In the fall of 1970, as a visiting professor at London University, I was introduced to Mary Douglas by mutual friends at University College and the Institute of Education. In addition to having lunch periodically, we would join Basil Bernstein for a drink at a pub on Gower Street. Our meetings were casual and intellectually quite enjoyable. Mary was always quick to introduce research topics of mutual interest. When I joined Basil and she at the pub, the discussion was more “aggressive” but always civil and stimulating. These episodic memories have never weakened, and as I recall those pleasant occasions I am reminded of the intellectual challenges that Basil and Mary created and their friendship.

After my year in London, I did not see Mary for several years, but there were occasional messages that were given to me orally by mutual acquaintances. We did meet more often when she came on visits to the U.S., and especially after she took up residence in New York while at the Russell Sage Foundation. Our relationship was typical for academic colleagues who maintained durable weak ties (Granovetter 1973).

In the pages that follow, I focus on a few aspects of Douglas’s general intellectual interests. I call attention to Douglas’ deep and broad understanding of theory, in particular, her ability to penetrate the many aspects of the foundations of human knowledge while reporting on her own field work and carefully describing a broad range of comparative studies. In her seminal book Purity and Danger (1966), and the collection of essays in Implicit Meanings (1975), Douglas delves deeply into the relevance of implicit public language, the role of social elements in controlling our thoughts, and noting how Durkheim failed to see that his views should have also have been applied to industrial societies, science and his own research. Douglas attributed this serious gap in Durkheim’s thinking to the belief that primitives “are utterly different from us” (1975: xi), and the “belief in objective scientific truth, itself the product of our own kind of society, with its scope for individual diversity of thought” (1975: xii). She quotes (1975: xii) Steven Lukes’ (1972) detailed and useful intellectual biography as evidence for her view:

Durkheim was really maintaining two different theses which he failed to separate from one another because he did not distinguish between the truth of a belief and the acceptance of a belief as true. The first was the important philosophical thesis that there is a non-context-dependent or non-culture-dependent sense of truth (as correspondence to reality) such that, for example, primitive magical beliefs could be called ‘false’, mythological ideas could be characterized as ‘false in relation to things’, scientific truths could be said to ‘express the world as it is’ and the Pragmatists’ claim that the truth is essentially variable could be denied.

The two overlapping assessments underscore Durkheim’s sociological determinism and his protection from criticism of the intellectual roots of his culture. For example, the problem social scientists encounter when they use methods that take for granted elicitation procedures that failed to recognize that the social construction of reality attributed to ‘primitives’ is applicable to all human cultures and the social science researcher.

The research conducted by Douglas in the Congo on human experiences of purity and impurity or pollution and taboo represent a creative mind and a challenging conceptual framework on how such notions are constitutive of social life. For example:

“The more we know about primitive religions the more clearly it appears that in their symbolic structures there is scope for meditation on the great mysteries of religion and philosophy. Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. Wherever ideas of dirt are highly structured their analysis discloses a play upon such profound themes. This is why an understanding of rules of purity is a sound entry to comparative religion. The Pauline antithesis of blood and water, nature and grace, freedom and necessity, or the Old Testament idea of Godhead can be illuminated by Polynesian or Central African treatment of closely related themes” (1975, 5–6).

The above quotation from Purity and Danger is a very small example of Douglas’ ability to link what may appear to some readers to be a reference to a sub-specialty, is gradually transformed into a useful conceptual frame that addresses the social organization of human life. Her subsequent research re-formulated and extended the useful ideas developed in Purity and Danger to contemporary issues.

The detailed study of religion and society by Douglas became an extensive discussion of an impressive amount of cross-cultural observation and the use of analytic concepts while underscoring the point that the essence of religion was not to be found in the spiritual belief systems of practitioners, but in the more general theme of the comparative study of “peoples views about man’s destiny and place in the universe. In the second place we shall not expect to understand other people’s ideas of contagion, sacred or secular, until we have confronted our own” (1975, 28). For Douglas, therefore, it was fruitless to undertake a systematic study of ‘primitive,’ ancient or presumably modern religious hygienic practices and dirt unless we make problematic our own beliefs about such issues and what is to be learned from ideas associated with what is called sacred and secular.

The detailed analysis of different religions, magic, miracles, and rituals include useful, convincing examples from Douglas’ research on the Lele and other ethnographers, as well as a broad range of religious texts, academic and non-academic treatises. The innovative conceptual framework that was created early in her academic career provided Douglas with a powerful framework with which to study activities that fell under her penetrating intellectual gaze, a gaze that always examined all ideas and data with a perspective that was as critical of others as it was of her own work.

Douglas’ work includes a detailed examination of collaborative sexual behavior and its possible rigid and violent interaction. The notion of “sex pollution” and the different ways these practices occur highlights the notion of controlling access and exits and its role in sustaining the internal organization of a social system, including how adulteries, incest and other conditions can alter the lines of control differentially in the same culture. Douglas notes that

“In primitive cultures, almost by definition, the distinction of the sexes is the primary social institution. This means that some important institutions always rest on the difference of sex”. (1975, 140)

Hence, in a strongly organized culture, men are likely to have the power to choose, in a weakly organized social structure both sexes may choose. In a culture where rules are directly enforced (Walbiri in Australia) women can be punished quickly. The men seek other men’s wives but women can never play one against the other male and there are no beliefs concerning sexual pollution.

A key issue for Douglas is the notion that each culture develops its own beliefs about dirt and defilement, and its members are socialized to sense what is positive about their practices, including rules of avoidance and the boundaries of public recognition. She continues (1975, 140)

But it still remains true that religions often sacralise the very unclean things which have been rejected with abhorrence. We must, therefore, ask how dirt, which is normally destructive, sometimes becomes creative…. Though it is only specific individuals on specified occasions who can break the rules, it is still important to ask why these dangerous contacts are often required in rituals. One answer lies in the nature of dirt itself. The other lies in the nature of metaphysical problems and of particular kinds of reflections which call for expressions.

Douglas was a master of blending conceptual ideas and empirical findings. For this reviewer, what was especially pervasive about her work was that she consistently exposed a tendency by social scientists to take for granted unexamined implicit meanings in their own cultural perspectives that affected their attribution of “objectivity” to their own knowledge claims.