Week 6

Question 1

Belief

Answer 1

• Anything that you personally think is true
• Single beliefs are combined with other interrelated belief into organized sets of belief systems… like religious doctrines and specific disciplines
• 2 kinds of relationships between belief systems and deviance: (1) belief systems as deviance and (2) belief systems as social typers of deviance

Question 2

Religion

Answer 2

• The foundation for dominant moral codes for most of history
• Dictated to followers by leaders and ‘experts
• Your religious beliefs may be considered to be deviant
• Your religious beliefs may provide you with a moral code that defines others as deviant… A social-typer of deviance

Question 3

Religion guides…

Answer 3

• Micro… our own individual behaviour + what/how we think about ourselves and others
• Macro… individual/social level, social institutions

Question 4

Deviant religions

Answer 4

• Historically, religious belief systems have been categorized using different typologies
• A religions place in the typology determined whether it was considered deviant

Question 5

Typologies

Answer 5

1. Ecclesia… state religions, not considered deviant
2. Churches… not ‘official religions of society but large, powerful religious groups (e.g. Christianity, Hinduism, etc.) well established, highly bureaucratized, not considered deviant usually
3. Sects… smaller religious groups usually broken apart from larger churches, more rigid doctrine, require higher levels of commitment (e.g. Amish, Taliban), deviant in need of social control
4. Cults… smallest, intense commitment, single leader, deviant in need of social control

Question 6

Sects

Answer 6

• Lower social status + members of marginalized groups drawn (reward comes in afterlife)
• Sects vary in requirements
• Level of tension experienced by a particular sect is determined by… magnitude of difference between sect & society, level of antagonism that sect feels abt society, extent to which sect separates itself
• Deviancy amplification can happen

Question 7

Cults

Answer 7

• Portrayed in the news media, ‘cult menace’ frame, constructs them as threatening and dangerous (moral panic)
• Played out in the deviance dance… the various means of social control of the deviant religions and the corresponding resistance to those means of control

Question 8

Controlling ‘deviant’ religions

Answer 8

• Universal declaration of human rights proclaims freedom of religious belief and practice as a right
• But this isn’t invincible cuz threats to public health, order + infringement on the rights of others give governments valid reasons to violate these freedoms

Question 9

Anti-cult movement

Answer 9

• Acting as moral entrepreneurs
• 1960s started as concerned parents, over time numerous professionals and researchers became involved in the anti-cult groups
• They only target specific religious groups

Question 10

Counter-cult movement

Answer 10

• Been around for more then a century
• Members are opposed to religious freedom itself (primarily conservative Christians)
• Their concern is ppl having the ‘wrong’ belief system + any religion that isn’t theirs is called a cult

Question 11

Media

Answer 11

• Sects and cults use media to convey messages but the media also frames them
• Cult narrative in entertainment frames cults in 5 ways… distinctive clothing, isolated areas, communes, delusional and highly visible
• This social control reinforces and maintains the othering of certain beliefs

Question 12

Governments

Answer 12

• Have power to create legislation + policies to destruct the nature of deviant religions

Question 13

Characteristics of destructive cults

Answer 13

1. Leader places group above the law
2. Leader doesn’t follow same rules as others
3. Leader exerts control beyond religion
4. ‘mind control’
5. Group follows policy of deceiving outsiders
6. Group based on apocalyptic vision

Question 14

Reisting a deviant label

Answer 14

• Religious groups may engage in resistance within the legal system
• Use the media to resist (impression management)
• Not from the groups but from academia (changed from traditional typologies to more open thinking… new religious movements or minority religious groups)

Question 15

Witch persecutions

Answer 15

• Religious and political interconnection
• Christian church governed + 100 000 witches were persecuted, killed
• Everything bad was blamed on them
• Most were women + were brutally tortured, also ppl who weren’t Christian, midwives or just anyone

Question 16

Malleus Maleficarum : the hammer of witches

Answer 16

• This document was used to create a massive, paranoid fueled moral panic
• The church printed documents for the educated people at the time (it told them how to identify and lead investigations for suspected witches
• All information was communicated by expert representatives

