Mary Douglas, edited by Richard Fardon, A Very Personal Method: Anthropological Essays Drawn From Life, Sage, London, 2013, 318 pages, £29.99, ISBN 978446254691.

Supervisors can inspire complex loyalties, but Richard Fardon has honoured Mary Douglas in ways few could expect, writing her Intellectual Biography (1999) and then, as her literary executor, editing two posthumous collections, one of which is A Very Personal Method. I approached this volume with curiosity, since “method” was not something one ever associated with Mary Douglas, who seized the raw material for her original thinking wherever she encountered it. That is very much the point. This book is not a manual of research techniques but a revelation of thought processes, the single exception being a hilarious account of her first experiment in fieldwork, when she and her artist sister joined a circus and learned valuable lessons about informal power structures, including that if you get too close to one “good” informant, no one else will tell you much.

Mary Douglas was without doubt an important anthropologist but her impact was arguably greater outside the discipline than within it - if she had contributed nothing more than her assertion that “dirt is matter out of place” (Douglas, 1966), her fame would have been assured.  Her ideas permeate a range of disciplines, including Geography (notably via the work of David Sibley) and were a major influence on Kristeva's thoughts on abjection, but Social Anthropology was always a little unsure about her, and she was late to be given a Chair at UCL. In the transcript of a radio interview that constitutes Chapter 24, Eleanor Wachtel quotes an unnamed critic as saying, “Mary Douglas is not an anthropologist’s anthropologist.  Her mind is too curious and too wild.  Her work is about boundaries and markers, about purity, ambiguity and pollution, which is all very proper, but she herself traverses the boundaries dangerously” (Douglas, 2013: 271).  I do not know who said this (though I can make an intelligent guess), but the comment captures Douglas’ almost unique status in the discipline and influence well beyond it – she may have been a maverick, but she certainly made people think.  Long before Bruno Latour (1993), Mary Douglas claimed there was nothing special about being modern, and Chapter 10, "Taboo", shows that as early as 1964 she was asserting, "We should prune [the sacred] down to something closer to its Latin root, sacer …we can see that the very idea of sacred implies restriction, separation" (Douglas, 2013: 138).

This book is an assemblage of articles published in unconventional places, lectures delivered to non-academic audiences, and material not intended for publication. Everything reveals an original thinker in the process of teasing out ideas, often by explaining them in detail to a lay audience. It contains several deliberations upon her unshakable Catholic faith, fairly unusual in a discipline famous for its atheists. These were generally written for publications like The Tablet and New Blackfriars, bringing the insights of anthropology to the problems of Vatican II. Her contemplation of religious issues through a mixture of theology and ethnography may seem like angelic pin-head dancing to outsiders, but her thoughts about the structures inherent in such things as the place of Leviticus within the Pentateuch, or gender in the sacraments, were likely to turn up later in more practical considerations of organizations. For Mary Douglas, the hierarchical structure of the church offered a framework of certainty from which to think radically.

Douglas’s only significant piece of ethnographic fieldwork was in the 1950s with the Lele people of the (then) Belgian Congo. Part Two of this collection is entitled "Thinking about Catholicism in Lele Religious Experience". Here she explains that she was drawn to this society by a desire to understand matrilineal kinship systems, connections of men through women, so we should not really be surprised to find her drawing upon Lele experience of gender to make sense of the power of a male priesthood in a church describing itself in the feminine. She says that she enjoyed living with the Lele and felt more relaxed with them than she had been anywhere before, but, unusually for a woman anthropologist of her generation, after fieldwork Mary married and had children. As she explains in the Wachtel interview, this, combined with the succession of civil wars, made further Congolese fieldwork impossible:

"I couldn't follow the usual career path. I find that most women whose lives contain more than their work do what I did, which is turn to philosophy or to library research that they can do without going into the field … I had to turn to whatever I could do" (page 290).

Though she could not visit them, the Lele continued to be a voice in so much of her theory.

Whilst the world knows Douglas for Purity and Danger, she felt that her main contribution was a schema for understanding modes of social control in terms of "grid" and "group", a variable blend of rules and personal solidarities that she presented in Natural Symbols (1970) and continued to refine for the rest of her life, in, for example How Institutions Think (1987).  Because A Very Personal Method draws together writings revealing Mary Douglas as a person, many of the chapters demonstrate her own preference for situations in which bonds are strong, boundaries defined, and rules are clear (hence the chapter entitled "A feeling for hierarchy").  This preference does not, however, mean that she did not find other combinations intellectually fascinating (and her students in the 1960s certainly gave her plenty of opportunity for observing examples of people with no "feeling for hierarchy" whatsoever). The most unconventional piece in this collection is "The Oracles of Love", a play commissioned by a theatre-based learning company for a Ministry of Defence conference, but never performed. Employing deliberately ludicrous stereotypes, she contrasts the rule-bound personnel of the (imaginary) Criminal Intelligence Organisation with the putative terrorists of Pure Life Community (a group about as effective as The People's Liberation Front of Judea) to spell out important messages about the futility of searching for leaders in leaderless structures. It is far from being compelling drama, and one is surprised to find her attempting it at all, but no one should be surprised that in her ninth decade Mary Douglas was still immersed in the world, looking for ways in which insights from anthropology could enlighten anti-terrorist strategy (and, yes, the Lele were traditionally an accephalous society).

