Mary Douglas
Born Margaret Mary Tew in 1921 in Italy (while her British parents were on their way back to Burma, where her father worked in the Indian Civil Service for the British government), Mary Douglas has been one of the twentieth century's most influential anthropologists and scholars of classification systems and institutions. She obtained her Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1951, has carried out fieldwork in, among other places, the Congo, and has held teaching positions in both the U.K. and the U.S. Although she has most recently turned her attention to studying Biblical texts as literature, Douglas is still best known for her 1966 book, Purity and Danger, which was a cross-cultural study of ritual systems of cleanliness, pollution, and taboo (a term that entered English in the late-eighteenth century, as a result of Captain James Cook's travels in the Polynesian islands, meaning "specially marked," as in set apart, forbidden, or consecrated). Douglas, assuming that systems of purity or cleanliness, rather than being primary concerned with establishing hygenic conditions, functioned instead to establish order on an otherwise non-ordered world, studied systems of allowable and disallowable behaviors--such as the famous dietary codes as found in the Hebrew Bible's books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Her conclusions, well in line with developments at this time in such other fields as Linguistics and Semiotics, concerned the manner in which relationships established within human symbol systems establish meaningful conditions, rather than the generally held view that such symbols embody and thereby convey and communicate previously existing or essential meanings.
Major Works
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Purity and Taboo
(1966)
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970)
Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975)
Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental
Dangers (1982 with Aaron Wildavsky)
How Institutions Think (1987)
Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992)
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers
(1993)
Leviticus as Literature (1999)
Quotation
" If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of
dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place.
This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of
ordered relations and a contrevention of that order. Dirt then, is never
a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt
is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter,
in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements."
- from Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
Select Web Resources on Douglas
Interview
with Mary Douglas (April 2003)
Entry
on Mary Douglas in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Society
Press
release for Mary Douglas's 2003 Dwight Terry lectures at Yale University
Secondary Literature on Douglas and Religion
Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory
Text, chapter 5. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline,
pp. 193-196. Fortress Press, 1995.
Moore, Jerry D., Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological
Theories and Theorists, chapter 20. Altamira Press, 1998
Richard Farndon, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography. Routledge,
1999.