Question 17

Residential schooling

Answer 17

• Colonization, residential schooling to guarantee assimilation

Question 18

Victorian child-savers

Answer 18

• Essential to child welfare reforms, education, prohibition and many other government policies in Canada
• Social Gospel
• State’s responsibility to provide moral environment for kids but the lower class ppl were automatically considered immoral so most effort was directed there

Question 19

Science

Answer 19

• Is subjective
• Beliefs fall into 2 categories… (1)claims about the nature of reality + way world works, (2)ethical + moral claims embedded in scientific belief system
• Some are characteristics of science as a whole but others are specific to different disciplines
• Science has a social control function and is subject to social control itself to prevent deviance

Question 20

Science as deviance

Answer 20

Scientists can be socially typed in 2 ways…
1. Individual scientists may be socially types as deviant when they scientific misconduct
2. An entire discipline may be deviantized for being pseudoscience

Question 21

Scientific misconduct

Answer 21

• Practices unacceptable cuz they intentionally manipulate research outcomes (a lot in biomedical research)

Question 22

Extent of scientific misconduct

Answer 22

• Prevalence is difficult to determine + varies across different fields of study
• There are very low response rates in the research of this
• We can track the amount of retractions

Question 23

Explanations for scientific misconduct

Answer 23

• Bad apple/bad person theory… Deviant acts committed by scientists explained on individual factors, just few ‘ bad’ scientists, we need to find them and throw them out so they don’t spoil the barrel
• Iceberg theory… says misconduct is far more common than we might think + detected is just tip of the iceberg, scientists undergo a lot of pressure + they become deviant to do ‘better’
• Iceberg theory has used techniques of neutralization (helps scientists justify their actions), strain theory (gap between legitimized goals and access to legitimate means) and self-control theory

Question 24

Misconduct + corporatization of science

Answer 24

• Prevalence + reasons of scientific misconduct are influenced by ties with corporate industry
• Corporate funding and pressure (corrupt science for profit, litigation)
• Corporatization of science has encouraged the production of ignorance

Question 25

Controlling scientific misconduct

Answer 25

• Informal regulation : workplace gossip
• Formal regulation : legal action, lose their positions and credibility
• Preventative social control

Question 26

Pseudoscience

Answer 26

• An entire science can be socially typed as deviance when its belief system/technologies are called into question… become determined as not science at all
• Can be a continuum
• A science perceived as deviant at one time may become accepted science later, and this is some of the arguments they make for validity
• Media reproduces pseudoscientific beliefs

Question 27

Science as a social typer of deviance

Answer 27

• When claims to truth come from places of institutionalized power, those claims become institutionalized
• Ppl believe it cuz its experts, they rarely question the scientist
• Technocracy
• So social typing by science tends to be effective

Question 28

social Darwinism

Answer 28

• Just as biological species evolve over time, so do societies (indigenous ppl vs white European colonization)
• Turned into the science of eugenics, scientific theory took on the new method of justification for domination
• Biological developments used to support the argument that some social groups were more evolved than (and biologically superior to) others

Question 29

Eugenics

Answer 29

• Based on discourses of degeneracy and social reform
• Which groups were target of focus vary across nation (race vs. class, immigration, disability etc.)
• Sterilization in Alberta for feeble minded women, still happens w AIDS ‘at risk groups’
• Nazi Germany went real far

Question 30

Problem with eugenics

Answer 30

The problem with eugenics is to make such legal, social and economic adjustments that…
- A larger proportion of superior persons will have children than at present
- That the average number of offspring of each superior person will be greater than at present
- That the most inferior persons will have no children
- Other inferior persons will have fewer children than now

Question 31

Medicalization

Answer 31

• Medicalization of deviance and normality has reached level of human genome and resulted in debates over genetic technologies (some call this new eugenics)
• Draw attention to dangers of labelling certain biological characteristics as superior vs. inferior
• UN prohibits human cloning and provides guidelines for genetic science
  Just cuz technology available doesn’t mean it should be used