May 16, 2007

Mary Douglas (March 25, 1921 to May 16, 2007) was an anthropologist, a scholar who specialized in applying anthropological techniques for a complex analysis of human culture. Her father Gilbert Tew (1884-1951) was a judge and her husband, James Douglas, an economist (1919-2004). She graduated from St. Anne's at Oxford in 1943. Her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article cites her two primary books as Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). Rules and Meanings:the anthropology of everyday knowledge (1973) is an anthology of articles Mary Douglas used in her teaching, and is constructed to put anthropology within a philosophical context. One of the texts Douglas used with her students is "The classification of animals in Thailand" by S. J. Tambiah (1967).

His article studies "spatial facts concerning domestic animals" wherein studies in an Thai village are contrasted with western habits. Both the dog (maa) and cat (maew) are allowed in the homes of the villagers, and neither is considered a food item. But they are veiwed differently. The dog is allowed access to the family but it is not for them a pet, In his words, the dog for this African culture is "given great license and little care." The dog is considered dirty and an example of licentious creatures. The cat, is veiwed differently. Less common in the village, the cat, like the dog, is not a pet in the Western sense , but it is viewed in a neutral manner compared to their analysis of the dogs in the village.

Although there is no taboo on eating a cat, the villagers do not eat cats or dogs. The dog is too dirty to eat, but they see the cat as too useful. For them the "cat brings coolness to the house." Also the cat is part of a "rain-making ritual." "The exposure of a cat to the sun...attracts rain."

More books followed:

The World of Goods, (1979)
Risk and Culture (1982)
Missing Persons (1998, with Steven Ney)

Douglas's insights continued to flourish, and according to the ODNB:

It was during this period, in 1987, that she read the book of Numbers for the first time in its entirety in preparation for delivering the Gifford lectures in the Edinburgh divinity school. This led her to reproach herself for having earlier mined Old Testament sources for apt illustrations, rather than treating them holistically, as her anthropological method recommended. The late harvest of a twenty-year period would be a trilogy, and its coda. In the Wilderness (1993) argued that the book of Numbers had been edited by its priestly redactors into a ring, and that only by appreciating this literary structure in the whole book was it possible to recover the inclusive social vision that was their message. Leviticus as Literature (1999) revisited the example that had been central to Purity and Danger to suggest that the book of Leviticus seen as a whole was a textual composition in three parts intended by its priestly editors to be analogous to other tripartite distinctions, including that of the courtyard, sanctuary, and shrine of the covenant in the tabernacle. Jacob's Tears: the Priestly Work of Reconciliation (2004) makes the most explicit argument associating the vision of the priestly editors of the Pentateuch of a religion that was strictly monotheistic and entirely rejected icons with their promotion of an inclusive social settlement meant to encompass all the descendants of Jacob. The priestly editors emerge as the heroes of the trilogy: wise, benign, and possessed of the artistry to express their ideas in literary forms that became invisible to readers for centuries. ...