Douglas, Mary (1921–2007)

Mary Douglas, one of the most celebrated social anthropologists of her time, was born in 1921 and died in 2007. She was the author of more than a dozen books. Her first book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo, published in 1966, established her reputation. Among her other books are Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970), Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975), The World of Goods: An Anthropological Theory of Consumption (1979), written with Baron Isherwood, and Risk and Culture (1980), written with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky.

She received her PhD in anthropology from Oxford University, where she was a student of the distinguished anthropologist E. E. Evans-Prichard. Douglas taught at the University of London from 1952 to 1978, was a resident scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York for a few years, and then taught at Northwestern University (1981–1985) and Princeton University (1985–1988). She wrote on a wide variety of topics, from rituals, religions, and taboos in preliterate cultures to behavior in contemporary consumer cultures.

Douglas has a discussion in her book Natural Symbols that led to the development of grid-group [Page 478]theory, the topic of most significance to those interested in consumer cultures. Douglas applied grid-group theory in a seminal article, “In Defence of Shopping,” which appeared originally in her collection of essays Objects and Objections, published by the Toronto Semiotic Circle, and later in Pasi Falk and Colin Cambell's edited book, The Shopping Experience.

Grid-group theory suggests that individuals face two questions in establishing an identity: “Who am I?” and “What should I do?” They arrive at their identities by becoming members of groups—Douglas calls them lifestyles—with either strong boundaries that contain them tightly or with weak boundaries that allow them to pass in and out of the group with ease. They answer the second question by becoming members of groups that have either few rules or numerous and varied rules and prescriptions.

This generates four, and only four, lifestyles, which are shown here:

Douglas offers an important insight about these four cultural types in her article on shopping:

These groups are important, Douglas suggests, because they shape our consumer choices.

It is our cultural alignments, she explains, that are the strongest predictors of our consumer preferences. When we are wandering around shopping centers or doing any shopping, we are actualizing the lifestyle to which we are attached and rejecting the kinds of choices made by members of other lifestyles. She writes,