Mary Douglas (1)Reseñas

The author presents her a theme of ritual and a social meaning in a style that is clear, concise and delightful. Her comparisons of primitive and civilized institutions are provocative and lively, and her material on body imagery and social boundaries is truly exciting.

Interessante il modo in cui "attacca" la prospettiva economica del consumo di beni costruendoci sopra una teoria socio-antropologica fondata su concetti a volte brillanti (la natura sociale del consumo e le sue categorie), a volte non pienamente convincenti (la netta separazione tra consumo e mercato).

Douglas' seminal work addresses how humans tend to delineate reality based on concepts of cleanliness and uncleanliness and associate these divisions with the sacred and profane, order and chaos, or purity and pollution. Very relevant work in modern discussions of environmental perceptions and ethics

I rarely know how to rate anthropology texts. The only thing I'm sure of is that the book wasn't quite what I was expecting (I was hoping for a more theoretical/general/broadly comparative treatise on purity & pollution; this disappointed expectation was not, of course, the author's fault.)

This book consists of a lot of squabbling with other anthropologists and one needs to be familiar with the work of those whom Douglas disagrees with to follow much of the early part. Suffice it to say Fraser is particularly singled out for some rough treatment over his proclivity to apply personal psychology to groups. She likes , as much as she likes anyone, Durkheim for his belief that the primary role of religion is to enforce social cohesion and form. I would have greatly preferred to have begun with some definitions rather than to jump in with controversy, a kind of in media res opening. It does not help that she isn't a very graceful writer. That said towards the end she talks about how a society structures a theology that must incorporate what stands outside of it, i.e. how to account for evil. Discord is a theme as she represents the notion that dirt and pollution represent disorder and chaos. She investigated the Lele tribe which was obsessed with form and food with extensive prohibitions. She uses their pangolin cult to illustrate the outlier aspect of the Lele embracing that which defies their extensive categorizing.

Mary Douglas did anthropology in a structuralist vein, and this book probably had its greatest significance for the discipline in her introduction of the idea of "group and grid" defining a coordinate plane on which to position the social-symbolic dispositions of different cultures. She arrived at this form in the process of attempting to apply the socio-linguistic theories of Basil Bernstein to the medium of ritual and ceremony.

An inquiry driving the development of this model concerns the varying affinity of different cultures for ritual expression and magical postulates. Douglas identifies the sacramental perspective rather explicitly with the magical one (26), and nicely deflates the secularization hypothesis regarding contemporary societies. There is nothing essentially religious about the "traditional or primitive," nor is secularism either predictable of or peculiar to modernity (36).

The chapter on "The Two Bodies" is concerned with "the human body ... as an image of society" (98), which put me especially in mind of the O.T.O. instruction that "in True Things, all are but images one of another; man is but a map of the universe, and Society is but the same on a larger scale." As expressed in the traditional doctrines identifying macrocosm with microcosm, this notion undergirding Douglas's structuralism is melothesia. There were also a few points in this chapter where I wondered if it might bear comparison with certain notions in Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism.

It was a little surprising and gratifying to see the Exclusive Brethren raised repeatedly as an example, and correlated positively with tribal societies preoccupied with witchcraft (140 ff.)! These Plymouth Brethren were not only doctrinal forebears of the greater part of 20th and 21st-century Anglophone fundamentalist Christianity, but the Exclusive stripe also accounted for the childhood religious environment of Aleister Crowley.

An especially interesting passage is the one in the "Test Cases" chapter on "co-varying ideas of sin" (131). Douglas delineates two types, which she supposes are the poles of a comprehensive continuum. These types are, however, merely the first two of three in the dialectic presented in section 32 of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, where he calls them "pre-moral" and "moral." The notion of Nietzsche's "post-moral" (and the consequent puzzle regarding its functional relationship to and distinguishability from the pre-moral) does not arise. Thelemites may wish to read the referenced Nietzsche in connection with the Aeons of Isis, Osiris, and Horus, but the bridge to Douglas's socio-cultural typology (however incomplete) is certainly intriguing.

Ever since the time of Descartes, and very probably since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have been deeply enamored with the idea that we - conscious, rational, decision-making beings - control the way that we think and act. While Mary Douglas certainly doesn't suggest that we are just mindless cogs in a machine, she does offer some interesting insights into how we think about institutions, categories, and rationality that have serious implications for the idea of wholly autonomous human intellectual agency. Douglas, one of the greatest social anthropologists to come out of England in the twentieth century, is known better for her "Purity and Danger," "Risk and Blame," and "Implicit Meanings." "How Institutions Think" is a series of Frank W Abrams Lectures that she delivered at Syracuse University in 1985.

