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Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography
by Richard Fardon Routledge, 1999 320 pp.; $28.95, paper |
It has been the most passionate affirmation of Mary Douglas's writings that the taken-for-granted beliefs, ideas and emotions of a period, place or person never be considered aside from the social circumstances which gave rise to them and then sustained them.
Thus begins Richard Fardon's intellectual biography of the still-active British anthropologist and social theorist Mary Douglas, one of the more interesting and eclectic figures in academia over the last 40 years. Her writings have ranged widely from the theoretical to the political and religious, crossing disciplinary boundaries with ease. She's received attention in both the social sciences and humanities, in areas such as sociology, religious studies, psychology, political science, and economics.
Fardon uses his opening to explain that he will interpret Douglas' writings through her own theoretical lens. Douglas has remained a practicing Catholic throughout her life, and Fardon's biography traces the development of her social theories back to her upbringing in a convent school, with its strong emphasis on hierarchy and ritual. From this perspective, Mary Douglas has been an outsider in academia, with its near-unquestioned preference for egalitarianism and freedom from tradition. Indeed, this outsider status has allowed her to use the tools of anthropology to see through the accepted conventions and assumptions of academia itself.
Born in 1921 to parents on the staff of the British Civil Service in India, Mary suffered the loss of her mother at age 12, and the death of a grandparent who had largely raised her while her parents were in Asia. She was then sent to the Sacred Heart Convent School near London. Fardon delves into the history and life of this school and its focus on an "ultramontane," or Romanized, social environment where everyday behavior was "minutely governed." Behaviors from eating to bathing followed strict procedures. The day was punctuated with prayers, confessions, and devotions. A strict authority and hierarchy oversaw a complex system of rewards and punishments. The goal was the formation of an inner state, a particular character that would enable the student to serve the organic model of society and Church that Catholic social teaching presents.
While others may have resented this rigid order, Mary thrived under it. By the beginning of World War II she was at Oxford studying politics, philosophy, and economics. During the later years of the war, she worked in the colonial office—the experience which, by her own account, made her into an anthropologist. She returned to Oxford to study anthropology under E.E. Evans-Pritchard, one of the most influential British anthropologists of the time, and an adult convert to Catholicism. Several other anthropologists of Catholic confession were at Oxford at the time, unusual in a discipline often hostile to Christianity, but Fardon argues that the diversity of the group precluded the development of a Catholic "school" of anthropology.
After fieldwork in the Belgian Congo among the Lele, Douglas returned to Oxford to write up her dissertation, an analysis of Lele life in terms of how its lack of hierarchy and authority produced a low level of wealth, numerous witchcraft allegations, and schisms. Later, in her many books, she would expand the theme into a general theory of the interplay between social organization and culture. She was to make her name, however, among nonanthropologists with the publication in 1966 of Purity and Danger, now translated into more than a dozen languages.
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