mary douglas presentation

Mary Douglas (March 25, 1921- May 16, 2007)

Douglas attended the Sacred Heart Convent School in Roehampton,

London, England.

• Douglas found a new sense of security, stability and belonging in the convent school.

• Scared Heart introduced Douglas to a richly constructed world.

Douglas was interested in social policy and wanted to study

sociology but ultimately focused on politics, philosophy, and economics

at Oxford University.

After graduating from university in 1943, Douglas volunteered in the

British Colonial Service where she began to meet anthropologists.

She studied under Evans-Pritchard

who was her teacher, mentor and role model.

In 1949, Douglas began her fieldwork in the Belgian Congo and studied the tribe

the Lele of the Kasai.

In 1951, Mary married James Douglas

• For the next several years, Douglas focused on caring for her family.

• She had one daughter, Janet, born in 1951.

• And two sons, James, born in 1954 and Philip, born in 1956.

In 1966, after taking a breakto care for her family,Douglas published her mostfamous piece of work Purityand Danger: An analysis ofconcepts of pollution andtaboo.

Douglas explored relationships between dirt, holiness, impurity and hygiene. She dealt with the ways in which the human body is used as a social and religious symbol.

Douglas’s next major book was Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology published in 1970.

Douglas proposed a new methodology for comparative anthropology known as

the grid-and-group analysis.

In 1978, Douglas published The World of Goods with Baron Isherwood which

was her collaborative research on British consumerism.

In 1982, Douglas co-authored the book Risk and Culture with Aaron Wildavsky.

In 1986, Douglas published How Institutions Think which was an

analysis of social accountability in institutional settings.

The last book that Douglas wrote was Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring

Composition published in 2007.

On May 8, 2007, Douglas was made a dame commander of the British Empire. On May 16, 2007, Dame Mary Douglas died in

London of complications of cancer.