Mary Douglas is probably the most distinguished active anthropologist in Europe and is a unique figure in British social anthropology. No other contemporary British anthropologist has so transcended the field to become a major figure in contemporary social theory. She has done all the classic things that a social anthropologist is supposed to do – she carried out extended fieldwork, in her case in the Congo; she wrote a classic monograph on an African society, the Lele; and she published numerous papers in learned journals that described and analysed complicated marriage systems, local forms of money, and, of course, taboos and rituals.
However, she then began to apply similar forms of analysis to new subjects; to the Old Testament, then to ideas about risks current in modern Western society, and on to our own symbolic constructions, running from the study of the structure of meals to fresh accounts of works of literature. Today, her work is a major point of reference for social theorists, for sociologists and economists dealing with risk and with models of consumption, for biblical scholars, for literary theorists, and for everyone who writes about ritual, or about systems of classification, or about collective memories.
Professor Douglas’ two breakthrough books, which established her wider intellectual reputation, were Purity and Danger, with its brilliant fresh interpretation of pollution and taboo, published in 1966, and Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, published in 1970. The roll call of titles of the books she has published in the past two decades bear witness to her continued exploration of new fields, and to her astonishing productivity: Essays in the Sociology of Perception (1982), Risk and Culture (1982), How Institutions Think (1986), Risk and Blame (1992), In the Wilderness (about the Book of Numbers, in 1993), Thought Styles (1996), Missing Persons (1998) and Leviticus as Literature (1999).
She was born Margaret Mary Tew in 1921, and in San Remo, because her parents were holidaying on the Italian Riviera en route for home leave from their colonial posting to Burma, where her father served in the Indian Civil Service for twenty-five years. It was an appropriately cosmopolitan beginning. Educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton and at Oxford University, she graduated in 1943 with a BA in Modern Greats.
She then served in the Colonial Office for the remainder of the war years. When peace came, she returned to Oxford to become a postgraduate student in social anthropology, gaining her PhD in 1951 and doing fieldwork among the Lele in what was then the Belgian Congo. From 1951 to 1977 she taught anthropology at University College London, where Brunel’s own professors of anthropology were associated with her, Suzette Heald as an undergraduate and then as a doctoral student, and Adam Kuper as a colleague. From 1977 to 1988 she was in the USA, where she held a succession of distinguished academic posts.
Mary Douglas is one of the exceptional scholars who has provided theoretical inspiration across the range of the human sciences and the humanities. She is regarded as an intellectual leader by many of Brunel’s anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists, and her theories provide one of the key points of common reference for the disciplines united in the Department of Human Sciences. In celebrating her career and her work, the Department is, at the same time, making a claim to the intellectual coherence of its own work at Brunel.
Since 1988 Professor Douglas has been living again in London, but if she has been retired since 1988 it must be said that this has been the most active retirement one could imagine. She is currently engaged in an anthropological study of the Bible. And now, in her eighty first year, her reputation, indeed her fame, and her influence are as great, if not greater, than they have ever been. Richard Fardon has even written a book about her, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography which reviews her career and provides a complete bibliography of her own work and of major commentaries on it.
Chancellor, it gives me great pleasure to present to you Mary Douglas for the degree of Doctor of Social Sciences honoris causa.
DSocSci - July 2001
