ANTHROPOLOGY WITH A DIFFERENCE: How Mary Douglas makes sense of hierarchy, ritual, and the nature of religious change. A profile.
Baumann, Paul
ANTHROPOLOGY WITH A DIFFERENCE Mary Douglas at 80 Paul Baumann In its issue of October 6,1995, the Times Literary Supplement printed a list of the "hundred books which have most influenced...
...At an age when most people have placed their word processors in mothballs, she continues writing at a rate that would make a freshly minted Ph.D...
...The Douglases are long-time parishioners at Saint Joseph's Church, just up the rather steep hill on which their handsome suburban neighborhood is laid out...
...Characteristically, Douglas now readily admits the problems with the book...
...A conventionally Catholic, middle-class woman married to a Tory grandee, that wasn't your average background for a woman anthropologist," Fardon, her biographer, said...
...Douglas saw it quite differently...
...It's a way of understanding organizational arrangements and the discourses they support and that support them," said Steve Rayner, director of the Program in Environmental Policy Studies and professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs...
...We can't afford not to take them into account...
...There were a (continued on page 18) Commonweal 15 August 17, 2001 (continued from page 15) handful of prominent women working in anthropology in the early 1950s—Douglas spent two relatively brief periods "in the bush/' in 1949-50 and 1953, both studying the Lele in what was then the Belgian Congo—and most of them were atheists and predominantly left-leaning...
...Douglas's passionate defense of ritual reawakened in me an appreciation of the connection between beauty and truth in religion and other human activities...
...The novel, she explained, is set in the Sacred Heart Convent at Roehampton in West London...
...She continues to work on Leviticus and Numbers, determined to convince readers that these neglected biblical books are not impenetrable catalogues of arcane laws and irrational taboos, but works of great spiritual beauty...
...She is convinced that the social intimacy and concern for others much longed for in modern societies, but rarely attained, is best achieved in tightly bounded hierarchical settings...
...Evans-Pritchard's ethnological work on witchcraft among the Azande and on Nuer politics and religion—both East African tribal cultures—was pathbreaking...
...Whatever supernatural reality may be, perception of it is mediated by social life...
...Both of their fathers served abroad in Britain's colonial empire, Mary's father in the Indian Civil Service in Burma, and Jim's in the army in India...
...Anthropology has always gone along with the Left, with the cultural relativists and so forth...
...the less cohesive, the more benign God will appear...
...At that time, English Catholic school children studied the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno...
...Critics found the criteria for identifying the relative strengths of both group and grid hard to pin down and the whole scheme overly deterministic...
...However, as an anthropologist, her interest is in explaining the variety of religious expression and the dynamics of religious change...
...Her efforts to involve the Roman bureaucracy in the crisis proved fruitless...
...These, along with other fascinating examples, were used to demonstrate the correspondence between social experience and religious beliefs and symbols...
...and "Jolly good...
...She is pessimistic about the fate of a hierarchical and sacramental religion in an increasingly individualistic and socially fragmented world...
...He subsequently retired from the party staff...
...even the debate about ordaining women (see "A Modest Proposal," Commonweal, June 14,1996), and the quest for the historical Jesus...
...Yet despite Douglas's own objections to loose speculation or theorizing, her cross-cultural comparisons have been criticized for a lack of rigor, a tendency to generalization, and an inattention to detail...
...How to humanize the machine is the problem...[and] these humanizing influences depend upon continuity with the past, benevolent forms of nepotism, irregular charity, extraordinary promotions, freedom to pioneer in the tradition of the founders, whoever they were...
...She is gracious but opinionated...
...In Natural Symbols, for example, Douglas presents a theory, developed from the work of sociologist Basil Bernstein, about how differing patterns of authority in working-class and upper-middle-class families restrict how children perceive the world...
...I asked him to evaluate the importance of Douglas's work...
...Despite these frustrations, Douglas's loyalty to the institution remains...
...That's not a hierarchy in my sense, at all, because it hasn't got natural balancing corrections...
...Fascinated, she read extensively in the field...
...Those reared exclusively in an elaborated code find it difficult to respond to condensed symbols of social solidarity, such as the Eucharist...
...Douglas's enthusiastic exclamations of "Marvelous...
...it is resilient and tenacious in the face of adversity...
...She took pains to show the similarities between the way modern and primitive people think about morality and religion...
...But a reassessment may be underway...
