Mary Douglas

Dame Mary Douglas, (25 March 1921 – 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture, symbolism and risk, whose area of speciality was social anthropology.

Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.

She was born as Margaret Mary Tew in Sanremo, Italy, to Gilbert and Phyllis (née Twomey) Tew.

Her father, Gilbert Tew, was a member of the Indian Civil Service serving in Burma, as was her maternal grandfather, Sir Daniel Twomey, who retired as the Chief Judge of the Chief Court of Lower Burma.

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 St. Anne's College, Oxford, from 1939 to 1943; there she was influenced by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

She graduated with a second-class degree.

She worked in the British Colonial Office, where she encountered many social anthropologists.

When Mary Douglas started her fieldwork in the late 1940s in the Belgian Congo, British social anthropology was a small elite discipline dominated by men who, as Edmund Leach caustically commented, saw themselves as gentlemen scholars.

Entry to this elite club involved undertaking intense ethnographic fieldwork following the model developed by Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Island.

Edmund Leach described this approach to anthropology as ‘butterfly collecting’, it was a way of recording ‘Other Cultures’ before they were overwhelmed by European political, religious and cultural institutions.

Underpinning this approach was a paradox, social anthropologists worked alongside colonial officials, indeed their safety could depend on the intervention of such officials yet, in their accounts of these other cultures, such colonial interventions were conspicuous by their absence.

For example in his ethnography of the Nuer in Southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard omits to mention that the Nuer were in conflict with the British Colonial authorities in Khartoum who sent planes to intimidate them and even bomb their cattle.

For the most part, Mary Douglas’s ethnography of the Lele hand cultivators who lived in the forests of South Eastern Belgian Congo, follows the conventional pattern of contemporary ethnographies.

Working in the structural function tradition in which the anthropologist seeks to identify the key structures and institutions and examines how they work to maintain society, Douglas explored how the Lele maintained social stability when there was no apparent authority, no leaders with legitimate power.

Douglas described a society in which older men collectively controlled key resources, women, cult membership and knowledge of divination and sorcery.

Younger men were dependent on these older men but in time took their places.

In 1946, Douglas returned to Oxford to take a "conversion" course in anthropology and registered for the doctorate in anthropology in 1949.

She studied with M. N. Srinivas as well as E. E. 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 what had previously been the Kuba Kingdom.

In the early 1950s, she completed her doctorate and 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 had three children.

She taught at University College London, where she remained for around 25 years, becoming Professor of Social Anthropology.

Ultimately, a civil war prevented her from continuing her fieldwork, but nevertheless, this led to Douglas' first publication, The Lele of the Kasai, published in 1963.

Her reputation was established by her most celebrated book, Purity and Danger (1966).

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.

She wrote The World of Goods (1978) with an econometrist, Baron Isherwood, which was considered a pioneering work on economic anthropology.

She co-authored with Aaron Wildavsky a book on risk and danger.

They used the cultural theory of risk to explore how and why social groups disregard some dangers but identify others as risks that require mitigating action

She taught and wrote in the United States 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.

She received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden in 1986.

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.

In 2002 a twelve volume edition of her "Collected work" was published by Routledge.

Her husband died in 2004.

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.