Dame Mary Douglas, was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism, whose area of speciality was social anthropology.
23 Facts About Mary Douglas
2.
Mary Douglas was born as Margaret Mary Tew in Sanremo, Italy, to Gilbert and Phyllis Tew.
3.
Mary Douglas's 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.
4.
Mary Douglas's mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, were raised in that faith.
5.
Mary Douglas worked in the British Colonial Office, where she encountered many social anthropologists.
6.
In 1946, Mary Douglas returned to Oxford to take a "conversion" course in anthropology and registered for the doctorate in anthropology in 1949.
7.
Mary Douglas taught at University College London, where she remained for around 25 years, becoming Professor of Social Anthropology.
8.
Mary Douglas's reputation was established by her most celebrated book, Purity and Danger.
9.
Mary Douglas wrote The World of Goods with an econometrist, Baron Isherwood, which was considered a pioneering work on economic anthropology.
10.
Mary Douglas taught and wrote in the United States for 11 years.
11.
Mary Douglas published on such subjects as risk analysis and the environment, consumption and welfare economics, and food and ritual, all increasingly cited outside anthropology circles.
12.
Mary Douglas received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden in 1986.
13.
Mary Douglas became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1992, and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's New Year's Honours List published on 30 December 2006.
14.
Mary Douglas died on 16 May 2007 in London, aged 86, from complications of cancer, survived by her three children.
15.
Mary Douglas' book Purity and Danger is an analysis of the concepts of ritual purity and pollution in different societies and times to construct a general concept on how ritual purity is established, and is considered a key text in social anthropology.
16.
At the difference to Claude Levi-Strauss, who utilizes a structuralist approach, Mary Douglas seeks to demonstrate how peoples' classifications play a role in determining what is considered abnormal and their treatment of it.
17.
Mary Douglas insists on the importance of understanding the concept of pollution and ritual purity by comparing our own understandings and rituals to "primitive" rituals.
18.
Mary Douglas emphasizes that in order to fully comprehend other societies understanding of taboo and sacred, one must first understand one's own.
19.
Mary Douglas dismantles a common euro-centric misconception that rituals and rites for cleanliness were devised with hygiene or sanitation as its goals.
20.
For Mary Douglas, there exists a clear distinction between recognizing the side-benefits of ritual actions and considering them as a whole and sufficient explanation for ritual actions.
21.
Furthermore, Mary Douglas recognized that there exists a strong resemblance between European rituals and primitive rituals in principle, omitting the differing foundations that separate European rituals based on hygiene and primitive ones on symbolism, European rituals of cleanness seek to kill off germs, whereas primitive rituals of cleanness seek to ward off spirits.
22.
Mary Douglas is known for her interpretation of the book of Leviticus, in the Chapter The Abomination of Leviticus in Purity and Danger, in which she analyses the dietary laws of Leviticus II through a structuralist and symbolist point of view, and for her role in creating the Cultural Theory of risk.
23.
In Natural Symbols, Mary Douglas introduced the interrelated concepts of "group" and "grid".