana in 1997 is one dramatic instance of such a mode in operation; a transi-tory phenomenon as it turned out, but one which was at the time both wide-spread and articulated in specifiable patterns of essentially social activity.More significantly, however, there are societal modes of emotionality whichare less transitory and, since they are routinised, less dramatically prominentthan the public mourning of a princess. Any culture seeks both to promoteand proscribe certain forms of emotional expression, options which arerealised by social agents in institutionalised modes of social activity. Social



formations, therefore, are always pervaded by discriminable and culturallyspecific modes of emotionality. We function as social beings, as agents, withindistinct emotional climates (Barbalet, 1998: 15961).

Fear, of course, operates in such an emotional climate for, as Scruton(1986: 10) rightly observes, it is a social act which occurs within a culturalmatrix. A sociology of fear, then, cannot simply be concerned with the opera-tion of the individual emotion of fear. It must examine the cultural matrixwithin which fear is realised and attend to the patterns of social activity routinely associated with it. Nor is it enough to develop a social psychologyof fear of the kind that we typically find in the sociology of the emotions. Fearmust also be examined at the societal level where it may even become thevery foundation of forms of social organization. As many have known to theircost, whole regimes of domination can be founded on fear.

In the recent sociological literature there have been two extended attemptsto examine fear at this level of generality, both under the rubric of the cultureof fear. One, focused largely on American data, is Glassner (1999), which ispredominantly a descriptive and polemic account of the kinds of phenomenawhich he considers to comprise the modern culture of fear. Why are so manyfears in the air, he asks, and so many of them unfounded? (Glassner, 1999:xi). From road rage to youth at risk, from irresponsible mothers to new diseases, he charts the rich variety of topics constituted as fearful in the American news media. His data (notwithstanding a tendency toward rhetor-ical overstatement) does indeed suggest that there is a real set of questions inneed of analysis here. But the vividness of his descriptions is not matched byincisiveness in his explanations. While he is clearly right to draw attention tothe complex role of the mass media in generating and amplifying collectivefears, his case is marred by an inadequate and undeveloped mass psychologyin which projection and displacement play key roles. From a psychologicalpoint of view extreme fear and outrage are often projections he writes (Glassner, 1999: xxvi): we displace discomfort at the shortcomings of oursociety onto scapegoats, project our guilt about, for example, leaving child-care to strangers, onto fears about child pornography. Our fear grows, hesays, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt (Glassner, 1999: 72).

While Glassners study does have virtues his point is well made that unjus-tified states of fearfulness are often exploited for profit and advancement byvarious social groups and organizations it lacks analytic power, proposingno coherent theoretical understanding. Furedis (1997) Culture of Fear,however, is more interesting in this respect. He too provides much evidenceabout contemporary fearfulness, but he also seeks a more comprehensiveexplanation of how this situation has come about. Like numerous other ana-lysts, not least those especially concerned with risk, he is much struck by thewidespread application of the precautionary principle in late modern societies: the evaluation of everything from the perspective of safety is adefining characteristic of contemporary society (Furedi, 1997: 4). This cannotbe understood simply as a rational response to growing dangers or as an

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automatic consequence of increased technical knowledge. It reflects, rather, amoral climate. Perception of being at risk expresses a pervasive mood insociety he writes, one that influences action in general (Furedi, 1997: 20).We perceive the world as dangerous and expect the worst of other humanbeings, lacking trust in established authority and exhibiting little or no faithin the efficacy of human intervention. In a word, we are in a constant state offearfulness.

Now it may be that he overstates the cultural grounds on which this dis-tinctive fearfulness rests, relativising genuinely frightening aspects of modernlife and thus underestimating their real force. Certainly critics of such culturalconstructionism (eg Young, 1999: 70 and passim) would argue as much. Butit would be difficult to deny the proposition that late modern societies haveindeed developed a distinctive and troubling focus upon the fearful and thatthis informs wide reaches of contemporary social activity. For Furedi this isenough to justify speaking in terms of a culture of fear, and his underlyinganalytic strategy is to postulate the recent emergence of such a culture, makecertain claims, sometimes implicitly, about the mechanisms through which itfunctions, and offer a general account of its social origins.