...I love to cook," she said unabashedly after lunch as we stood before her large kitchen window looking into a surprisingly green (it was November) English garden...
...Adam Kuper, author of Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (1996), compares her to Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Ernest Gellner, and Margaret Mead...
...Douglas is also concerned about the role of women in the church today, which she describes as "absolutely iniquitous...
...Douglas is circumspect about her years in the convent school in the 1930s...
...The research and writing of this article were funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc...
...It is a pity that I didn't sort out the book...
...It was Douglas's contention, for instance, that the abolition of Friday abstinence from meat did away with a vital symbol of Catholic identity and solidarity...
...So the idea of practical commitment is important...
...Writing with barely concealed contempt in the New York Review of Books (January 28,1971) the eminent Cambridge anthropologist Edmund Leach railed against Douglas's praise of traditional Catholic practice...
...What appears to be irrational superstition among so-called primitive peoples, Douglas argued, can in fact be explained by examining how a culture's system of classifications mirrors its social institutions...
...To Douglas it is an ineluctable impoverishment...
...In this sense, as the biblical exhortation to follow God's commandments promises, the way we live can disclose aspects of reality that are inaccessible to those who choose to live in a different way...
...ANTHROPOLOGY WITH A DIFFERENCE Mary Douglas at 80 Paul Baumann In its issue of October 6,1995, the Times Literary Supplement printed a list of the "hundred books which have most influenced Western public discourse since the Second World War...
...the etiquette of eating and drinking...
...Because of his hearing loss, conversation must be conducted at a high decibel, although Jim can effortlessly read Mary's lips...
...You have to choose between different forms of life, and you have to make a commitment to one...
...She attributed much of the problem to the church's lack of understanding and respect for the traditional sorcery beliefs and practices of the Lele...
...As every family knows, there really is a good to be experienced together that cannot be experienced alone, but it requires a willingness to sacrifice for the whole...
...Brunei University's Adam Kuper said that while any of Douglas's particular analyses may be shown to be in error, Commonweal 18 August 17,2001 something she seems quite ready to admit, the way in which Douglas has thought about culture will make a lasting contribution...
...Making an argument she would elaborate in Natural Symbols, Douglas wrote that "magical practice, in this sense of automatically effective ritual" is not a sign of irrationality or primitiveness, "nor is a high ethical content the prerogative of evolved religions...
...Purity and Danger stood alongside Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great Cities...
...They've really got a thriving parish but they're all in their seventies and soon they will start falling off the perch...
...Explanations for why something should be done are hierarchical and positional: Because Dad says so...
...I first encountered Douglas's work in 1980 in a class on ritual taught by the liturgist Aidan Kavanagh, O.S.B., at Yale Divinity School...
...But Natural Symbols has also provided a mother lode of ideas about religion, society, and cultural bias that Douglas has mined for the last thirty years...
...In working-class environments, authority is often conveyed in a "restricted" code...
...Our understanding of what is "natural" is always filtered through socially constructed categories of what is good or bad, holy or profane, safe or risky, or ambiguous...
...Still in print after nearly forty years, Douglas's essay deals with such esoteric topics as the logic and thematic coherence of the dietary laws in the book of Leviticus and the seemingly macabre ritual murder of elderly "spearmasters" among the Dinka of East Africa...
...Douglas graces her conversation with a sly smile and mischievous laugh...
...The more we have of telecommunications, individuals able to work at home, no ties, no bonds, not having to be somewhere, or not having to see each other, the more isolates we become...
...Cultural theory has contributed to the study of consumer behavior, labor movements, political parties, and more...
...I wrote it in a great heat of excitement," she told me...
...I enrolled, and spent the next few months spellbound—and frankly a bit overwhelmed—by her command of the anthropological literature on apparently everything: population control in primitive groups, the nature of contemporary sectarian religious conflict, how different societies conceive of the separation or unity of spirit and matter...
...Paul Baumann is executive editor of Commonweal...
...The couple celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in April, and proximity to their three grown children and six grandchildren was a major reason for their return to England...
...The Douglases' comfortable four-bedroom house is close to Highgate cemetery (where Karl Marx and other luminaries rest) and a short walk from Hampstead Heath...
...Still, she acknowledges that not everyone thrived in the severe and highly structured environment...
...All her recent work gives the impression that she is no longer much concerned with the attainment of empirical truth...
