Mary Douglas
| Dame Mary Douglas | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Margaret Mary Tew 25 March 1921 Sanremo |
| Died | 16 May 2007 (aged 86) London |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Social anthropology, Comparative religion |
| Institutions | University College London, Russell Sage Foundation, Northwestern University, Princeton University |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford |
| Doctoral advisor | E. E. Evans-Pritchard |
| Known for | Purity and Danger, Natural Symbols, Cultural theory of risk |
| Influences | Émile Durkheim |
| Influenced |
David Bloor Steve Rayner Peter Brown |
| Notable awards | FBA, CBE, DBE |
Dame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA (25 March 1921 – 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.
She was born as Margaret Mary Tew in San Remo, Italy, to Gilbert and Phyllis (née Twomey) Tew. Her father was in the British colonial service. Her mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, were raised in that faith. After their mother's death, the sisters were raised by their maternal grandparents and attended the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton. Mary went on to study at St. Anne's College, Oxford, from 1939 to 1943; there she was influenced by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.
She worked in the British Colonial Office, here she encountered many social anthropologists. In 1946, Douglas returned to Oxford to take a "conversion" course in anthropology and registered for the doctorate in anthropology in 1949. She studied with M. N. Srinivas as well as E. E. 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 what had previously been the Kuba Kingdom. Ultimately, a civil war prevented her from continuing her fieldwork, but nevertheless, this led to Douglas' first publication, The Lele of the Kasai, published in 1963.
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