In Memoriam: Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas, preeminent anthropologist of the late 20th century, died this year at 86. Within sociology, Douglas is most often remembered for Purity and Danger, a classic treatise on the maintenance of boundaries between social groups. Often overlooked, however, is her later work Risk and Culture, co-authored with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. This book, which defined Douglas's intellectual trajectory in her late career, presaged Ulrich Beck’s work on risk by nearly a decade. In the few citations of the book in sociology today, the majority focus on Douglas and Wildavsky’s discussion of the mobilization of risk-consciousness by environmental movements. Among the more fascinating chapters of the book, however, is their analysis of the ways fear activates boundaries towards fringe groups at the margins of society. Douglas would later extend this line of thought from her early work on the Basai of Congo to the philosophy of Al Qaeda in recent years. This move mirrored her long-term interest in the abominations of Leviticus, which continue to interest biblical scholars to the present day.

Douglas’s key contribution was to show how taboo or “dirt” reflected the key role of classification in human groups. Above and beyond Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, however, Douglas introduced a new typology of “grid” and “group” with which to classify the function of classification in a wide range of societies. “Grid” refers to the amount of classification used to guide everyday behavior among different segments of society. A “Group” is therefore defined by the amount of classificatory force that holds people together. Societies with strong grids are hierarchical, whereas those with weak grids produce opportunism and entrepreneurship. Extremist groups exist where grid is strong but group is weak: “Enclavists have formed a group of like-minded friends who reject the rankings, formalities and inequalities of the outside society.” Hence, Douglas interpreted the motivation of Al Qaeda in symbolic—not instrumentalist—terms.