Mary Douglas R.I.P.
British anthropologist Mary Douglas died at the age of 86 last week. The Guardian (London) obituary is excellent. The Times (London) is a touch snippy. Commonweal readers will remember Paul Baumann’s superb profile of Douglas of a few years ago. Put simply Douglas was one of most influential Catholic intelllectuals of the postwar era, and along with Clifford Geertz perhaps the most influential social anthropologist from any background.
The obituaries nicely summarize Douglas’s achievement but I’d add that her focus on ritual, hierarchy and community — preoccupying concerns for her generation of Catholics, perhaps all generations of Catholics — allowed her to move seamlessly from the Lele in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Irish Catholic tribalisms. Her influential study, Natural Symbols, included a fierce defense of the ban on eating meat on Fridays, and she later declared herself agnostic on the question of women’s ordination given her belief in the importance of gender in constructing a symbolic (and social) system. At the same time she thought the refusal of church leaders to give women positions of real power within the institution appalling.
All in all a remarkable career.
Robert Alter was quoted a while back in the WSJ as saying that Mary Douglas’s Leviticus as Literature was one of his five favorite books on the Bible ( or was it the Pentateuch?). In any case no small compliment.
Mary Douglas thought, on anthropological grouonds, that doing away with the Friday abstinence rule was a great mistake. A sociologist-friend of mine was at Princeton when the Times ran the story about doing away with “fish on Friday.” A Jewish sociologist told him, “That is the most significant change you people have made yet, the one that is likely to have greatest consequence.” My friend demurred on the ground that it was a matter of mere discipline;, but his colleague insisted, on the grounds that it was doing away with a major badge of Catholic identity.
I do wish that in the reform of the rites of the sacraments more use had been made of the insighrts of anthropolgists like Mary Douglas. A French sociologist has done a very interesting study of the transformation, perhaps not intended, of the meaning of the rite of what used to be called Extreme Unction and is now the Anointing of the Sick.
If I’m not mistaken, historians dominated in the commission that reformed these rites.
The idea that eating meat on Friday was sufficient to exclude one forever from God’s presence did seem, well, a bit legalistic. That said, at some point–I think in the in the 90s– we decided, tacitly, not to eat meat on Fridays. Eamon Duffy’s Faith of Our Fathers followed our decision but confirmed the propriety of this practice, at least in my mind. Yes, we do like fish.