Dame Mary Douglas, DBE FBA, (March 25 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 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. 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 December 30 2006. She died on 16 May 2007 in London, aged 86. She is survived by 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.

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.

Douglas claims that rituals of purity that focus on sexuality are meant to mark the boundaries of the human body, in the same way by which the boundaries of society are marked.

She begins Purity and Danger by stating what she considers obvious, that “ambiguous things can seem very threatening” (xi) and claims that “taboo is a spontaneous device for protecting the distinctive categories of the universe… taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred”.

Douglas' observations about the differences in traditional African societies' views of risks such as sorcery led her to formulate a functionalist theory of how social structures generate supportive worldviews. She developed this more fully into the Cultural Theory of risk in Risk and Culture, written with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky.

While the Cultural Theory of risk has not been hugely important within anthropology, it has made an impact on the inter-disciplinary field of risk perception.

Observations on Jokes

In 1975 she noted that "Joking as one mode of expression has yet to be interpreted in its total relation to other modes of expression";^[1] scholar Seth Graham remarked that 30 years later that statement is still largely valid.^[2] She also noted:^[3]

When people throw excrement at one another whenever they meet, either verbally or actually, can this be interpreted as a case of wit, or merely written down as a case of throwing excrement? This is the central problem of all interpretation.

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 (1975) essays
• “Jokes.” Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. [1975] Ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
• Evans-Pritchard (1980)
• The World of Goods (1979) with Baron Isherwood
• Risk and Culture (1980) with Aaron Wildavsky
• In the Active Voice (1982)
• How Institutions Think (1987)
• Missing persons: a critique of the social sciences (1988) with Steven Ney
• Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992)
• Thought styles: Critical essays on good taste (1996)
• Leviticus as Literature (1999)
• In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (2001)
• Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (2004)
• Thinking in Circles (2007)

References

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

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