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The Contemporary Culture of Blame and the Fetishization of the Modernist MentalityThe Open University of Hong Kong, rlau{at}ouhk.edu.hk In recent years, a culture of blame has arisen in certain economically advanced societies that rules out the unexpected mishap. Its nature is theorized with reference to Mary Douglas’s blame theory. A genealogy of the modern concept of accident shows that the conceptual distinction between the foreseeable and the unforeseeable becomes meaningful under a secular cosmology. Since contemporary society is secular, how the culture of blame is able, despite this meaningfulness, to delegitimize the unexpected is analysed by tracing it to the modernist mentality itself. Why the culture of blame has arisen is shown by tracing its emergence to neoliberalism’s ascendance. By showing, with reference to Garfinkel and others, why the unexpected is intrinsic to social life, and by combining the lay and Marxist meanings of the term fetishism, it is explained why the culture of blame’s mentality constitutes a fetishization of the modernist mentality. Illustrative cases are given. The culture of blame’s implications for understanding contemporary modernity vis-a-vis Giddens’, Beck’s and Bauman’s theories are discussed. The entrenchedness of the culture of blame is examined from a discursive angle.
Key Words: accident • culture of blame • individualization • modernist mentality • modernity
Current Sociology, Vol. 57, No. 5,
661-683 (2009) |
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