Some scientific ideas enter the world, readily accepted and widely read by an eager scholarly community. Others languish - but not because they are of a lesser quality, and not even because they are incorrect. Ludwig Fleck's book on the discovery of syphilis titled "The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact" (Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache), was one of the latter. Anticipating a sort of social constructivism, Fleck said that scientific ideas are accepted or rejected into a canon for reasons not because of their inherent worth, but because certain social conditions (Fleck called these "thought-conditions" or "thought collectives") allow or disallow their admittance. The Denkkollecktiv is a whole matrix of social circumstances, thoughts, and assumptions that envelop the scientific project. If a new idea substantively differs from one some aspect in the Denkkollecktiv, it will be ignored - not consciously by individual scientists, but by the scientific profession as an institution.

This is where Douglas picks up on her anthropological history of the "classificatory enterprise." How can the phenomenon that Fleck described really happen? What was it about science - or any institution - that shapes social cognition and categories so profoundly? How do these institutions develop, and why? Following Durkheim's lead, Douglas claims that autonomy (in the sense of radical social individualism and atomization) was in many respects an illusion, and that we are marked by a strong sense of social solidarity through shared "classification, logical operations, and guiding metaphors [that] are given to the individual by society."

One of Douglas' implicit arguments is that the difference between sociology (group action) and psychology (action of a single agent) is wrong-headed. Instead, she asserts that for a rule to turn into a legitimate social convention, it needs a parallel cognitive convention to sustain it (46). Social institutions encode information, and then use that information to minimize the entropy, or inherent disorder, in decision-making. The stabilizing principle of institutions - what keeps them from breaking down - is that they "naturalize social classifications." By naturalizing the social in reason, the institution automatically legitimizes it. After all, one of the first priorities of the institution should be legitimacy, or else it would incur so much doubt that it would eventually be destroyed. Douglas considers the common social analogon of likening the roles of men and women to that of the left and right hand; the logic of complementarity in nature legitimizes the social order, constructing a rationality which seems like it was there before time began. Even the institution of sameness (yes, even sameness - logical similarity - is an institution) is time- and culture-sensitive. Douglas cites the example in Leviticus of the camel, the hare, and the rock badger: they all chew cud, which would lead us to believe that they would all be classified as cud-chewing ungulates. However, since they don't have cloven hooves, they are excluded. The criterion of difference here, having a cloven hoof, is completely arbitrary - yet it is the sole category that bestows "sameness" on a group of individuals. Douglas makes it clear that categorizations like this are not cool, objective observations into the inner working of nature. They are very telling maps that "model the interactions of the members of the society."

Institutions do more than order categorical knowledge. They also filter information in such a way that they can be said to remember and forget. Fleck's book recounts a classic case of institutional forgetting. The failure of a legitimate scientific idea to be accepted into the prevailing canon of knowledge is usually the result of a lack of "formulaic interlocking with normal procedures of validation." For an idea to gain acceptance, it sometimes has to exploit "the major analogies on which the socio-cognitive system rests." Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer focuses on institution remembering, according to Douglas, discovering "an explicit demonstration of how institutions direct and control memory" (72). He showed how economic interactions, including weddings and cattle distribution, order the memory of ancestors.

The one thing I was curious about while reading the book was that Douglas never mentioned Berger's "Social Construction of Reality," which covers much of the same territory. Of course, not being an anthropologist, Berger has a somewhat different take on matters. "How Instutitions Think" should definitely be read alongside the Berger, and I think the reader will find that they shed light on one another. Highly recommended.

The most surprising thing about reading Mary Douglas's 1966 anthropological classic Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, was my sheer enjoyment of the thing. This is a theoretical work, written less for a lay audience than for Douglas's fellow cultural anthropologists, and yet her style is clean and lively, with barbs of wit to keep things interesting. ("This fashionable presentation," she quips at one point, "was supported by no evidence whatever.") As a result, it was far more entertaining than I had anticipated, and although Douglas's approach is now out of fashion for being overly rigid and/or simplistic, she introduced me to some ideas and dichotomies that will be worth thinking about during my ongoing disgust project. (On which subject, I haven't forgotten that second post on Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, but it occurred to me that the Douglas may be relevant to Gaitskill, so I thought I'd post on Douglas first.)

That said, there is a lot contained in this slim book, and I'm sorting out exactly what relation it may hold to analyzing disgust in non-ritual settings. Essentially, Douglas is writing about ritual cleanness and uncleanness, and the role that rituals of purity and pollution play in both "primitive" and "advanced" societies. Since her focus is on ritual cleanliness and pollution, she is only addressing certain kinds of situations in which disgust may or may not arise, and the disgust itself is not her main focus—something that makes William Ian Miller's dismissal of her points a bit unfair, in my opinion. Her overarching claim is that ritual pollution tends to reinforce the structure of a given society, defending the boundaries of that structure when they're threatened. As such (although this idea is more mine than Douglas's) the idea of pollution is fundamentally conservative, helping to maintain the status quo in the face of whatever forces may the threatening it.

