Product Description

This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #714649 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover

This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century.

Richard Fardon covers Douglass family background, education and early research in the former Belgian Congo before providing an analysis of two of her most influential works: Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). A third section deals with Douglas's controversial writings in the fields of economics, consumption, religion and risk analysis in contemporary societies. In conclusion, Fardon assesses Douglass place in the history of British social anthropology and her crucial role in the disciplines struggle to achieve relevance to contemporary, western societies.
This book will be essential reading for anthropologists, as well as for students of other disciplines influenced by Douglas's theories, who wish to know more about her sources of inspiration. It will also provide an indispensable aid to further resear

Customer Reviews

The fox who became a hedgehog

Mary Douglas is a fox who became a hedgehog. Richard Fardon shows Douglas as a divergent thinker whose work has nevertheless converged upon a single theme: the social control of cognition. This admirable text will surely become the standard reference work for all who follow her intellectual development. It could almost be called "The Annotated Mary Douglas", so detailed and careful are Fardon's approaches to controversial aspects of her work and the interpretations put upon them. In 11 wide-ranging chapters, he covers everything, from purity and danger to risk and consumption, from the pangolin to the Pentateuch.

Fardon's analyses are impressive. I should like to have known more about Douglas's education at the Sacred Heart Convent, Roehampton, in the 1930s, and the impact of metaphysical logic and Catholic social teaching upon her intellectual life. I attended convent schools in the 1960s and 1970s. No matter what question was asked about the nature of society, the reply usually avoided any contentious points. Douglas's religious education at the Sacred Heart at Roehampton was probably more thorough, and may have been more radical, than my own: there may have been more widespread lay involvement in Catholic social action in England in the 1930s than in the 1970s. But exactly how much socio-economic analysis accompanied discussions of the organic model of society proposed in Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical "Quadragesimo anno"? The 1930s were the decade of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and the election of the Popular Front in France. What were the reactions of the grandly bourgeois or aristocratic pupils and ladies of the Sacred Heart?

Convent education has in the past attracted many criticisms, of which several seem relevant to Antonia White's (Eirene Botting's) descriptions, in Frost in May (1933), and The Lost Traveller (1950), of Roehampton before the First World War. The Sacred Heart Convent was a hermetic environment, where the minute regulation of every aspect of daily life produced both exemplary moral behaviour and the ruthless humiliation of those who refused to conform. Aristocratic attitudes, lady-like behaviour and the existing social order, were conflated with Christian principles and seen as normative. The convent did not produce subversives: pupils of a rebellious tendency, like Eirene Botting, were asked to leave. But Mary Tew (later Douglas) was the convent's star pupil: she must have been a very good, orderly, hard-working girl. At the risk of sounding trite, it is easy to see correspondences between Douglas's own writings and her Sacred Heart education. Her polemical approach, plus her simplification of arguments so that they can be construed more clearly, resemble a French essay plan. Her grids and groups can be seen as a tidy mind's longing to classify, her creativity as a stress response to the complex anomalies which elude its grasp. Her impatience with disorganized protest can be traced to Continental and English traditions of Catholic social action.

Douglas's transition to the outside world, to Paris, Sacred Heart accommodation and St. Anne's College at Oxford, and the Colonial Office, seems to have passed smoothly. Yet once she had completed her doctoral fieldwork in the Belgian Congo, left the Catholic sympathies of Oxford, had married and taken up a post at University College London, she felt hurt at being overlooked by her mostly male colleagues. Marginalized and misunderstood, her Catholicism and social conservatism held against her, she departed in 1977 for the United States and an eventual professorship at Northwestern University.

Fardon calls Douglas the last of the anthropological modernists, but also describes her as a utilitarian anti-idealist. Her progressivism appears romantic from current standpoints, which accept the biological bases of human behaviour. Her attempt to theorize the social control of cognition is a brave one, however uncertain its outcome may be. So are her other concerns, social inclusion and imagining the ideal society. Today we have positive psychologists, so why not optimal anthropologists? But her blueprint for a religiously-aware, ritualistic, benevolent hierarchy, in which everyone has complementary roles, is essentially elitist. How many people are altruistic enough to sacrifice their own wants and status drives for the common good? Or is their consent dependent on mass illusion, a misperception of the social order?

Fardon concludes his book by repeating what he sees as the key to Douglas's work, the belief that mankind only knows God through society. But Fardon's real accomplishment is to show Mary Douglas as a true scholar, whose intellectual creativity, courage, and integrity, have at last received the recognition they deserved.