Let us concede that Furedis (and, for that matter, Glassners) evidence issuch as to merit the hypothesis that modes of fearfulness in late modernsociety are usefully described as constituting a distinctive culture of fear. Thiscan be maintained whatever views we might have about the realism or oth-erwise of the fears articulated within this culture. But the mere postulation ofsuch a culture is not enough. It is also necessary to document it systematicallyand analytically, and, having done so, ask through what social mechanisms isthis culture effective? Here Furedi is rather less convincing. As his constantrecourse to terms like pervasive mood and moral climate might suggest, histacit account is a kind of diffuse cultural emanationism in which it is sufficientto demonstrate the contours of a culture to show its effectiveness in mould-ing social action. More specifically, he seems to view the culture of fear asworking broadly on the model of an individual suffering from free-floatinganxiety, whereby a general state of pre-existing anxiousness, however caused,is made available for subsequent focus on any feature of the sufferers situa-tion. For Furedi, contemporary society is similarly afflicted. The pervasivemood of fear, he suggests (Furedi, 1997: 20) appears as a free-floating con-sciousness that attaches itself to (and detaches itself from) a variety of con-cerns and experiences. He writes of societys disposition to panic (Furedi,1997: 45) and claims that there exists a disposition towards the expectationof adverse outcomes (Furedi, 1997: 53).

As a descriptive account all that is not in itself implausible. We can imaginecircumstances in which the resources that a culture provides will, if actuallyused by agents in establishing and maintaining their routinised activities,dispose them toward being fearful. We might even agree that a state of gen-eralised fearfulness appears to shift its focus from time to time and situationto situation. However, to conceive that process in terms of a free-floating



consciousness is a form of theoretical short-hand that runs the risk of reify-ing society (societys disposition to panic) and so concealing the agents activ-ity essential to transmute cultural resources into real patterns of social life.It does not so much answer the question how is the culture of fear sociallyeffective? as repeat the assertion that there is a culture of fear which self-evidently impacts upon social action. Let me be clear about what I am sayinghere. I think that Furedi is quite right to claim that a culture of fear is aprominent and important feature of late modern societies. What needs furtherexamination, however, are the links between such a culture and everydayactivity, and what is needed to understand those connections is both a moreanalytically grounded description of the culture of fear itself and, fundamen-tally, a systematic framework for analysing its relations with other features ofsocial life.

These Furedi does not provide. His primary project, after all, is to offer adiagnosis of the ills of contemporary society, and none the worse for that,drawing together a number of loosely related themes into an argument about(in the words of his sub-title) the morality of low expectation. The ubiquityof the culture of fear, he argues, is producing people who are fatalisticallyresigned to their circumstances unwilling to take risks and given to cele-brating suffering. It is a continuing accommodation to powerlessness. Thisanalysis has the virtue of directness, obvious relevance to many familiar fea-tures of modern life, and critical strength. However, it lacks analytic clarityand leaves both the sociology of fear and the related analysis of modernsociety with more problems than solutions.

Nevertheless, given his vivid descriptions and wide ranging analysis, itshould be possible to build upon Furedis insights with a view to developinga less culturalist model of the relation between the culture of fear and otheraspects of modern society. But that requires us to give rather more system-atic consideration to the analytical elements from which our sociology of fearmay be constructed.

Parameters of fear

There is, of course, a long sociological tradition of classificatory schemesdesigned to categorise the factors presumed to be significant in the formationof social regularities. The tripartite distinction between personality, social, andcultural attributes, for example, was for many years a fundamental buildingblock in otherwise diverse social theories, summarising under those three con-venient headings an array of features that came to an analytic focus in theconcept of status-role. In its Parsonian variant where the three becamesystems the categories were supplemented with a fourth, the organismic,thus conveniently mirroring at the most macro of levels the two-by-two classifications around which Parsons built his elaborate theoretical edifice.However, this history of constant use in the conceptual hinterland of

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structural-functionalism should not be allowed to disguise the more general heuristic virtues of these categories; many a puzzling situation has been clar-ified by sifting social, cultural, personality and organismic elements one fromanother. And while such distinctions are, in one sense, arbitrary, in that theydraw analytic boundaries where none may exist in the flux of social process,the very consistency of that usage over the years should remind us of itsgenuine utility.