For example, in one chapter she analyzes the esoteric food restrictions in the biblical book of Leviticus. Here the link with disgust seems relatively strong: foods forbidden the Israelites are described as unclean abominations, even when, to the casual reader, there seems little difference between them and the permitted foods. Following her usual pattern, Douglas first debunks a couple of previous schools of thought that attempted to explain the food prohibitions: she is satisfied neither by the idea that the prohibited foods are those associated with neighboring "heathen" clans (since the Israelites often incorporated foods and behaviors from their neighbors elsewhere), nor by the notion of an allegorical reading of these prohibitions (since it's possible for a reader to construct an allegorical reading of any combination of animals, and nothing of the sort is mentioned in the actual text). She neatly pokes holes in both theories, and is even more dismissive of the idea that these prohibitions rested on a pre-knowledge of modern hygienic requirements.

She suggests instead that the prohibited animals are those which exist at the uneasy boundaries of animal types, and which therefore are unclassifiable, seen as hybrid or monstrous. What makes her argument so persuasive, at least to this theological innocent, is that this is actually what the text itself says, whereas other interpretations are deductions away from textual evidence. For example, Leviticus specifically states that the category of animals which chew the cud and have cloven hooves are permitted for eating. If this is a distinct type of animal by the Hebrew classification system, then animals which have only one of these traits (cud-chewing or cloven hooves) would be seen as odd border-cases and possibly contaminating. And indeed, "unclean" animals include "the camel, the hare and the rock badger [hyrax], because they chew the cud but do not part the hoof...and the swine, because it parts the hoof but does not chew the cud." Similarly, animals which move by "swarming" are forbidden because the Hebrew word for "swarming" is an intermediate form of locomotion somewhere between walking and slithering, and can be applied to both earth-bound and water-bound creatures—disrupting more boundaries. Thus, in Leviticus,

[I}n general the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world. (55)

Through declaring certain animals unclean for eating, the Leviticus author was helping to "create and control experience," (65), which Douglas argues is a key role for all ritual, both religious and secular. And indeed, she argues passionately that many of the dichotomies used by previous anthropologists working in this area are either totally misguided (the separation of "magic" from "religion," for example, which Douglas sees as residual Protestant bias against Catholics, and establishes a dichotomy unsupported by actual conversations with tribal people) or irrelevant to the questions she is asking. In both primitive and modern cultures, "dirt" occupies a similar systemic niche:

[D]irt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. [...] For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. (2 - 4)

Thus ritual, and the ideas of purification and cleanliness, hold power to impose order against the threatening chaos. Despite Miller's complaints against Douglas, this is essentially the flipside of his own argument: he claims that a major component of our experience of disgust is a confrontation with the ever-changing, chaotic flux of "life soup," itself the perfect symbol of Douglas's "essential disorder." Yet "life soup" also holds huge amounts of power and potential—in fact, one of the threatening things about it is that it reminds each of us that our bodies and brains are only temporary organizations of matter. In the chapter "Power and Danger," Douglas analyzes this idea on the level of social structures:

Granted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the materials of pattern. Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realised in it, but its potential for patterning is infinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both power and danger. (94)

She goes on to elucidate who, in a given society, is likely to be endowed with the conscious use of the power of disorder (often termed witchcraft or sorcery), and who is likely to be thought to inflict the danger of disorder unconsciously. This section seems particularly relevant to Veronica and to modern disgust in general, since our disgust is so often directed toward those in the margins (homo- and bisexuals; the homeless; the visibly mentally ill), and their contagion is often felt to endanger those around them without any conscious malicious effort on their part. This accords with Douglas's analysis: in the tribal cultures she cites, conscious and directed use of sorcery is usually associated with those who possess structural power: chieftans, kings, patriarchs. The magic associated with those on the structural margins is often thought to emanate from them without their conscious intention. In this passage, which strikes me as profoundly relevant to Mary Gaitskill, Douglas moves from general points to a discussion of Maori boys undergoing an initiation rite into adulthood:

Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry into his new status. [...] To behave anti-socially is the proper expression of [the Maori boys'] marginal condition. To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power. (96-97)

I'm drawn to this idea of the disordered margins (source of so much of the disgusting) as both dangerous and powerful or compelling. And it's not just people passing through one stage of life into another: those who occupy ambiguous or double roles in a social structure are sometimes thought to be sources of dangerous pollution by the mere fact of their existence. Douglas brings up a number of examples in which groups or individuals who in practice hold some level of unacknowledged or uncertain power (Kachin wives, Jews in England, Joan of Arc, or the serf-like Mandari "clients," all of whom occupy uneasy, intermediate power positions) are thought to be involuntary sources of witchcraft.

