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8 Accounting for Deviance C. WRIGHT MILLS intended “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive” as an analysis of “observable lingual mechanisms of motive imputation and avowal.” The very act of explicating motives for our actions itself has motives; the reasons why we do things are separate and distinct from the reasons why we explain the things we do and the way we explain the things we do. Under certain circumstances, people are motivated to verbalize their motives for doing things. Scott and Lyman (1968) argue that the most important of such circumstances—those that call for an account—is that actors believe that audiences will regard the behavior they narrate as objectionable or deviant. Scott and Lyman believe that the ritual of offering acceptable accounts for unacceptable behavior helps make the social order possible. Neither Mills nor Scott and Lyman argued that such verbalizations cause deviant, untoward, or unconventional behavior. Indeed, the phenomenon they wish to explain is the very process of rendering such verbalizations. And some of those verbalizations will be more convincing to specific audiences than others; even though all such devices are conventional efforts to explain unconventional behavior, not all are equally successful in neutralizing deviance. Sykes and Matza (1957) argue that accepting or believing in the validity of vocabularies of motive that justify or account for deviance makes delinquent behavior possible—hence, first the neutralization, then the behavior. This seems to be an unwarranted argument, though actors do know that if others discover or hear or read a description of their unconventional or transgressive behavior, observers or audiences expect them Accounting for Deviance / 169 to render an account consisting of justifications, motives, or apologies. In my view, the adoption of stigma neutralization for a deviant act is not a cause of deviant behavior; a sensible reading of these accounts indicates that neutralizations are an accompaniment or a consequence of the enactment of deviant behavior. The social analyst must be on the lookout for both variety and communalities in these neutralizations. At the very least, different types of behavior generate distinctly different genres of verbalizations—but all are devised for similar motives. Granted, actors are influenced by their social setting or context . In this volume, I focus on one setting in particular: admitting to untoward actions in the actor’s memoir and autobiography. I may have harmed some people, authors say—but that was in the past. Or, I did what lots of others did—maybe a little more so—but everyone’s hand was in the cookie jar. And the people who condemn me have committed far more serious sins. He harmed people; I didn’t. Or, I did what was expected of me; it was my heritage , my background. Anyway, I was the victim of circumstance. Or, others pushed me into it; I didn’t want to do it, but I just went along. Or, the system is biased against the little guy. I did what I had to do. I couldn’t help myself; I was swept away. I wasn’t immoral or evil—I was sick, I had an illness. Some people deceived me, took advantage of me. Or, I did the right thing; I struggled for justice; I fought the system; I told the truth. What I did should not be a crime; it doesn’t harm anyone. These are neutralizations readers frequently find in memoirs, as all of us do in oral utterances; in fact, except for length, it is difficult to see where the differences might lie. Common sense tells us that some crimes are so heinous that no offender would attempt to justify them, but common sense is often wrong; pederasts routinely neutralize the stigma of their acts (Durkin and Bryant, 1999; McCaghy, 1967)—still, we virtually never come across a pederastic memoir, only interview studies of anonymous pederasts. One murderer after another explains why he did it (Joey, 1973; Levi, 1981; Hardin, 1961). “I never killed a man who didn’t deserve to die” is a common theme in the killer’s narration of his illicit actions. Rape? No problem—explain it away; justify it; excuse it; call it fun (Scully, 1990); even rationalize it, in a memoir, as an insurrectionary act (Cleaver, 1968). What about bestiality? Even that can be justified and has, by its participants (Maratea, 2011)—though, again, I have never encountered a memoir by an identifiable author with a sexual preference for and sexual experience with animals. Perhaps we can say, closer to the...

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