...Alert to every social boundary and interaction, Douglas sees all interpersonal acts, from the most mundane to the most intimate, as fraught with social meaning...
...Consequently, whole areas of aesthetic experience are closed off to them...
...her view of her own work and accomplishments can be blunt...
...Its advantages are in its clearly stratified and specialized pattern of roles: it can organize effectively...
...Douglas admits that something about religious experience escapes reductionist analysis...
...A high regard for religious knowledge is also evident in her rejection of the idea that secularism and modern unbelief are the result of science's triumph over superstition...
...I don't think I got much of it right," Douglas told me...
...That phrase applies to almost all of the eighty-year-old Douglas's work...
...In this Douglas is a disciple of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology and the author of The Elemental Forms of Religious Life (1912...
...Or have the richness of life, of symbolic life, of the hierarchical system...
...she said...
...I don't know enough about the church," she said...
...What we're saying as cultural theorists is that a lot of values and a lot of beliefs and a lot of knowledge are stabilized as an emergent property of social organization," he said...
...Open society," she has written, "leads to private religion...
...Dirt," she famously wrote, "is matter out of place...
...You sort out problems by behaving differently, then your head will take care of itself...
...The Douglases have traveled widely, making friends around the world, especially in the United States...
...Without hesitation she answers, "It's always the one I'm doing...
...Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Albert Camus, Erik Erikson, and Primo Levi were among the expected selections, along with Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature...
...In Natural Symbols, Douglas argued that the student upheavals of the late 1960s, with their mass demonstrations and demand for unstructured freedoms, conformed to a familiar historical pattern...
...Mary spent her early years in Burma...
...I think it is fair to say that many liberals, including many liberal Catholics, have made naive assumptions about how societies work...
...Douglas is convinced on sociological grounds that modern culture makes accepting many of the church's claims— and even understanding the church's logic—difficult...
...I can't think of another one at all...
...Douglas's venture into the debates about Vatican II did not sit well with some of her colleagues...
...Nevertheless, it is clear that her appreciation for religious values was kindled at Roehampton, along with her conviction that the measure of a society is how it controls the powerful and cares for those at the bottom of the social ladder...
...The need to classify and categorize experience is universal, she argued...
...The conventional wisdom was that such protests were compensation for deprivation...
...The social basis of belief Much of Douglas's work is an effort to develop a method that enables us to recognize the cultural bias or "blinders" that shape our views...
...It's very confused and difficult...
...Hierarchy also helps solve problems...
...In the absence of such teaching, people reverted to older witchcraft practices, practices whose traditional safeguards against abuse had been rooted out in the Leles' conversion to Catholicism...
...She confessed, for example, to having only recently realized how destructive the Index of Forbidden Books had been for Catholic intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century...
...By measuring to what extent a society conceived of itself as a bounded entity (group) and in what ways individuals relate to each other within that group (grid), what beliefs would be held about everything from sin to sorcery to sexual morality could be predicted...
...A petite woman with penetrating hazel eyes and trimly cut white hair, Douglas has an incorrigible intensity and buoyant sense of humor...
...Already in Purity and Danger, she alerted readers to the way the discipline of anthropology grew out of the British colonial and essentially Protestant encounter with tribal peoples, and how the Enlightenment bias in favor of "ethical" rather than "ritualistic" or "revealed" religion colored nearly everything written about so-called primitive belief...
...The lives of students lacked "articulated roles" or any group allegiance and were characterized instead by ego-focused competition and fleeting, easily dissolved social bonds...
...Especially exams...
...Grid-group was Douglas's effort to develop a typology of societies and their cosmologies in which social location predicted religious beliefs...
...That's really a very radical breakaway from mainstream social science...
...And of course that's pretty much what Durkheim was saying as well...
...The church's own actions also present obstacles...
...She openly laments the fact that she never held a long-term appointment at a major research institution...
...We read Douglas's Natural Symbols (1970), which expressed deep skepticism about Vatican II's reforms and took "reforming bishops and radical theologians" to task for "their doctrinal latitude, their critical dissolving of categories and attack on intellectual and administrative distinctions...
...Examining primitive cultures turned out to explain the Americans and Brits," Kuper added...
...Hierarchy, as I idealize it, has got movements of communication up and down...
...I thought, that's no place for me...
...the way consumer behavior communicates social concerns...
...Rather, she seems more concerned with making plain the merits of what many dismiss as anachronistic religious practice...