To develop a more ordered understanding of the contexts within which fearis organised I propose to adopt such a set of categories here, but with twoadditions. One, environments, physical and built, is probably self-explanatory. The other, social subjects, is perhaps less so, concerned as it iswith the fine but important analytic distinction between psychological andsocial selves; hopefully that will become clearer in the discussion that follows.My aim, then, is above all heuristic; to frame the construction of fear in termsof six analytically distinct classes of variables or parameters. The categoriesthat I shall use are: environments; cultures; social structures; bodies; person-alities; and social subjects. It should be noted that this usage is not conceivedas a neo-functionalist development of the classical Parsonian scheme. It makesno assumptions about functional relations among the parameters, integrativeor otherwise, does not seek to conceive them as systems, and imposes nohierarchy of determination upon them. This is a strictly classificatory enter-prise, open to a variety of possible empirical configurations.

It is convenient to begin this task with a schematic representation of theinterconnections among these elements. (see Figure 1)

The parameters of fear given diagrammatic expression here are those dis-cursively apparent in the various examples discussed above. The model pro-poses that the modes in which fearfulness is articulated and experienced area consequence of complex interactions among sets of grouped variables. HereI have distinguished six such analytical groupings, the first set (environments,cultures, and social structures) macroscopic and structuring in their emphasis,the second set (bodies, personalities, and social subjects) more focused uponthe contribution of individual agents. Any concrete situation of fearfulnesswill involve all six in a variety of possible permutations and combinations. Inthe nature of things, however, they must be considered one at a time. Let meenlarge briefly on each.

1. Environments

Physical environments (and features associated with them, such as tigers,mountains and storms) are clearly significant, sometimes directly so where theenvironment is itself the occasion of danger, more often indirectly where itsattributes may contribute in a variety of ways to the intensity, duration andcharacter of fear. This, of course, includes the built environment, at whichpoint the inevitable blurring between the physical, cultural and social is particularly apparent. Urban streets or multi-storey car-parks may be just as



conducive to fear as forest paths, as perceptions of crime risks in our citiesmight suggest. But environments as moulders of fear also feature more indi-rectly than this in the form of perceived environmental threats, be they acci-dents, unanticipated environmental consequences of human activity, ormerely the result of our increasing ability to identify diseases and dangers andthus multiply occasions for fear.

2. Cultures

Cultural environments too are of obvious significance in the ways in which weconstruct states of fearfulness. In as far as cultures are the reservoirs on which

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Modes of Institutional Fearfulness(constitution)

(negotiation)Modes of Individual Fearfulness

ENVIR

ONME

NTSCULTURES SOCIAL STRUCTURES

BODIES

PERSONALITIESSOC

IALSUBJ

ECTS

MACRO (structure)

MICRO (agency)

PHYSICAL

SOCIAL

Figure 1 Parameters of Fear.

we draw to make our everyday lives make sense, then that is as much a matterof definition as of empirical observation. We are constantly choosing from thearray of attitudes, values, presumptions, stereotypes, routines, memories, ideasand beliefs that are stored and circulated within and through cultural institu-tions. If our cultures repeatedly warn us that this kind of activity is danger-ous, or that sort of situation is likely to lead to trouble, then this provides thesoil in which fearfulness may grow. Indeed, the very constitution of the waysin which we experience and articulate fear is significantly dependent upon thechannels of expression made available to us by our cultures. That is particu-larly apparent where new fears emerge and become widespread in relativelyshort periods of time as, for example, with the extraordinary Satanic Abusescares of the late 1980s in the US and the UK (La Fontaine, 1998; Showalter,1998: 17188).

3. Social sructures

What we find fearful, and how we find it so, is deeply dependent upon thesocial structures within which everyday life is conducted. The routinised andrepeated patterns of social activity that form our social structures, and therelations among social actors that they presuppose, impinge on the construc-tion of fear just as they do on every other aspect of human endeavour. Some-times that may be deliberate, as it is in those authoritarian forms of socialorganization most common in police-states where fear is an institutionalisedfeature of social divisions and power hierarchies. Often, however, it is moreindirect, when the unanticipated consequences of changing social structuresmay generate potential for fear. Social mobility and changing patterns ofkinship relations, for example, produce circumstances in which old peopleexperience more social isolation with concomitant increased potential foranxiety about crime (Maxfield, 1984; Hough, 1995) and violence more generally.

4. Bodies

Individuals, through whom fear as emotion is articulated, often experiencetheir emotional and bodily states as closely related. In the case of fear thereis a well established physiological pattern of response which, though it maysometimes be debilitating, may also have various possible consequences incombination with other aspects of the individuals constitution and with moregeneral features of the structuring environments of fear. The climber, thehunter, the practitioner of dangerous sports, learns to channel the physiologi-cal response in the service of goal-directed activity. More generally, our aware-ness of our own bodily attributes will feed into potentially fearful situations.To put it at its crudest, a 6ft 6in, well built young male in good health is likelyto be less fearful in a potentially violent situation than is an older, smaller orsimply physically weaker counterpart. Gender too will play a part here, as



may the bodily attributes of ethnic difference, of age, and of physicality moregenerally.

