"Our technological infrastructure alienates us from each other. No need to form a workplace community, everybody there will be out in a year or two, and so will you, looking for a better place." -- Mary Douglas
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 Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.
"An escalating, violent tit-for-tat may lead to terrorism.""Any great organization can go through sectarian phases.""Behind a leader there must be followers, but they should always be on the lookout for the main chance and ready to change sides if the current leader doesn't deliver.""Enclave life becomes very tense, Even when they do elect a leader, the factions remain, with the threat of splitting off.""Every year the progress of advanced capitalist society makes our population consist of more and more isolates. This is because of the infrastructure of the economy, especially electronic communications.""Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.""Hierarchy works well in a stable environment.""I am convinced that living in an enclave shapes the personality, and living alone shapes the personality too.""I am sure it must be true that people opt out of the mainstream society because they feel that there are going to be no rewards for them, if they stay.""I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.""If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny.""If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.""Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination.""Inside a religious body you get sects and hierarchies, inside an information network you get bazaars and cathedrals, it is the same, call them what you like. They survive by pointing the finger of blame at each other.""Islam is in principle egalitarian, and has always had problems with power.""It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on.""It is very reasonable to worry about the harm done by organized religion, and to prefer looser and more private arrangements.""It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat.""It's unlikely that the organized religions will get more sectarian... or is it? I am not at all sure.""Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion.""Mormons... are so strong, they can handle wealth, they are confident. I think it is because they are not bogged down by rules for equality, but have a firmly defined system of relative status and responsible command.""Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.""Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.""Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?""Since 1970, relationships can be more volatile, jobs more ephemeral, geographical mobility more intensified, stability of marriage weaker.""Some scholars have been arguing that a civilizational clash between organized religions is the next step in human history.""The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting.""The natural response of the old-timers is to build a strong moral wall against the outside. This is where the world starts to be painted in black and white, saints inside, and sinners outside the wall.""The theory of cultural bias... is the idea that a culture is based on a particular form of organization. It can't be transplanted except to another variant of that organization.""What did our nation ever do to provoke these madly vicious enemies? What is seen as injustice in one place is seen as just requital in the other.""When we are reflecting on terrorism we can grieve for many things we do and have done.""Without that assured American largesse Israel would have been obliged to come to an accommodation with her neighbours.""Yes, disappointment over perceived unfairness, injustice, promises not kept, tends to go hand in hand with increasing prosperity. Expectations are dashed. What can I say!"
She was born as Margaret Mary Tew in San Remo, Italy to Gilbert and Phyllis (née Twomey) 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 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. Like her, he was a Catholic and had been born into a colonial family (in Simla, while his father served in the Indian army). They would have three children. She taught at University College, London, where she remained for around 25 years, becoming Professor of Social 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 published on such subjects as risk analysis and the environment, consumption and welfare economics, and food and ritual, all increasingly cited outside anthropology circles.
She taught and wrote in the USA for 11 years. After four years (1977—81) as Foundation Research Professor of Cultural Studies at the Russell Sage Foundation 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, and spent three years at Princeton University. In 1988, she returned to Britain, where she gave the Gifford Lectures in 1989.
In 1989, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1992, and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) 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.
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 regarded as dirt in a given society is any matter 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 that 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 that were also allowed to be sacrificed: animals that depend on herdsmen. Thus, Douglas concludes that animals that 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 pessimistic or optimistic in their understanding of purity or dirt as positive (dirt affirming) or otherwise.
In Natural Symbols (first published 1970), Douglas introduced the interrelated concepts of "group" (how clearly defined an individual's social position is as inside or outside a bounded social group) and "grid" (how clearly defined an individual's social role is within networks of social privileges, claims and obligations). The group-grid pattern was to be refined and redeployed in laying the foundations of cultural theory.