...A love of cooking isn't surprising for someone long fascinated by customs surrounding eating and drinking...
...There's a bit of existentialism thrown in," Fardon added...
...Don't bet against her success...
...Douglas's status within her field, which in the 1970s and '80s increasingly turned away from the "participant observer" method developed by the classic British anthropological tradition, has had its ups and downs...
...Kuper calls Douglas a "genius of lateral thinking," and that may be her true hallmark as an intellectual, an ability to perceive identities between seemingly disparate phenomena...
...Baldly put, the more cohesive a group, the more it will conceive of God as an enforcer of moral rules...
...The sisters of the Society of the Sacred Heart "really despised the world and all its exams and works and pomps...
...Therefore, we should unmask it a bit, and ask them directly: Is that the kind of society you want...
...The grid-group method has been extensively refined...
...you go and look at what they do...
...I had become skeptical of the motives of student protesters, whose "radicalism" and iconoclasm in the end always seemed as self-interested as it was theatrical...
...It just is literally a movement which people can be kicked out of at any time...
...Social organization is broken down into four kinds of institutional life: hierarchical, sectarian (or enclave), competitive individualistic, and isolates...
...Lay sisters did all the housekeeping...
...Douglas has remarked elsewhere how the solicitude of the nuns after her mother's death had created in her an intense attachment to Catholicism...
...Her trained interest in domestic rituals carries over into her own kitchen...
...Modern doubts about the existence of sin or hell, for example, are better explained by our independence and mobility than by the idea of intellectual progress...
...Encountering the work of Edward Evans-Pritchard, one of the seminal figures in twentieth-century anthropology, was a turning point...
...Durkheim emphasized how society shapes the way individuals think, and how our ideas about God mirror our relationship to the community...
...Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family," she writes in her essay "Deciphering a Meal...
...the rational basis of witchcraft accusations...
...Only four books written by women were included, the most academic being Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) by the British social anthropologist Mary Douglas...
...Having been raised in a very "positional" home, I recognized the truth of this analysis...
...At home in London Mary Douglas is as direct and challenging in person as she is on the page...
...She had been a student at Roehampton, and she thought Frost in May brilliantly captured the vividness and startling beauty of that world—a beauty inseparable from its carefully delineated social structure...
...Douglas retired from teaching in 1988, after spending much of the late 1970s and the '80s in the United States, first at the Russell Sage Foundation, then Northwestern and Princeton...
...Douglas, however, is not a thoroughgoing sociological determinist...
...The idea is that you really don't sort out problems in your head," Fardon said of Douglas's insistence on the social basis of belief and knowledge...
...Jim Douglas, now eighty-two and hobbled by arthritis, helps with the cooking...
...you're always there, so your voice is always important...
...I'd better go where Evans-Pritchard was...
...Fortuitously, Mary Douglas arrived on the Yale campus the next fall (she was working at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City) to teach a course on "Methodological Issues in the Study of Religion...
...They weighed in heavily, creating a special bereavement entitlement for orphans—spoiling and favoritism...
...It tries to conciliate its rival units...
...Her interests have ranged far and wide: how contemporary societies assess environmental risks...
...A more "elaborated" code, stressing the calculation of competing interests and the personal feelings of others, is used in less traditional, and often more prosperous households...
...As a result, Douglas's pioneering achievements in bringing anthropological methods to bear on contemporary concerns tended to be overlooked...
...Science is a tool for solving problems in the natural world, but it has relatively little to do with religious ideas or our everyday moral decision-making...
...But Douglas argues that a restricted code possesses value as well, one that enables children—and adults—to see their lives unfolding within an overall pattern...
...In our society, any experience our colleagues and readers and friends have of hierarchy is General Motors," Douglas added...
...Not surprisingly, Douglas's Catholicism has strongly influenced her work...
...They now spend much of their time at home, although Mary makes regular trips to the British Library for research on her latest intellectual passion—a reexamination of Numbers (In the Wilderness, 1993) and Leviticus...
...She contended that the undifferentiated and often ecstatic nature of student protest was not a form of compensation but "replicated" the social experience of the young...
...She turned eighty in March, but looks fifteen years younger, and is possessed of the kind of energy and industry one can only envy...
...In her hands the modern corporate media baron in London looks and sounds uncannily like the "Big Man" of the Indonesian cargo cults...