5. Personalities

An individual placed in a situation of fear will bring to bear a set of psycho-logical dispositions established in the course of previous experience. Sometypes of personality are given to anxiety; some are apparently fearless. Someexhibit phobic fears of various kinds which in the limiting case may come topredominate over the other environments of fear. But for the most part individual personality traits interact with the social, cultural and physical togenerate the specific construction of fear at an individual level. They are a partof what is brought to bear in the application of agency in human activity.

6. Social subjects

As well as being physical and psychological subjects we are also social sub-jects. That is to say, a significant element in the cluster that makes up our senseof ourselves as individuals derives from our social circumstances. We are notjust a certain kind of personality and body; we are also a certain kind of socialbeing. And our social being our position within the elaborate nexus of struc-tured social interactions will differentially impact upon our modes of fear-fulness. Take a structuring pattern such as the life-cycle routines of modernsocieties. At different points in the life-cycle (infant, child, adolescent, youngadult, family member, old person, and so on) our propensity to be fearfuldiffers, as does our perception of the dangers implicit in various situations.This is not just a simple function of age, but reflects rather the social circum-stances in which individuals at different points in the cycle typically find them-selves. In our daily lives we move among a whole series of such social positionsderived from different social routines. All of them, severally and collectively,will influence the character of our potential and actual fearfulness.

As will be apparent from the above, this account is designed to avoid thetemptation of reductionism postulating one or another of the six parame-ters as dominant. In figure 1 this is the purpose of the circle linking the sixand of the symbolic arrow heads on that circle. Environments, cultures, socialstructures, bodies, personalities and social subjects are only analytically dis-tinguishable. In a concrete situation they will mutually modify each otherseffects in the elaborate flow of social action. Of course, there may be situa-tions in which one or another might predominate. But that would not be aproduct of some pre-supposed ontological primacy; it would be a contingentconsequence of particular circumstances.

As already observed, these parameters can usefully be grouped in terms ofthe level at which they contribute to the construction of fear. Three of them environments, cultures, social structures refer to macroscopic features of

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the fear environment. They are structuring factors to which we, as agents, areobliged to relate. We may relate to them selectively, of course, and we are certainly not out-and-out dupes of our environments, cultures or social structures, but they play a broadly constitutive and trans-individual role in theconstruction of fear. They are, as it were, the collective resources on whichagents are bound to draw in feeling fearful. The second group (bodies,personalities, social subjects) are more microscopic in emphasis, relating toagency rather than to structure. They provide the bases upon which we associal agents negotiate the terms of our fearfulness. Our bodily, psychologi-cal and social characteristics impact upon the experience of fear, producingdifferent individual responses to similar situations, or, indeed, individual con-sistency over time and space in response to different situations. Central to thisconception is an image of social activity in which active agents establishvarious modes in which they relate to their structuring environments, and inwhich that activity itself is grounded in bodily, psychological and social iden-tity. Fear, then, is a product of interlocking relations between what I havecalled the modes of institutional fearfulness (given by the structuring environments) and the modes of individual fearfulness (deriving from theformations of individual identity).

Cultures of fear

We are now in a position to return to the analytical limits that need to be setupon cultural constructionist approaches to fear. Cultures constitute only oneparameter of fear among the six, and, although clearly important, there is noa priori reason to suppose that their terms will predominate over the otherparameters in constituting fearfulness. In as much as cultures are central to par-ticular modes of fearfulness, they will be so because of their temporal andsocially specific conjunction with the other parameters, not because the veryexistence of a particular set of cultural dispositions necessarily leads to fixedpatterns of social activity. In addition, the capacity of agents to choose amongand interpret the resources offered by their cultural environments opens a gapbetween the terms of the culture and its instantiation in social activity. We donot fear X simply because our culture tells us to; we fear it because a concate-nation of factors, cultural and non-cultural, physical, psychological and social,lead us to do so. Nevertheless, as one of the structuring environments of fear,cultures are an essential starting point for analysis storing, as they do, the termsin which we routinely give expression to our fears. To explore our cultures offear is definitionally incomplete as an account of the societal construction offear, but it is nonetheless a vital moment in any such investigation.

