32 Facts About Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas was born as Margaret Mary Tew in Sanremo, Italy, to Gilbert and Phyllis Tew.

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.

Mary Douglas's mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, were raised in that faith.

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

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

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

Mary Douglas's reputation was established by her most celebrated book, Purity and Danger.

Mary Douglas wrote The World of Goods with an econometrist, Baron Isherwood, which was considered a pioneering work on economic anthropology.

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

Mary Douglas taught and wrote in the United States for 11 years.

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.

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

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.

Mary Douglas died on 16 May 2007 in London, aged 86, from complications of cancer, survived by her three children.

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.

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

Mary Douglas explicitly acknowledged and examined the ways in which colonial authorities were changing the Lele.

When Mary Douglas returned to Kasai in the 1987 she found major changes in social and religious relationships.

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.

In contrast to Claude Levi-Strauss, who takes 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.

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.

Mary Douglas emphasizes that in order to fully comprehend other societies understanding of taboo and sacred, one must first understand one's own.

Mary Douglas dismantles a common euro-centric misconception that rituals and rites for cleanliness were devised with hygiene or sanitation as its goals.

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.

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.

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.

In Natural Symbols, Mary Douglas introduced the interrelated concepts of "group" and "grid".

Mary Douglas brought together anthropologists and historians who explored the ways in which accusations of the use of supernatural powers by individuals were used to explain misfortune and allocate blame in different part of the globe and in different historical periods.

When Mary Douglas revisited the Lele in the 1987 she observed important changes in the blaming system.

Mary Douglas used historical anthropology to explore the ways in which the concept of sin was used to explain misfortune and allocate blame.

Mary Douglas examined the ways in which leprosy was linked to sin and used in 12th century Europe to allocate blame and protect from threats to the social order.

However, Mary Douglas argues that they perform the same function, they explain and allocate responsibility for misfortune to human agents.