...I can't remember much more, but it was about social problems in a philosophical vein...
...On a very personal note, she mentioned a violent outbreak of sorcery accusation and subsequent church-sponsored exorcisms in Zaire in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where the children of some of her friends among the Lele were tortured under the supervision of a local priest...
...Explaining the moral integrity of "primitive" beliefs and questioning the social nexus out of which modern moral assumptions emerge were part of her pedagogic technique...
...Douglas strongly objected to the denigration of ritual and Commonweal 12 August 17,2001 traditional forms of religious knowledge implicit in the early anthropological paradigm...
...So that was really exciting...
...But the curriculum included courses on Catholic doctrine and the social teaching of the church...
...At Oxford, Douglas studied philosophy, politics, and economics...
...Douglas argued that too many of the council's reforms were carried out with little appreciation for what makes rituals and symbols meaningful, and with even less understanding of how attitudes toward religious conformity depend on a person's social location...
...Like Evans-Pritchard, she thinks exorcism can be a useful pastoral tool as well as a profound way of reflecting on the nature of evil...
...But that doesn't mean she exonerates the hierarchy...
...It was Jim's mother who introduced them...
...For many readers, Frost in May is a kind of horror story about authoritarian and taboo-ridden pre-Vatican II Catholic schooling...
...it plans for the long term, and justifies what it Commonweal 14 August 17,2001 does by reference to tradition," she has written...
...The weight of their rules was continually lightened by loving privilege...
...But I think they're not appreciating how much they're losing by undermining it...
...We can't afford to have this naive foundationalist view of knowledge...
...Growing up in Paris, Jim was sent to Beaumont, an English Jesuit boarding school...
...Mary always says that it was only when my mother stopped insisting on Mary that I asked her to marry me," Jim confessed to the amusement of both...
...And there's absolutely no one else behind them...
...Today she lives in the Highgate section of north London, where she and her husband James, an economist and former policy adviser for the Conservative Party, have owned a home since 1956...
...Tribal societies, such as the Pygmies, can be just as irreligious or secular in their outlook as any free-spirited New Yorker, she writes...
...A women's commission within the hierarchy, Douglas said, should have veto power over certain aspects of church teaching, thus giving women as a group a voice in church decision-making that counterbalances the authority of the all-male priesthood...
...Her combative defense of Friday abstinence, affirmation of transubstantiation, and praise for hierarchical principles provoked both consternation and enmity...
...There should be something like a women's commission on doctrine, so we would get off all this sex that they're on so embarrassingly and get on to real doctrinal and theological problems," she said...
...Mary has pretty much made mincemeat of these opponents...
...Now called "cultural theory," it has been used by an eclectic group of social scientists, including most prominently the late Aaron Wildavsky, with whom Douglas collaborated in writing Risk and Culture (1982...
...But she also made it very difficult for herself to have that, because she was attracted to work with people whom she found original, quirky, Commonweal 13 August 17,2001 and stimulating, but inevitably found she couldn't always agree with them...
...Is that the kind of society you think this church is for...
...Mary always wanted to have a school," Fardon told me when I spoke with him last fall in London, "a group of people who would be doing things which were one way or another informed by her ideas...
...Her vivid, pugnacious writing style and vast, eclectic store of knowledge have been displayed in more than fifteen books and numerous essays and reviews...
...When she was twelve her mother died and she and her younger sister, Pat, were enrolled in the Roehampton convent where her mother and cousins had been students...
...Graduating while Britain was at war, she went to work in the Colonial Office in London...
...Rayner, a former graduate student of Douglas's, has taken her ideas about the social determinants of belief and applied them to a variety of social-science concerns, especially environmental questions...
...In her critique of fashionable trends in parenting, she warns that child-centered education may free the young from "a system of rigid positions" only to make them a "prisoner of a system of feelings and abstract principles...
...I probably idealize it, and I probably underestimate the costs, which people are hating...
...This no doubt gives me my bias toward hierarchy as a particularly empowering form of government...
...the relationship between ritual and jokes...
...And they should do the same thing to me, and I should be able to be explicit...
...the object of the exercise is to adapt her anthropological learning to the service of Roman Catholic propaganda," Leach wrote...
...For me the destruction of the stark dichotomy between primitive and modern consciousness broadened my understanding of how rationality works and deepened my sense of what all humankind holds in common...
...Douglas champions what she calls "benign" hierarchy, where listening is emphasized, different gifts recognized, and graces shared...
