http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1805952.ece

From The Times
May 18, 2007
Professor Dame Mary Douglas
Challenging and wide-ranging social anthropologist whose ideas and
influence reverberated far beyond her discipline
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Dame Mary Douglas was one of the outstanding British social
anthropologists of the latter half of the 20th century. Her books,
Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970), were seminal for
anthropologists and were widely appreciated in other disciplines.

A Sunday Times survey of "Makers of the 20th Century" in 1991 listed
Purity and Danger among the 100 most influential nonfiction works
since 1945; only four women and four anthropologists made the list.

Starting as an Africanist, she branched out to cover contemporary
Western society, addressing such topics as risk analysis and
environmentalism, and food and consumption. Old Testament religion was
another interest, first in her famous discussion of the "abominations
of Leviticus", in Purity and Danger, and latterly in studies of
Numbers and Leviticus.

Douglas aroused strong opinions among fellow anthropologists, partly
because of her personality but also because of her dismissal of people
whose work she did not rate. "The time has come to topple Mary Douglas
from her pedestal" was the headline to an article in The Times
Literary Supplement.

Her intellectual self-confidence was combined with a sense of driving
purpose. Some found her divisive as she used her penetrating intellect
to force home a conclusion. She seemed to sense herself as an
outsider, although she stood in the central tradition of
Durkheim-descended British social anthropology. She held few
institutional positions in her discipline, but many of her ideas and
insights entered its general patrimony. As a follower of Durkheim she
had to contend with the different perspectives of those who looked to
Max Weber or Karl Marx.

Her interest in food as "a system of communication" provoked protests
in the House of Commons. Because some of this research had public
funding via the Social Science Research Council, MPs raised hostile
questions about its usefulness, and scathing references were made to
"the sociology of the biscuit". She justified herself vigorously,
claiming that study of the social costs of changes in eating habits on
grounds of advice, availability of food, and changes in price or
incomes was useful.

Mary Douglas was very much the product of her up-bringing. She was
born in San Remo in 1921, where her parents had stopped while
returning home from Burma. Gilbert Tew, her father, was a member of
the Indian Civil Service. Of working-class background, he won a
scholarship to read classics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He wrote
much on angling and in her last years Douglas edited his writings for
publication. She inherited her good looks and her religion from her
mother, Phyllis Twomey, an Irish Catholic.

When her mother died, Mary was 12 and her younger sister 9, and their
grandparents in Devon brought them up. The two girls were awarded
bursaries to board at Sacred Heart School in Roehampton. The nuns, if
not quite proxy parents, shaped Mary's values – values which would be
reflected in much of her work on institutions, rules, symbols and
hierarchy. The nuns may also have fired her ambition to excel; in her
later professional career she sought scholarly approbation and seemed
almost to court disciples.

After graduating in PPE at Oxford in 1943, she served in the Colonial
Office until 1947. This proved to be significant because Britain still
ruled a vast empire and she met a number of anthropologists. She then
enrolled as a research studen at the Oxford Institute of Social
Anthropology, headed by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, an Africanist and then
the leading practitioner of the discipline. Few universities offered
anthropology and the institute was the place for training as Africa
was the place for fieldwork.

Supported with a war veteran's grant, Douglas began fieldwork for her
DPhil in 1949, studying the Lele, a matrilineal society living on the
forest/ savannah divide in the remote highlands of the southern
Belgian Congo.

In 1951 she accepted an anthropology lectureship at University College
London and married in the same year. For the next few years she
concentrated on caring for her family and completing her doctorate (in
1953). She published her monograph, The Lele of Kasai, in 1963.
British reviewers were less than appreciative of research in
French-speaking Africa, and French anthropologists in turn did not
engage with work written in English. The book was, many years later,
translated into French.

Douglas returned to the Lele in 1987 and was depressed at the region's
ecological degradation and the complicity of the indigenised Catholic
Church in vicious witch-killing.

Purity and Danger – An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
testified to an outstanding talent. Drawing widely on different
sources and disciplines and her Lele research, Douglas explored the
relationships between dirt, holiness, impurity and hygiene. The book
had a great impact outside anthropology, went through numerous
editions and was translated into at least 15 languages.

Natural Symbols (1970) received a more mixed reception among
anthropologists. It was felt to have taken the insights of Purity and
Danger too far, and some disliked its defence of Catholic traditionalism.

