Mary Douglas

Dzieła

• 1966Czystość i zmaza: analiza pojęć nieczystości i tabu

  Porównawcze studium idei skażenia, od Lele po przepisy o pokarmach w Księdze Kapłańskiej i nowoczesną higienę: brud jest produktem ubocznym systemu klasyfikacji; reguły czystości strzegą jego granic, a anomalii unika się jako niebezpiecznych lub czci się je w rytuale.

• 1970Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (Symbole naturalne: badania nad kosmologią)

  Wiąże symbolikę religijną i cielesną z dwoma wymiarami życia społecznego, „grupą” (ograniczona przynależność) i „siatką” (wspólne reguły klasyfikacji): im silniejsza kontrola społeczna, tym bardziej sformalizowane traktowanie ciała i tym wyżej ceniony rytuał.

Stanowisko

Douglas is on the map because her work on purity, classification and institutions was taken up far beyond anthropology. In “Purity and Danger” (1966) she argued, drawing on Durkheim, Robertson Smith and Franz Steiner’s lectures on taboo, that ideas of pollution are neither primitive hygiene nor mere superstition but a way of keeping a system of classification in order: dirt is “matter out of place”, and what does not fit the categories is either avoided as dangerous or, like the pangolin among the Lele, honoured in ritual. Her reading of the dietary laws of Leviticus 11 became a much-cited example; in “Leviticus as Literature” (1999) she revised it, holding that the animals forbidden as food were protected rather than abhorred. “Natural Symbols” (1970) related cosmologies and attitudes to the body to two dimensions of social life, the strength of group boundaries (“group”) and of shared rules (“grid”). With Aaron Wildavsky she applied this “cultural theory” to the perception of risk, and in “How Institutions Think” (1986) she followed Durkheim and Ludwik Fleck in arguing that institutions shape what their members classify, remember and forget. Kristeva built her theory of abjection partly on Douglas’s account of defilement, and Butler took up her image of the body as a bounded system. Reviewers of “Risk and Culture” doubted its specific correlations, and Edmund Leach, according to Richard Fardon, charged that Douglas had put her anthropology in the service of Catholic belief.

Życie i kontekst

Mary Douglas was born Margaret Mary Tew in Sanremo, Italy, on 25 March 1921; her father served in the Indian Civil Service in Burma. She grew up with her grandparents in Devon and attended the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton. She read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford (BA 1943) and worked in the Colonial Office until 1947, where she first met anthropologists. Back at Oxford she studied social anthropology at the institute led by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, at first her supervisor, and did fieldwork among the Lele of the Kasai in the Belgian Congo (1949–50, 1953), the basis of her doctorate. In 1951 she married James Douglas and joined University College London, where she held a personal chair from 1970. In 1977 she moved to the Russell Sage Foundation in New York; from 1981 to 1985 she was Avalon Professor at Northwestern University, then spent two years at Princeton. She returned to London in 1988, was made a Dame in 2006 and died there on 16 May 2007.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
• Purity and Danger (1966)
• Risk and Culture (with A. Wildavsky, 1982)
• How Institutions Think (1986)
• Leviticus as Literature (1999)