Mary Douglas
Dame Mary Douglas, was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture, symbolism and risk, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.
Biography
She was born as Margaret Mary Tew in Sanremo, Italy, to Gilbert and Phyllis Tew. Her 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. Her mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, were raised in that faith. After their mother's death, the sisters were raised by their maternal grandparents and attended the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton. Mary went on to study at St. Anne's College, Oxford, from 1939 to 1943; there she was influenced by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. She graduated with a second-class degree.She worked in the British Colonial Office, where she encountered many social anthropologists. In 1946, Douglas returned to Oxford to take a "conversion" course in anthropology and registered for the doctorate in anthropology in 1949. She studied with M. N. Srinivas as well as E. E. Evans-Pritchard. In 1949 she did field work with the Lele people in what was then the Belgian Congo; this took her to village life in the region between the Kasai River and the Loange River, where the Lele lived on the edge of what had previously been the Kuba Kingdom. Ultimately, a civil war prevented her from continuing her fieldwork, but nevertheless, this led to Douglas' first publication, The Lele of the Kasai, published in 1963.
In the early 1950s, she completed her doctorate and married James Douglas. Like her, he was a Catholic and had been born into a colonial family. They had three children. She taught at University College London, where she remained for around 25 years, becoming Professor of Social Anthropology.
Her reputation was established by her most celebrated book, Purity and Danger.
She wrote The World of Goods with an econometrist, Baron Isherwood, which was considered a pioneering work on economic anthropology. She co-authored with Aaron Wildavsky a book on risk and danger. They used the cultural theory of risk to explore how and why social groups disregard some dangers but identify others as risks that require mitigating action.
She taught and wrote in the United States for 11 years. 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. After four years as Foundation Research Professor of Cultural Studies at the Russell Sage Foundation 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, and spent three years at Princeton University. She received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden in 1986. In 1988 she returned to Britain, where she gave the Gifford Lectures in 1989.
In 1989 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She 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. She died on 16 May 2007 in London, aged 86, from complications of cancer, survived by her three children. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, alongside her husband James, who had died in 2004.
In 2002 a twelve volume edition of her "Collected work" was published by Routledge.
Contributions to anthropology
''Fieldwork and Ethnography: The Lele of the Kasai''
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. Entry to this elite club involved undertaking intense ethnographic fieldwork following the model developed by Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Island. Edmund Leach described this approach to anthropology as ‘butterfly collecting’, it was a way of recording ‘Other Cultures’ before they were overwhelmed by European political, religious and cultural institutions. Underpinning this approach was a paradox, social anthropologists worked alongside colonial officials, indeed their safety could depend on the intervention of such officials yet, in their accounts of these other cultures, such colonial interventions were conspicuous by their absence. For example in his ethnography of the Nuer in Southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard omits to mention that the Nuer were in conflict with the British Colonial authorities in Khartoum who sent planes to intimidate them and even bomb their cattle.For the most part, Mary Douglas’s ethnography of the Lele hand cultivators who lived in the forests of South Western Belgian Congo, follows the conventional pattern of contemporary ethnographies. Working in the structural function tradition in which the anthropologist seeks to identify the key structures and institutions and examines how they work to maintain society, Douglas explored how the Lele maintained social stability when there was no apparent authority, no leaders with legitimate power. Douglas described a society in which older men collectively controlled key resources, women, cult membership and knowledge of divination and sorcery. Younger men were dependent on these older men but in time took their places. The tensions between these groups were kept under control by potential and actual accusations of sorcery. Older men were careful not cause offence and avoid accusations of sorcery and younger men could use sorcery accusations to blame their older relatives for their misfortunes.
Douglas’s ethnography differed from conventional ethnographies. In particular it was written in the past tense. Conventionally ethnographies were written in the present tense; an attempt to record and preserve a reality that was destined to disappear. Douglas explicitly acknowledged and examined the ways in which colonial authorities were changing the Lele. For example she noted that Belgian colonial authorities had outlawed the poison ordeal. This was an important mechanism that limited the number of sorcery accusations as both the accuser and accused had to take the poison and one was expected to die; either the guilty sorcerer or the false accuser.
When Douglas returned to Kasai in the 1987 she found major changes in social and religious relationships. Many younger Lele had taken advantage of European education and had migrated to the capital, Kinshasa where they thrived as professionals, entrepreneurs or catholic priests. Those older people who remained in the villages and retained allegiances to traditional beliefs, were by the 1980s experiencing economic hardship. Younger urban Lele were adopting Christianity. This changed the nature of sorcery accusations which were increasingly used as a way for young Lele priests to attack and destroy traditional religion through the purging of older sorcerers and their sinful practices. There were public purges of sorcerers and ‘Those who were suspected of sorcery were beaten and burned until they confessed’.