Mary Douglas (nee Tew) (born 1921) is a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism. Her area is social anthropology, where she is considered a follower of Durkheim, with a strong interest in comparative religion.

She was born in San Remo, Italy; her parents were in the British colonial service. She had a Catholic education at the Sacred Heart Convent, in Roehampton, and then studied at the University of Oxford from 1939 to 1942/3. There she was influenced by E.E. Evans-Pritchard .

She worked in the British Colonial Office until 1947, when she returned to Oxford to take up graduate study she had left. She studied with M. N. Srinivas as well as 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 the previous Kuba kingdom .

In the early 1950s she completed her doctorate, married James Douglas and started a family of three children. She taught at University College, London, where she remained for around 25 years. Subsequently she has had positions in the USA. Her reputation was established by her book Purity and Danger (1966).

Works

• The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
• Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966)
• Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970)
• Implicit Meanings (1975) essays
• Evans-Pritchard (1980)
• The World of Goods (1979)
• In the Active Voice (1982)
• How Institutions Think (1987)
• Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992)
• Leviticus as Literature (1999)

Reference

• Mary Douglas: an Intellectual Biography (1999) Richard Fardon