Thus far I have been careful to use the plural cultures of fear ratherthan suggest that sociology should presume to attend to the culture of fear,the self-identified focus of Furedis and Glassners studies. The reason for that,of course, is that human societies, unless they are without any concept of fear



at all, always have cultures of fear at least in the sense that they provide theirmembers with the cultural materials out of which fear and fearfulness are con-stituted. However, the multiplicity of cultural patterns that exist within a givensociety may well be inconsistent with each other, and will also be differen-tially utilised by the various social groups whose property they are. They mayalso differ in the social range over which they are effective and in the degreeof specificity with which they identify that which is to be feared. There are anumber of ways in which this cultural variation might be conceptualised, butfor present purposes it is enough to suggest that a culture of fear will provideresources to agents at any or all of the following three levels.

Descriptions of, and prescriptions about, discrete phenomena that are tobe counted as fearful. In a given society these may appear to an observerand, indeed, to a member of that society to be ad hoc and disconnectedfrom each other for example, our cultures may offer us ghosts, poiso-nous snakes, black cats, and still waters as things of which we should befrightened without in any way linking those phenomena together into ageneral cosmology of fear.

Descriptions of, and prescriptions about, classes of phenomena that areto be counted as fearful. Our cultures may group together particular setsof phenomena as potentially frightening, specifying criteria against whichsuch sets are constituted, and proposing appropriate fear responses. Overtime these classes will change. Although, for instance, there is still inmodern societies some fearfulness surrounding the supernatural, by andlarge such fears are deemed unfounded and superstitious in comparisonwith what was the case in, say, the pre-modern world. On the other hand,fears about the hidden dangers of environmental pollution have becomewidespread in many western societies in the latter quarter of the twen-tieth century, although relatively unrecognised before that.

Descriptions of, and prescriptions about, fearfulness in general. As wellas identifying specific phenomena of which we should be frightened, ourcultures may also encourage a general level of fearfulness. When Furedi(and others) suggest that the precautionary principle has become awidespread guide to action in modern societies they are, in effect, sug-gesting that there has been a rise in the general potential for fearfulness that our cultures are predisposing us to be frightened but without anynecessary focus on specific phenomena. Cultures, that is, may promote ageneralised climate of fear.

How might this tripartite distinction aid us in further developing a socio-logical approach to cultures of fear? Consider, for instance, the common claimthat recent years have seen the growth of a widespread belief perhaps evena moral panic that young children are likely to become victims of pae-dophiles. It would not be too difficult a task to document the expression andamplification of such a belief in the various news and current affairs media,

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to find evidence of altered social routines based upon it (changing patterns ofchildrens play, stricter modes of transport to school, parental and educatorswarnings, etc.), and to find dramatic instances of public concern (policies toidentify convicted paedophiles resident in local communities, campaigns anddemonstrations based upon alleged identification, public violence, etc.). Thepaedophile threat, then, could be analysed as a discrete cultural patternarticulated in a variety of contexts and acted upon by agents in distinct socialcircumstances. Those social circumstances would have to be specified, aswould any interactions between the cultures account of paedophilia and thevarious other parameters impinging upon the construction of fear. In whatphysical environments is fear of paedophile attacks most acute? What kindsof social subjects are most likely to embrace and act upon such a cultural predisposition? In what kinds of social structures is such fear most likely tobecome a routinised feature of social activity? Under what circumstances willthis fear be articulated in one way rather than another? Answers to such ques-tions, systematically organised in terms of the parameters of fear summarisedin figure 1, would provide the basis for a more comprehensive characterisa-tion of the manner in which fear of paedophile attack enters into the dailypattern of social life via specific categories of social agents and in empiricallyspecifiable circumstances.