[The witchcraft] may lie dormant as they live their life peacefully in the corner of the sub-system in which they are intruders. But this role is in practice difficult to play coolly. If anything goes wrong, if they feel resentment or grief, then their double loyalties and their ambiguous status in the structure where they are concerned makes them appear as a danger to those belonging fully in it. It is the existence of an angry person in an interstitial position which is dangerous, and this has nothing to do with the particular intentions of the person. (102, emphasis mine)

"An angry person in an interstitial position": surely a useful formula to keep in mind.

There are certainly problematic elements in Purity and Danger. Probably the section which gave me the most pause was Chapter 5, "Primitive Worlds," in which the author searches for a principle to distinguish "primitive" societies from those properly classed "advanced." And there's a reason I've used some variation of the word "structure" so many times in this post: Douglas is a proponent of high anthropological Structuralism, which has since fallen out of favor for its reductionism and simplification of human societies. She herself is not unconscious of these criticisms, though, and does address them in the book. And although her Anglo-centrism is grating at times to a modern ear—when she uses the word "we" it is always synonymous with English Protestant, as if she expects that these will be her only readers—she also makes a genuine and respectable effort to demolish many of the more egregious assumptions made by early 20th-century anthropologists and psychologists about "primitive" peoples. Her chapter debunking psychology's equation of primitive rituals with infant and childhood stages of development is particularly scathing. So, as I said, surprisingly enjoyable as well as very thought-provoking.

I am left with some questions vis-à-vis Douglas and my own project. Principally, what is the relationship between a person in a ritual state of pollution, a person who is disgusted, and a person who is (to some third party) disgusting? Is pollution synonymous with, or totally unrelated to, disgust? Obviously, given that I've spent this long writing about Douglas, I don't believe the two are irrelevant to one another, but neither do I believe they're identical. For one thing, pollution as Douglas is describing it is almost by definition a codified element of a social structure. Whereas the circumstances of the disgust emotion are socially constructed as well, it's not formalized in the same way, and it seems to me more individualized as well. There are things whole societies will find disgusting—indeed, there are things almost all humans, cross-culturally, find disgusting—but there are also many idiosyncratic quirks to the disgust reactions of individuals. There's no equivalent of Leviticus to tell us what's disgusting and what's not. In any case, teasing out exactly which of Douglas's writings on pollution are relevant to disgust, and what the relationship between the two might be, will be interesting fodder for future thought. In the meantime, I can't resist closing with one more quote, this one from Douglas's rich final chapter, examining rituals in which dirt and filth are sometimes re-contextualized as creative, positive forces. Those concerned about finding Douglas insensitive to the complexity of human society should rest easy:

Of course, the yearning for rigidity is in us all. It is part of our human condition to long for hard lines and clear concepts. When we have them we have to either face the fact that some realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the concepts.

The final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction. (162)

This may be an entertaining book if you want to read stories of foreign cultures and habits, but I don't think it meets the scientific standards of anthropology. The subtitle of the book is "an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo", but this is an overstatement. You will not find any true analysis in it. Every time the author approaches an analytic question or theory, she soon lets go of her thread and diverges into another irrelevant story. While reading this book, I asked myself several times "wait a second, what does this have to do with pollution or taboo?", "what was the subject matter of this chapter again?" and "what conclusions can be drawn from all these examples?". My questions were left unanswered, so this book was a very frustrating read. It deals with an interesting topic but the author just doesn't manage to gain any interesting insights. A few disconnected thoughts scattered among colourful stories is all you get in terms of analysis. Very disappointing.

A classic

Written by a social anthropologist, this work studies the way in which religions structure 'pollution' and sacred influences. She analyzes how religions not only create laws, but how those laws have an inner consistency related to social/economic/environmental influences.
I think of this book as a sort of addendum to Eliade's "Sacred and Profane". It works with many of the same concepts, and often works off of Eliade's conclusions. Again, it's rather important if you're curious about the study of religion. My only problem with it is that Douglas hasn't gotten past that superior mentality the British suffer from. Well, it's more of a shared malady among white christians living in capitalist societies, really...but periodically having a supposedly balanced book devote pages and paragraphs to exactly why the Christian capitalist system is oh so much better than these poor 'primitives' is distracting and distasteful. Most of the ideas were good, but the fact that she's approaching the cross cultural studies with the assumption that her culture is the shiznit makes me distrust her. 6/10

A highly influential, and also highly readable, classic of anthropology. I really, really love this book -- it brings out my geekiness to a high degree. I expect some of the ideas may be dated at this point, but I know that many of her theories are still highly regarded, nearly 40 years later.

GBIP