Douglas, Mary (1921–2007)

Mary Tew Douglas, a British anthropologist, is most famous for her work on ritual purity, bodily [Page 311]symbolism, and cultural perceptions of risk. Trained at Oxford under Evans-Pritchard, she began her career studying the Lele of the Congo. After numerous articles and two books on these and other central African peoples, she turned to more theoretical matters—notably, connections between how people order their conceptual worlds and how they order their social lives. She applied her insights broadly, arguing that culture and social structure must be seen as part of a single system, not as two unconnected parts of life.

Purity and Danger (1966) was Douglas's first book to attract attention from scholars of religion. There, she presented ritual purity and taboo as expressions of both mental and social dividing lines. For example, the rules in the Book of Leviticus that describe what the Hebrews could and could not eat were neither early health edicts nor random prohibitions. Instead, they resulted from anomalies in the Hebrews' classification system. Pigs were tabooed as food because they share the cloven hoof of (edible) ungulates but do not chew their cud. Animals that chew cud but do not have cloven hooves—camels, rock hyrax—were similarly shunned. Such purity systems, said Douglas, are not primitive; instead, they exemplify well-developed analytic thinking. For the Hebrews, they also simultaneously symbolized and enforced the Hebrews' status as a people set apart from others. Food, marital status, and social endogamy went together.

Douglas argued against dividing peoples into “moderns” and “primitives”—with the former somehow thinking more flexibly than the latter. In Natural Symbols (which appeared in two conceptually different versions in 1970 and 1973), she pointed out that Mbuti Pygmy theology was every bit as abstract as modern liberal Protestantism. Simultaneously, one can find what amounts to magical thinking both among the Lele and in contemporary urban professionals. There are, she said, three basic patterns: (1) societies that emphasize classification and hierarchy are prone to ritualism, (2) societies that emphasize individual enterprise are antiritualistic, and (3) societies that maintain high boundaries against outsiders while simultaneously claiming that all insiders are equal, suffer from sectarianism and fears that one's enemies are consorting with evil. (The Lele, along with many university departments, fit this mold.)

Scholars have since applied her “grid-group theory” to topics as varied as New Testament communities, 19th-century scientists, and ancient China. Douglas herself came to focus on why people in different societies evaluate risks differently (Risk and Culture, with Aaron Wildavsky, 1982). She then developed her approach in two directions. First, she emphasized the active role that people play in constructing both their cultural beliefs and their social orders (In the Active Voice, 1982). Then, she combined this active-voice sociology with a revised functionalism, asking what practical purpose various beliefs play in people's lives (How Institutions Think, 1986).

Douglas's ability to find the clever example and the perfect turn of phrase gave her work considerable influence, sometimes despite a logical imprecision hidden beneath her stellar prose. Her short essays, especially, were startlingly creative on a variety of fronts (e.g., Implicit Meanings, 1975). Above all, her work forces one to think about what one takes for granted about the world—and what this might mean about how people order their collective lives.

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