Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas (1921–2007)
British anthropologist

File:Mary Douglas (1921–2007) young in Africa.jpg

Mary Douglas while young and working in Africa

Dame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA (25 March 1921 – 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism.

Her area was social anthropology; she was considered a follower of Emile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.

Biography

She was born as Margaret Mary Tew in San Remo, Italy to Gilbert and Phyllis Tew; her father was in the British colonial service. Her mother was a devout Roman Catholic and Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, were raised in that faith. After their mother's death the sisters were raised by their maternal grandparents and attended the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton (later Woldingham School). Mary went on to study at the St Anne's College, Oxford from 1939 to 1943; there she was influenced by E.E. Evans-Pritchard.

She worked in the British Colonial Office until 1947, when she returned to Oxford to take up graduate study she had left. She studied with M. N. Srinivas as well as Edward Evans-Pritchard. In 1949 she did field work with the Lele people in what was then the Belgian Congo; this took her to village life in the region between the Kasai River and the Loange River, where the Lele lived on the edge of the previous Kuba kingdom.

In the early 1950s she completed her doctorate, married James Douglas and started a family of three children. She taught at University College, London, where she remained for around 25 years. She taught and wrote in the USA for 11 years. She published on such subjects as risk analysis and the environment, consumption and welfare economics, and food and ritual, all increasingly cited outside anthropology circles.

After four years (1977-81) as Foundation Research Professor of Cultural Studies at the Russell Sage Institute in New York, she moved to Northwestern University as Avalon Professor of the Humanities with a remit to link the studies of theology and anthropology. Her reputation was established by her book Purity and Danger (1966). She wrote The World of Goods (1978) with an econometrician, Baron Isherwood, which was considered a pioneering work on economic anthropology.

She became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's New Year's Honours List, published on 30 December 2006. She died on 16 May 2007 in London, aged 86, from complications of cancer, survived by her three children. Her husband died in 2004.

Contributions to anthropology

Mary Douglas is best known for her interpretation of the book of Leviticus, and for her role in creating the cultural theory of risk.

Douglas' book Purity and Danger is considered a key text in social anthropology.

The line of enquiry in Purity and Danger traces the words and meaning of dirt in different contexts. What is considered dirt in a given society is matter which is considered out of place (Douglas takes this lead from William James). She attempts to clarify the differences between the sacred, the clean and the unclean in different societies and times. Through a complex and sophisticated reading of ritual, religion and lifestyle she challenges Western ideas of pollution, making clear how the context and social history is essential.

In Purity and Danger, Douglas first proposed that the kosher laws were not, as many believed, either primitive health regulations or randomly chosen as tests of Jews' commitment to God. Instead, Douglas argued that the laws were about symbolic boundary-maintenance. Prohibited foods were those which did not seem to fall neatly into any category. For example, pigs' place in the natural order was ambiguous because they shared the cloven hoof of the ungulates, but did not chew cud.

Later in a 2002 preface to Purity and Danger, Douglas went on to retract her initial explanation of the kosher rules, saying that it had been "a major mistake." Instead, she proposed that "the dietary laws intricately model the body and the altar upon one another" as of land animals, Israelites were only allowed to eat animals which were also allowed to be sacrificed; these animals which depend on the herdsmen. Thus, Douglas concludes that the animals which are abominable to eat are not in fact impure, as the "rational, just, compassionate God of the Bible would [never] have been so inconsistent as to make abominable creatures." Douglas makes it clear in Purity and Danger that she does not endeavour to judge religions as pessmisitic or optimisitic in their understanding of purity or dirt as positive (dirt affirming) or otherwise.

Works

• The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
• Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966)
• Pollution (1968)
• Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970)
• Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975)
• Jokes, in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (1975); edited by Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson
• The World of Goods (1979) with Baron Isherwood
• Evans-Pritchard (1980)
• Risk and Culture (1980) with Aaron Wildavsky
• In the Active Voice (1982)
• How Institutions Think (1986)
• Missing persons: a critique of the social sciences (1988) with Steven Ney
• Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992)
• In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (1993)
• Thought styles: Critical essays on good taste (1996)
• Leviticus as Literature (1999)
• Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology (2002)
• Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (2004)
• Thinking in Circles (2007)

Sources

• Richard Fardon, Mary Douglas: an Intellectual Biography (1999)

See also

• Risk perception

• Cultural Theory of risk

External links

• Mary Douglas Papers, 1948-1985, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois
• Sketch from Univ of Pennsylvania as Honorary degree recipient in 2000
• Bibliography
• Obituary in The Guardian
• Obituary in The Times
• New York Times obituary available in Cache version
• The Star Obituary
• Commonweal Anthropology with a Difference
• Mary Douglas interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 26 February 2006 (film)
• Pantheon of Risk Analysis at the Society for Risk Analysis