Dame Mary Douglas

Margaret Mary Tew, anthropologist: born San Remo, Italy 25 March 1921; Lecturer in Anthropology, Oxford University 1950; staff, Department of Anthropology, University College London 1951-78, Professor of Social Anthropology 1970-78; Research Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation 1977-81; Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University 1981-85 (Emerita); FBA 1989; CBE 1992, DBE 2007; married 1951 James Douglas (two sons, one daughter); died London 16 May 2007.

Mary Douglas was a distinguished and original social theorist. Her Purity and Danger (1966) was listed by the TLS in 1991 as one of the hundred most influential non-fiction books published since the Second World War. Her books, which range from African ethnography and biblical exegesis to accounts of contemporary social movements, stirred interest and debate in a number of different disciplines, but they also attracted a wide general readership.

Born Mary Tew in 1921, the first child of a colonial civil servant, she was sent home from Burma at the age of five to live with her mother's retired parents in Devon. She was 12 - waiting for her parents to come back on leave - when her grandmother told her that her mother had died. Shortly afterwards, she was sent as a boarder to the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton, where her mother had been educated. The transition might have been disastrous, but in fact she was happy at school and remained faithful all her life to the rather traditional Catholicism that it transmitted.

In 1939 she went up to Oxford to read for a PPE degree, and after graduation she joined the Colonial Office, where she worked under the anthropologist Audrey Richards. "It was there in the Colonial Office that I first began to meet anthropologists," she told an interviewer. "They were the experts, while we civil servants were on the menial side, and I used to ask them, 'How do you get to be an adviser and not a servant?'" In 1946 she returned to Oxford to begin postgraduate studies in social anthropology.

For a brief period after the Second World War, Oxford University was the leading international centre of social anthropology. Religion was the central focus of interest. Emile Durkheim was still the theoretical guide, but sociological interests were giving way to a primary concern with systems of belief. The young professor, Edward Evans-Pritchard, had converted to Catholicism during the war. He was working on a study of the religion of the Nuer of the Southern Sudan, attributing to them theological views reminiscent of those of St Augustine.

Mary Tew was particularly impressed by Franz Steiner, a German poet and Jewish mystic, who gave a seminal series of lectures on taboo, ranging from Polynesia to Ancient Israel. Most of Evans-Pritchard's students did fieldwork in Africa but Tew made the unusual decision to work outside the British sphere of interest, in the Belgian Congo, studying a remote, impoverished, matrilineal people, the Lele of the Kasai Province.

In 1951 she married James Douglas, who had just joined the Conservative Party Research Department as an economist. They settled in Highgate, north London, and Mary Douglas was recruited by Daryll Forde to the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Three children were born during the 1950s and it was only in 1963 that Douglas published her first book, The Lele of the Kasai, a solid but conventional study that was, however, cast in the past tense since the Congo had entered its post-independence turmoil and the fragile Lele way of life had been fatally disrupted.

The apprentice work safely out of the way, her children by now at school, Mary Douglas, in her forties, made a decisive change of track. Jim Douglas was by now a senior figure in the Conservative Party and he encouraged her to apply anthropology to the problems of contemporary Britain. However, Mary was more immediately engaged by the debates raging around Vatican II and she began to think about the place of ceremony and symbolism in modern societies.

Two very successful books, Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970), established her as a major theorist of ritual and theology. Witty and accessible, both books are studded with evocative examples taken from the Lele and other African societies, the Old Testament, contemporary social movements, and even from her housekeeping routines in Highgate. They were written quickly and the argument was sometimes elusive, her style intuitive rather than systematic, but for the next 20 years she elaborated the ideas floated in this period, trying to develop universal models of the relationship between group structures and ideas about the world.

Her fundamental propositions were taken from Durkheim. Our understanding of the world is grounded in social relations. Cosmological ideas mirror specific forms of social life and are embodied in sacred symbols. Things that do not fit in with our basic assumptions about nature are not only puzzling but dangerous, threatening to the social order. They become symbolically charged, polluting, taboo.

But Durkheim was wrong to oppose a group-bound traditional society to individualist and secular modernity. "As a social animal, man is a ritual animal," Douglas insisted. We have our rituals and symbols, embodied in meals, dress codes, pageantry or political demonstrations, above all in the human body, a perennial focus of symbols and taboos. However, all this had become invisible to intellectuals. They were in denial, prisoners of utilitarianism, rationalism and individualism, detached from social reality.

Stable stratified societies have hierarchies of saints, complex divinities and elaborately ritualised distinctions. All this Douglas preferred, at least in theory. Loosely organised egalitarian groups and networks may struggle to maintain a common front against the dangerous outside world, but they are torn by internal jealousies. They are hotbeds of witchcraft accusations, prey to millenarian cults and outbreaks of iconoclasm. Both forms - church and sect - coexist in different strata of complex western societies, or even in single institutions.

Following Natural Symbols, a new project began to crystallise, the study of forms of consumption conceived of as modern rituals. Meals and shopping provided some of the main examples. But while other scholars - from economists to philosophers and theologians - began to pay attention, her work was regarded increasingly by her professional colleagues as not really anthropology. Meanwhile, her immediate position at UCL was becoming uncomfortable. Daryll Forde had provided sophisticated and congenial leadership but when he retired, the UCL anthropology department began to fall apart - providing an excellent but unwelcome instance of her model of sectarian iconoclasm. Jim Douglas was also being marginalised as the Conservative Party lurched to the right. A new start was in order.

In 1977, at the age of 56, Douglas moved to New York where she became Director of Research on Culture at the Russell Sage Foundation. She now began a fruitful collaboration with the American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. In Risk and Culture (1982) they addressed the environmental movement in the United States, pointing to the sacralisation of nature, asking why particular dangers - taboos - were given such symbolic weight, and arguing that there were links between the millenarianism of the environmentalists and their loose organisational structures. These arguments were further developed in How Institutions Think (1986) (better than individuals, was the answer) and Risk and Blame (1992).

In 1981 Mary Douglas was appointed to a chair at Northwestern University in Chicago. Here, and later in Princeton, she taught in a department of religious studies and she returned to a study of the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus in particular. She published several monographs on the bible in quick succession, the last of which, Thinking in Circles, appeared this year.

Jim and Mary Douglas returned to London in 1988 and she found somewhat to her amusement that she was at last being claimed by the British anthropologists. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, and just a week before her death she was invested with the insignia of a DBE.

In complete contradiction to her own theory, Mary Douglas's formal commitment to order, authority and tradition went along with personal informality, even eccentricity, contempt for all the old guards, a delight in transgressing boundaries, a tendency to fall for novelties, and a preference for loose networks of like-minded associates, just the sort of grouping she denounced in her books for producing socially irresponsible ideologies. Beautiful but unadorned, striving to be honest, frank about one's shortcomings, she could sometimes almost seem like a Puritan, but she also loved food and wine and gossip and, while she was unforgiving of intellectual lapses, she was tolerant of mortal sin.

Adam Kuper