It introduced the "group" and "grid" tools of analysis, so
characteristic of her later work.

The first referred to the clarity of the boundaries around a group to
which people belong; the second to the strength of the rules which
govern how people relate to one another. Thus, a hierarchical society
with strong ties scores highly on group and grid, but an individualist
or market-driven one will be weak on both.

In these years Douglas also emerged as something of a public figure,
writing frequently in New Society (a social science weekly founded in
1962) and giving talks on the BBC Third Programme, many of which were
published in The Listener.

She was promoted to a personal chair at UCL in 1970, one of a very few
women professors in the social sciences in Britain. Family and
research were her priorities; she avoided university committees and
was never head of department. Although not a feminist, she brought to
her work the feminine concerns of the home, its meals and upkeep, the
domestic rituals of cleaning, shopping and marking special events with
friends and family Douglas spoke rapidly in lectures and seminars, and
students quickly became aware of her energy, engagement with the
subject to hand and her remarkable intellect. But she was also
formidable; forthrightly and doggedly challenging what she regarded as
slipshod thinking or careless expression.

Having "done" Africa, her interests extended to contemporary Western
society; 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. The World of
Goods (1978), for example, was written with an econometrician, Baron
Isherwood, and was a pioneering work on economic anthropology.

Douglas could spot the symbolic significance of the most humdrum
activities such as the choice of food and seating arrangements at
meals. She argued that the changes in Vatican II, affecting the Mass,
abstinence and the habits worn by some religious orders weakened the
social rituals and thereby the social boundaries of Catholicism.
Indeed, some complained that on occasion her work displayed her
religion too openly; one critic dismissed Natural Symbols as Roman
Catholic propaganda.

It would be difficult to understand Douglas without appreciating her
devotion to her husband James. Both had parents from the Anglo-Indian
world and inherited their Catholicism from their mothers. James
Douglas was director of the Conservative Research Department between
1970 and 1974.

Widely respected for his intellect and ability to transcend
disciplinary boundaries, he stimulated and encouraged her to look
beyond anthropology in her work. She turned down offers of chairs
elsewhere because of her concern for his career. Both were
Conservatives of the R. A. Butler kind, even Christian Democrats. They
were out of sympathy with Thatcherism and Reaganism, regarding the
emphasis on competition and individualism as a licence for selfishness
and a cause of social divisions. By 1977, with their children grown up
and James having retired, Mary Douglas, finding British university
life less congenial (the anthropology department at UCL was becoming
increasingly factionalised), opted to spend the next 11 years in the
US. After four years (1977-81) as Foundation Research Professor of
Cultural Studies at the Russell Sage Institute 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. She was
elected FBA in 1989 and appointed CBE in 1992.

In the 1970s she had begun a productive collaboration at Sage with
Aaron Wildavsky, the brilliant political scientist at the University
of California Berkeley. They co-wrote Risk and Culture(1982);
subtitled "An essay on the selection of technologies and environmental
dangers", it studied the perceptions of risk prompted by the concerns
of the US ecological movement. Ten years later she collected a volume
of essays on the theme of Risk and Blame. In 1987 she published the
influential How Institutions Think.

In later years she studied the impact of modernisation on religion,
noting the revival of traditional and even fundamentalist religions,
for example Christianity in the US and Islam in the Middle East. She
also immersed herself in the Old Testament, learning Hebrew and
drawing on the help of Hebrew scholars to produce In the Wilderness
(1993), a study of the book of Numbers, and Leviticus; A Literature
(1999).

In her eighties she did not slow down in spite of a serious illness
and a mugging in Waterlow Park, North London, on her return from
church. She continued to write and travel, receiving awards and giving
distinguished lectures. She enjoyed domestic chores and she and James
(both fine cooks) were generous hosts at their house on the Holly
Lodge estate in Highgate, London. They had simple tastes, were not
particularly interested in the arts, and most of all enjoyed vigorous
discussion, leavened with a little gossip about politics and academe.
Until James's death in 2004 theirs was a marriage of minds as well as
hearts.

Douglas was appointed DBE in the last New Year's Honours List. She is
survived by two sons and a daughter.

Professor Dame Mary Douglas, anthropologist, was born on March 25,
1921. She died on May 16, 2007, aged 86