...Richard Fardon, anthropologist and Douglas biographer (Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography, 1999), describes Purity and Danger as an "embarrassment of riches...
...Mary seems fond of, but worried about, her parish community, especially its aging clergy...
...She is not interested in demonstrating the self-evident superiority of her faith...
...In the convent, she said, there were lay sisters who were subordinate to the highly educated "choir nuns...
...Douglas's analytical method does not come with a predetermined answer about what organizational structure is best in any particular circumstance...
...Her Leviticus as Literature (1999) includes a remarkable revision of her earlier views on how the system of classifications worked in the Jewish dietary laws...
...What, looking back over all she has written, is Mary Douglas's favorite book...
...In the 1960s, when much of the Western world was infatuated with the notion of liberation from traditional structures and morality and with the celebration of emotional authenticity, Douglas cautioned against trusting either...
...And they have also taken a sort of atomistic individualism for granted when making their complaints about hierarchy and tradition...
...The greater efficacy and prestige attached to the lay sisters' prayers balanced out the higher status of the choir nuns...
...Known as a Tory "wet," Jim was committed to what was known as the "postwar consensus"—economic and welfare policy based on John Maynard Keynes and William Henry Beveridge—which was abandoned by the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher...
...What she rejects is methodological individualism, which assumes that everyone is a self-interest maximizer and that the individual, not social structural forces, should be the proper unit of analysis...
...Whereas in my idea of hierarchy nobody can kick you out...
...Sacramental religion Asked to assess the condition of the church thirty years after the warnings issued in Natural Symbols, Douglas is hesitant...
...The cultural theory approach requires you to unlearn a lot of social science," Rayner said, noting that social science operates on a mistaken individualist paradigm...
...To those who argued that abstinence was more spiritually authentic if it was a personal decision, not a group discipline, Douglas pointed out that dispensing with such shared symbols would not make self-denying acts more likely or more intelligible, but quite the opposite...
...That sort of comparative jump—that is the inspiration that will remain...
...Evans-Pritchard was a convert to Catholicism, and this was of paramount importance, Douglas admitted...
...Natural Symbols had convinced me that my grandfather's bead-counting, literal-minded piety—he had only an eighth-grade education—was not the mere superstition my prosperous middle-class world judged it to be...
...I had been a college student in the early 1970s, years marked by great social and political conflict as well as moral confusion...
...We can predict what kind of society that is...
...So you start with relationships instead of the individuals for understanding...
...Her memories of the convent, where she rose to be head girl, are almost entirely positive...
...At the end of the course, Douglas gave me a copy of Antonia White's Catholic coming-of-age novel, Frost in May (1933...
...And that goes back to that system of education where you are educated through practices, through bodily practices and punctuality, and sitting in a certain way...
...But the church in Zaire, she said, had not done a good job of getting across Catholicism's great teachings about sin and suffering, forgiveness and reconciliation...
...At the same time, however, the lay sisters were recognized as being much holier than the choir nuns, and stories abounded of the power of the lay sisters' prayers...
...There is knowledge, but it is always influenced by social factors," she told me...
...What I'm saying," Douglas told me several years ago, "is that when people are citing theology—the reformer's theology, for example—they have in mind some sort of ideal society which would make sense of that theology...
...Added to the sense of irreparable loss and the need to enshrine her memory in my life, was loyalty to the nuns themselves," she told interviewer Peter Fry in 1997...
...You don't go study people's religious beliefs...
...He thinks Douglas has done a remarkable job of encapsulating the fundamental principles of all social organization...
...I met some great anthropologists in London and I knew that they were mocking Catholicism...
...Genius at lateral thinking Princeton philosopher Jeffrey Stout (Ethics after Babel, 1988), a former colleague and neighbor of the Douglases, confirms the connection between Douglas's Catholic upbringing and her anthropological method...
...It's how we organize our communities, not what science tells us about the origins of the universe, that determines the shape of our religious beliefs...
...This described my undergraduate experience quite well, and I thought it helped explain the frustrations and disillusionment that followed in the wake of the extravagant 1960s...
...Meals are for family, close friends, honored guests...
...And that is one that won't be able to take on major ritual structures at all...
...The idea that primitive peoples were psychologically unbalanced or irrational (see "The Myth of Primitive Religion," Commonweal, October 9,1970) reflected the self-congratulatory prejudices of anthropological observers, not the human or moral reality of tribal life...
