A Home for the Disabled: Marginality and Reality

Abstract

The participant-observer study of a Cheshire Home which is described in this article was intended to bring some fieldwork evidence to bear on currently popular speculations in the field of the sociology of knowledge. These speculations are best known through the writing of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, which draws heavily on the work of Alfred Schutz. The reality of everyday life, it is said, is massively taken for granted and presents itself as not in need of further analysis: it rests on 'typifications' which make patterns of social intercourse easy and unselfconscious and so constitute the social structure. But sub-universes of meaning (such as Schutz examined in his study of Don Quixotel) are not only possible but today highly probable: counter-realities are the home of counter-identities.2 Schutz had written off 'attentional modification' which converts what is taken for granted into something deeply problematical;3 Berger and Luckmann talk about 'a more complex distribution of knowledge' that occurs when bastards, lepers, idiots and cripples congregate in durable groups and establish counter-worlds with their own institutionalized clusters of counter-identities. New 'plausibility structures' are established for counter definitions of reality.4 The taken-forgrantedness of everyday reality is apparently less massive and far more fragile than one had supposed; and in Berger's later writings it is highly precarious. Modern man lives in 'discrepant worlds of meaning' and is 'peculiarly unfinished' and conversion-prone.5 Berger's sociology of knowledge draws heavily on notions of socialization (and resocialization) which are derived from Goffman's studies of institutional life and from a too simple interpretation of G. H. Mead.6 (Mead, of course, knew that the self is a social system in which I interacts with me. It does not collapse nearly as readily as Berger imagines when familiar social props are withdrawn.) I therefore examined a Cheshire Home as a marginal world which perhaps gave a base for a counter reality and a cluster of counter identities by focusing on processes of resocialization. I looked for evidence of resocialization on the one hand as stages in a 'moral career', on the other as a process of shedding old typifications and conceptual categories and acquiring new ones. In view of the great weight given by Berger and Luckmann to