All that, of course, is focused at the first of the three levels sketched outabove that of discrete fears. But fear of paedophile attack is not merely asingular element within late modern culture; it is arguably also a member ofa distinctive class of similarly disposed fears. In the last two decades of the20th century, in Britain and elsewhere, much media and public attention hasbeen paid to a range of child sexual abuse: systematic abuse in childrens residential institutions; alleged satanic abuse; recovered memory of hith-erto unrecognised familial abuse; priests as routine abusers; and so on (forsummarising accounts see: Furedi, 1997: 73105; La Fontaine, 1998;Showalter, 1997). The specific fear of paedophile attack, then, draws some ofits cogency for those disposed to act on its basis from its position within anetwork of such fears. It is, from the point of view of the accepting agent, yetanother self-evident confirmation of more widespread sexually motivatedexploitation of children by adults. As so often in such cases, the apparentfacts of the matter do not impinge on the plausibility of the mutually rein-forcing cluster of fearful beliefs (cf Scott et al., 1998: 693). Thus it was thatparticipants in the Portsmouth anti-paedophile demonstrations of summer2000 were widely reported in newspapers and on television repeating thecharge that child abduction was now common. Such claims are not borne outby the evidence, but their status as part of the larger cultural set of child-abusefears lends them additional force. By establishing distinctive classes of fearfuldispositions, our cultures of fear provide us with the materials for closing thecircle of self-confirmation. A publicly articulated and apparently intercon-nected set of fears constitutes a potentially much more powerful culturalresource than a single fearful disposition.



As before, however, and even allowing for agents greater inclination toaccept fears that belong to an already established class, the precise form inwhich fears are actually utilised in social activity will depend on the overallmodes of institutional and individual fearfulness. Accordingly, a sociologicalanalysis would have to examine empirically the interaction of the variousparameters within which culturally articulated sets of fears are realised.However widespread and however deeply embedded within an extensive classof such fears, it cannot be assumed that a particular cultural predisposition tobe frightened will uniformly be implicated in social action. Fear of paedophileattack, although clearly a prominent recent feature in some areas of Britishculture, is by no means a universal fear even among parents of young chil-dren, and fear on behalf of young children more generally remains unevenlydistributed across the social landscape.

But what of the third level, fearfulness in general? Is there a case to arguethat fear of paedophile attack in the late modern period is not only embed-ded in a larger set of such child-related fears but is also the product of a culturewhich simply encourages anxiety and fearfulness? This is certainly the tenorof Furedis account in as much as he lays claim to there being a distinctiveculture of fear characteristic of the late 20th century. In documenting his arrayof specific fears a range which encompasses all the abuse-related cases men-tioned above, as well as a wide variety of others he also suggests that takentogether these fears constitute a significant pattern. Late modern society, onhis account, does not simply specify for us a wide range of things to be feared.It also encourages us to be fearful across the full range of our activities; thereis, to borrow Furedis metaphor, a kind of free-floating anxiety embodied inthe culture of fear. We are not simply frightened of paedophiles, or of childabuse more generally. We are frightened per se.

The difficulty with this kind of view lies in establishing what kind of evidence would compel us to accept that there is indeed such a generalisedculture of fear. Simply to document the considerable range of fears given cur-rency in our cultures is not enough, however striking that may be in itself. Wewould also have to demonstrate that late modern conceptions of fear are dis-tinctive in their fundamental character when compared with other periods andsocieties, and that this feature of our cultures significantly impacts upon theconstitution of specific fears. In effect, to show that we have developed a newconception of fearfulness which leads us to find fears for example, wide-spread fears about child abuse where they would not otherwise be found.In part, such a case might be mounted on an account of the spread of the lan-guage of risk in late 20th century public discourse. In part, also, it wouldrequire comparative and historical analysis. Other periods, both modern andpre-modern, have attracted attention in terms of the distinctive fears articu-lated in their cultures. One might consider, for example, the popular culturesof fear found in 1950s America in the context of invasion anxiety and con-cerns about the risks of nuclear energy (Biskind, 1983; Jancovich, 1996) or thewell documented history of 17th century English witch trials (Macfarlane, 1979;

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Thomas, 1979). What, if anything, serves to distinguish our culture of fearfrom such historic episodes as these?

As it happens, I am sympathetic to the claim that there is a distinctiveculture of fear in late modern societies, and that its proper comprehension isessential to a macro-sociology of the period. However, it does not seem to methat this claim has been adequately substantiated in the existing literature. Todo so, as I have sought to show in this paper, we need to refine the theoreti-cal resources that we have available for understanding fear sociologically.Furthermore, we cannot simply assume that the much remarked diversity andspread of modern fears is enough to justify their elevation into a distinctiveculture. That, too, will need a more refined and systematic analysis before wecan be justified in speaking of the contemporary world in terms of an all pervasive culture of fear.

University of York Received 17 April 2002Finally accepted 3 December 2002

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Janet Heaton, Steve Yearley, and members of the University of York Sociology Department seminar for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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