...Despite the elegiac tone of much she has written about contemporary Catholicism, Douglas's own work continues to be suffused with the values of constancy and dutifulness she absorbed in the convent: staying the course and remaining faithful to a larger vision...
...She turned her skill at explaining seemingly strange behavior in primitive cultures to the rituals and beliefs of people in modern industrial societies, and in the process showed us how strange our own behavior can be...
...proud—or a biographer nervous...
...It was there that she first met some of the most prominent British anthropologists, including Audrey Richards and Raymond Firth...
...Years of playing organized athletics also convinced me that certain aesthetic and moral experiences are available only to those who are willing to conform to hierarchical social forms...
...Mary is one of the few anthropologists who have become general intellectual figures," he said when I called him at Brunei University in London, where he is professor of anthropology...
...That decision enabled Mary to accept an offer to come to the United States, where Jim secured appointments in university political science departments...
...It's hard not to be impressed by this matter-of-fact concession of error...
...One way of reading her most important book, Natural Symbols, is as a traditionalist Catholic's critique of the liberalizing trends associated with Vatican II," Stout told me...
...Even those sympathetic to Natural Symbols found that book confusing, some of its conclusions unwarranted by the evidence...
...Math and science were also conspicuously weak, and foreign languages not much stronger...
...Her impatience with questions she doesn't like matches her enthusiasm for ones she does...
...But during Douglas's time, the convent's rich symbolic life and emphasis on hierarchy and group solidarity gave her an abiding sense of how social structure inculcates values and how nonverbal forms of communication both reflect and reinforce group bonds...
...She was one of the few anthropologists, he said, who could communicate with philosophers, historians, and literary people...
...Douglas speaks of how Evans-Pritchard taught about "the sacredness of knowledge" and about "synthesizing from what was there, not going off into theorizing" or indulging in fashionable generalizations or idiosyncratic speculation, something Douglas thinks much recent anthropological writing does...
...But whatever the organizational strengths and spiritual merits of Roehampton's hierarchy, the academic program was spotty at best...
...Commonweal 19 August 11, 2001...
...Latin, for example, was not taught...
...Living with the Azande, he learned their language and practiced the tribe's witchcraft rites, judging them to be logically coherent and socially efficacious...
...Commonweal 11 August 17,2001 Finishing the book, I found myself a newly minted skeptic about the "rationalistic" reform of the liturgy...
...Following Durkheim and her Oxford mentor Edward Evans-Pritchard, Douglas thinks differences in religious belief—how we think about metaphysical questions, or even if we bother to think about them at all—can be explained sociologically, for instance, by comparing how people hold each other accountable for misfortune...
...Evans-Pritchard was to become Douglas's teacher, mentor, and model, and she eventually paid tribute to him in a brief intellectual biography written for the Modern Masters series (Edward Evans-Pritchard, 1980...
...In these Douglas developed an interest in how any society or institution can structure itself in a way that enables it to exercise what she calls "concern for the whole...
...Its rules are formalized...
...Instead of antiritualism it would be more practical to experiment with more flexible institutional forms and to seek to develop their ritual expression...
...She was able to make connections, able to take a study of taboo in the jungle and give you a whole new way of thinking about Leviticus, which never would have occurred to people who spent their lives studying Leviticus," Kuper said...
...Internal Catholic disputes are only a small part of Douglas's interests...
...Douglas is a great storyteller, and she readily culled examples from African, New Guinean, and Native American cultures to illustrate a passing point...
...On the basis of what they do, then you'll figure out why they believe what they do...
...I'm completely nonpolitical," Douglas told me, which is another way of saying that the relationship between her work and her own religious "biases" is complex...
...yet, even without Mr...
...Douglas noted that "compensation theory" could not explain the privileged status of most of the protesters...
...The elaborated code is, of course, the method of rational analysis and of the academy...
...She speaks emphatically, often answering with a simple yes or no...
...Taboo is a violation of classifications...
...I do pick out what I love about a great religion, and I feel it a great privilege to be brought up in one," she said...
...It ought to be...
...they remain, at least in the eyes of an American, unmistakably English...
...Perhaps the book's most problematic idea was "grid-group" analysis...
...So we had two years of studying those, about the just wage, the living wage," Douglas said...
Vol. 128 • August 2001 • No. 14
