Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography

by Richard Fardon

Overview

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 Douglas' family background, and the pervasive influence of her catholic faith on her writings before providing an analysis of two of her most influential works; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). The final section deals with Douglas' more controversial writings in the fields of economics, consumption, religion and risk analysis in contemporary societies. Throughout, Fardon highlights the centrality of Douglas' role in the history of anthropology and the discipline's struggle to achieve relevance to contemporary, western societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415040921
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/27/1999
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Fardon is Professor of West African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Table of Contents

PART I Beginnings: 1920s–1950s 1 ‘Memories of a Catholic girlhood’: 1920s and 1930s 2 Oxford years: 1940s 3 The Africanist: 1950s PART II Synthesis: 1960s 4 Purity and Danger revisited 5 Natural Symbols defended PART III Excursions and adventures: 1970s–1990s 6 Rituals of consumption 7 Verbal weapons and environments at risk 8 Returning to religion – in the contemporary West 9 Returning to religion – in the Old Testament PART IV Conserving anthropological modernism 10 Do institutions think? 11 The secret consciousness of individuals and the consecrated society

Editorial Reviews

' This is a fine book, analysing the owrk of a wonerful person, the conservative rebel prophesying rampageously against the more staid orthodoxies of her contemporaries. If it was a subject worth giving ten years of study to complete , Mary Douglas is fortunate indeed to have been provided with so sensative an intellectual biographer'

' ... it is a necessity for every undergraduate student of anthropology to read the book, at a time when a clear political position and idiosyncratic ways of thinking are still controversial.' - Cambridge Anthropology

From the Publisher

Mary Douglas is one of Britain's best-known and most productive anthropologists, noted not just within the discipline but across a wider range of intellectual activity where she has applied her anthropological insights, ranging from theology and environmental studies, to economics and the study of consumer capitalism. She is also perhaps one of Britain's most controversial anthropologists, whether it be for her forthright rejection of standard utilitarian approaches in the disciplines she has tried to colonize, or for her lifelong search within her own discipline - while many of her colleagues were content to embrace a loosely defined relativism - for a universal explanatory formula for cultural difference. Different though it has been in its theoretical orientation, Douglas's career bears comparison with that of one of the few other women in the discipline to have achieved recognition outside it: the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. In a review some years back of a book on Mead by Robert Cassidy, Douglas was critical of his biographical approach. The book, she wrote, suffered "the usual limitation of hagiography, strong in praise . . . and weak in dealing with the enigmas and problems of a person living in a particular time and place". Douglas was particularly curious to understand why it was that Mead had been so marginal to mainstream American anthropology. "How much did she choose to be an outsider", she wrote; "how much was the choice a response to the opportunity structure she found herself facing - it is impossible to say." Mead's gender was not irrelevant, she suggested. "A man who showed such an early brilliance would have been sought by major institutions which would have forced the conflict of ambition and independence to be played within supporting structures eminently able to bestow awards on their favourites."

Times Literary Supplement