Part Four consists of five pieces on Mary Douglas’s contemporaries in anthropology, beginning with an appreciation of Franz Steiner, whose work on taboo was later to influence her own thoughts on pollution. She describes the post-war Oxford anthropologists clustering around Evans-Pritchard and Steiner "both interested in religious belief, both against idealism, both against materialism and rationalism." Both, one might add, swimming against the tide of what anthropology was becoming. The Department of Anthropology at University College, London in the mid-sixties was entranced by Levi-Straussian structuralism; Mary Douglas who was a Senior Lecturer there, was not.  She reveals her contempt for his work in two essays, the one for The Listener being particularly scathing: "Somewhere between phrenology and the Piltdown man is where history will probably rank The Raw and the Cooked" (page 192).

Take any piece of discourse, preferably a work of art, a poem or a play, historical or literary piece.  Start where you like, for it is all going to be proved to be part of a single system. Discern the pairs of contrasts which the instructions guarantee are there. Think of the kind of pattern you want to create. Place the contrasted pairs on cards as if for a binary computer, but don't worry if you know you will never have access to one, for its role is inspirational … Use set theory, algebra and Venn diagrams to summarise them. Stop at any point you like… (page 193).

At the time she was seen as missing the point, now Levi-Strauss is rarely mentioned (but due for a come-back?).  Clifford Geertz does not fare much better in Mary Douglas’s estimation, and there's a passing swipe at Edmund Leach amongst others.  One begins to see why she wasn't an anthropologist's anthropologist.

One may well ask who is this book is for. Undoubtedly specialists who have already engaged with her major works will find this selection of writings, untempered by the pressures of peer review, a fascinating insight to her way of thinking.  But merely interested people (the original audience) will also find much to enjoy in her elegant writing (I have been looking for an opportunity to use the word "elegant", Mary Douglas’s favorite term of approval).  Equally, one should consider whom it is not for.  It would be a terrible starting point for anyone wanting to gain access to her contribution to anthropology - these should start where everyone else does, with Purity and Danger or with The Lele of the Kasai. This book does what it is intended to do, it allows a privileged encounter with Mary Douglas, the person; someone like all of us, beset by a mixture of doubt and certainty. As such, it is a great encouragement to all of us to keep going (even if most would baulk at trying to learn Hebrew in their seventies, so they could check up on the possibilities of alternative interpretations of the Pentateuch). Mary was a prolific writer, and Fardon’s biography (1999) provides a bibliography of such startling range that it should serve as an example to researchers looking for inspiration in how to satisfy that requirement for “dissemination”;  she was an evangelist for anthropology and kept working right to the end. Many Douglas was finally invested as a Dame just one week before she died, as with her Chair, honoured late, but just in time.

How I wish the apprentice anthropologist I was in the mid '60s could have had this book, particularly the two essays standing as "bookends" (Fardon's term) to this volume, but both date from 2002 (aged 81), and it would never have occurred to Mary Douglas in her middle years to have written like this, so directly revealing her frailties.  MD (as she always signed herself and was always referred to by students) was formidable. Like many others, I was terrified of her. People who had returned from long fieldwork in the jungles and savannahs of Africa could be found outside her office, nervously checking their watches before an appointment - knock on the door a minute too early and you'd be given a rollicking for invading her precious time, a minute too late and it would be for wasting it. If I'd had the essay "A feeling for hierarchy", in which she describes the regime she experienced from the age of five when sent to live with her paternal grandparents, I'd have understood her obsession with the comforts of structure, but, ignorant of this, it could take a long time to learn to love Mary.

As she says:

‘Sending home the children’ was a normal part of colonial family life. It was backed by the theory that white children would not be able to survive the rigours of the tropics. My father was in the Indian Civil Service in Burma. He got ‘home leave’ every three years, and my mother came to see us every year (Douglas, 2013: 17).

When she was twelve, her mother died and her father retired to England: “We left our grandparents and went to live with him, a kindly stranger who had never had much to do with children.” (Her tribute to him is two chapters on trout fishing, based on her editing his notes on the subject – goodness knows what a fisherman might make of her conclusions about “The Gender of the Trout”.) Then it was a Catholic boarding school, the same one her mother had attended when she had been “sent home”.  The religious divide within the family, where paternal kin were Protestant (but father an atheist) and maternal kin Catholic, informs Mary's world-view as revealed in this collection. She describes her grandmother's deep respect for a promise to raise the children in their mother's faith. One gains the impression that, for Mary Douglas, family is a matter of statuses, roles, obligations and traditions, rather than sentiments – a good grounding for a woman who remained an anthropologist of the structural-functionalist persuasion.

No piece is more striking than "Granny", the final chapter providing the key for decoding Mary:

Sometimes I see her, unexpectedly in a crowded street.  I turn a corner and there is someone coming towards me, someone very familiar, someone I am glad to see.  I smile, she smiles back - it is my grandmother! A split second later I realise it is my own reflection in the polished glass of a shop window.  I must be looking as she used to look (page 298).

I find it very moving to think of Mary contemplating her own old age, momentarily being the child she was.  Statuses and menus may have been rigidly fixed in her grandparents' household, but "Granny" was mercurial, quick to feel slighted, easily panicked, and a terrifying driver; she had also been in her time a pukka memsahib, married to an officer in the Indian Civil Service in Burma. In a flash one understands the remarkable woman Mary Douglas became, the mixture of sternness and benevolence, of seriousness and mischief, convention and surprise, but most of all, the sheer determination not to be overwhelmed that pervades all of her work. 

References

Douglas M (1963) The Lele of the Kasai. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Douglas M (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Douglas M (1969) Is Matriliny Doomed in Africa? In: M Douglas and P Kaberry (eds) Man in Africa. London: Tavistock Publications.

Douglas M (1970) Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie & Rockliff.

Douglas M (1987) How Institutions Think. London: Routledge.

Fardon R (1999) Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography. London: Routledge.

Kristeva J (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.

Latour B (trans. C Porter) (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Sibley D (2002) Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London: Routledge.