Mary Douglas

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Dame Mary Douglas DBE (born Margaret Mary Tew ; born March 25, 1921 in San Remo , Italy , † May 16, 2007 in London ) was a British social anthropologist .

Life

Mary Douglas' father worked in the British colonial administration in Burma , she herself grew up with her grandparents in southern England, where she attended a convent school.

During the Second World War she worked as a civil servant in the Belgian Congo . From 1946 to 1951 she studied at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology with Edward E. Evans-Pritchard and Franz Baermann Steiner .

In 1949/50 and 1953 she did field research stays in the Belgian Congo with the Lele . Immediately after completing her doctorate in 1951, she married the conservative politician James Douglas and had their first of three children. In the same year she moved to University College London , where she taught for the next 25 years. In 1974 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Between 1977 and 1981 she worked for the Russell Sage Foundation in New York . From 1981 until her retirement in the late 1980s, she was a professor at Northwestern University ( Chicago ). In 1989 she became a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy .

Her work was particularly influenced by Émile Durkheim and her teacher Edward E. Evans-Pritchard .

Main work: Purity and Danger

Douglas' treatise on the ethnology of religion, published in 1966, deals with culture-specific notions of the correct order of things, which are mostly associated with religiously sanctioned concepts of pure and unclean.

In her opinion, the concept of 'purity and defilement' is at the core of religious classifications. Douglas' interest in this regard stems from earlier discussions about the ethnology of religion as well as from her own research results with the Lele. The Lele differentiate between buhonyi (virtuous behavior such as friendliness, politeness, shyness, shame) and hama (physical impurity up to blood, excrement, maggots, used clothes, sexual intercourse). The Lele say that to insult a man is like rubbing excrement ( tebe ) on his face (Douglas 1975: 9-13). The Lele also abhor milk and eggs, as these are physical products and thus also hama . Many carnivorous animals, foul-smelling animals and a type of monkey that feed on the sap of palm trees, among other things, are regarded as hama and are therefore not eaten.

According to Douglas, this symbolism is not about hygiene , but about symbolic classification systems to differentiate between

  • clean and dirty,
  • human and animal,
  • male and female,
  • Village and forest,
  • upstream and downstream etc.

According to Douglas, dirt is not absolute, but rather lies in the eye of the beholder. However, dirt always violates a relative order, which is why one tries to restore this order by cleaning or tidying up. Wherever disorder is felt, there are also ideas of order and of what could endanger it.

Douglas clarifies this universality of the system of order she claims in her analysis of the purity laws laid down in Leviticus : The purity of animals is primarily determined by whether they are cloven-hoofed or odd-toed ungulates, ruminants or non-ruminants. Thus, for example, pigs or camels are considered unclean and may therefore not be consumed. Douglas excludes some borderline cases in her work and tries to uncover a logic in the Mosaic dietary laws.

Accordingly, the purity of an animal can be tied to its form of movement: All animals are considered pure that are completely adapted to movement in the element belonging to them (air, earth, water). Animals are considered unclean if their locomotion cannot be clearly assigned to an element and thus violate the classification system.

The food classification used by Douglas differs completely from the view of her contemporary Marvin Harris on this subject, who assumes that food taboos serve an adapted conservation purpose.

literature

Primary literature

  • 1950. People of the Lake Nyasa Region . London: Oxford University Press. (published under her maiden name Mary Tew).
  • 1951. A Form of Polyandry among the Lele of the Kasai. In: Africa 21 (1): 1-12.
  • 1952. Alternate Generations among the Lele of the Kasai. In: Africa 22 (1): 59-65.
  • 1954. The Lele of Kasai. In: African Worlds, edited by Daryll Forde. Oxford 1954
  • 1955. Social and Religious Symbolism of the Lele of the Kasai. In: Zaire 9 (4): 385-402.
  • 1957. Animals in Lele Religious Symbolism. In: Africa 27 (1): 46-58.
  • 1960. Blood Debts Among the Lele. In: Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 90 (1): 1-28.
  • 1963. The Lele of Kasai . London: Oxford University Press.
  • 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo . New York: Praeger Publishers. (German: Purity and Danger. A study on ideas about pollution and taboo. Berlin 1985)
  • 1968. Pollution. In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences Vol. 12: 336-342.
  • 1970. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. (German: ritual, taboo and body symbolism. Social anthropological studies in industrial society and tribal culture. Frankfurt am Main 1974)
  • 1975. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  • 1987. How Institutions Think. London: Routledge and L. Kegan Paul. (German: How institutions think. Frankfurt am Main 1991)
  • 1993. In the Wilderness. The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. Sheffield 1993.
  • 1996. Thought styles. Critical essays on good taste. 1996.
  • 1999. Leviticus as Literature. Oxford 1999.

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikibooks: Sociological Classics: Mary Douglas  - Learning and Teaching Materials

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed May 22, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Douglas, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Margaret Mary Tew
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British social anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH San Remo
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 2007
Place of death London