Work · Sociology & Social Theory
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology
Relates religious and bodily symbolism to two dimensions of social life, “group” (bounded membership) and “grid” (shared rules of classification): the stronger the social control, the more formal the treatment of the body and the higher the value placed on ritual.
Introduction
Natural Symbols appeared in 1970, four years after Purity and Danger, and in Douglas’s own account gave up that book’s contrast between “primitive” and modern religion. Borrowing from the sociolinguist Basil Bernstein, she related the coherence of symbolic systems to the boundedness of social groups and introduced the scheme of “grid” and “group”. A chapter on “the two bodies” treats the physical body as the medium through which the social body expresses its demands for control. Douglas framed the book as an answer to a modern “contempt of ritual”, illustrated by the reaction of London’s Irish Catholics when the Church ended the rule of abstaining from meat on Fridays. Reviewers such as Edmund Leach read it as a defence of ritual, hierarchy and Catholicism.
Connections
Builds on
- Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo1966 · Mary Douglas
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