Mary Douglas An Intellectual Biography

Times Literary Supplement

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."