Mary Douglas Implicit Meanings Essays In Anthropology
Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology by Douglas, Professor Mary. The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge: Selected Readings, edited by Mary Douglas (Penguin Books, 1973). Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975). The essay 'Jokes' was reprinted in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, edited by Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (1991), 291–310. First published to great acclaim in 1975, Mary Douglas has now revised the text to include additional chapters and a new introduction. Implicit Meaningsincludes writings on the key themes which are associated with Mary Douglas's work and which have had a major influence on anthropological thought, such as: *food *pollution *risk *animals *myth. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology is a collection of essays written in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by the influential social anthropologist and cultural theorist Mary Douglas. Get this from a library! Implicit meanings: selected essays in anthropology. [Mary Douglas].
Implicit Meanings Are Sometimes Called
Mary Tew Douglas (born 1921) was a British anthropologist and social thinker of international fame. Mary Tew Douglas was born in San Remo, Italy, to Phyllis Twomey and Gilbert Charles Tew, and was the eldest of two daughters. She was educated as a Catholic at the Sacred Heart Convent, Roehampton, in England, and she was keenly interested in religion all her life. As an anthropologist she kept on with her faith. At Oxford (where she did a B.A.
Degree in 1943) she fell under the influence of the famous social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who was also interested in comparative religion; he died a Catholic. Douglas wrote a biography of her mentor in 1980. She interrupted her graduate study at Oxford to be a volunteer in World War II in the British Colonial Office working on penal reform. Afterwards she earned a bachelor of science degree in 1948 in anthropology and went to Africa, to the Belgian Congo (now Republic of Congo), to study the folkways of a tribe, the Lele of the Kasai, for her Ph.D.
Under Professor Evans-Pritchard (1951). Also in 1951, Mary Tew married the economist James A. They had one daughter and two sons. She lived in London and was associated with University College, London, from that time onwards (lecturer in anthropology, 1951-1962; reader, 1963-1970; professor, 1971 until her retirement in 1978). She was the 1994 Bernal prize recipient.
Subsequently she went to the United States. Douglas was in New York City at the Russell Sage Foundation as director of research on human culture from 1977 to 1981; in Chicago at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, as Avalon Foundation professor in anthropology and religion, 1981-1985; and at Princeton University as visiting professor of religion and anthropology beginning in 1985. She maintained her residence in London.
Doctoral Dissertation Her doctoral dissertation, published as The Lele of the Kasai in 1963, studied the Lele tribe 'as they cooked, divided food, talked about illness, babies and proper care of the body' and examined how taboos operated within tribal society and the way in which polygamous male elders of the tribe manipulated raffia cloth debts in order to restrict the access of younger men to Lele women. This field investigation led Douglas on to other studies in what she called 'social accountability' and 'classification schemes' of human relations, applied equally to 'primitive' societies (pre-industrial, pre-modern) and to modern industrial society. She wrote books on a variety of subjects including pollution, the consumer society, and religion.
The anthropology of Douglas was derived partly from the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). Douglas rejected his determinism, but accepted what Durkheim realized: the social basis for human thought. She used the Durkheimian method of drawing on 'primitive' cultures to illuminate problems in modern society. For Douglas, rituals dramatize moral order in the human universe. 'Culture' is rooted in daily social relations: the most mundane and concrete things of daily life. From childhood on, the drama of life is constructed: the self concept; the linguistic code, which the individual learns as a child; the individual as a moral actor; the collective nature of human existence. Comparative studies have to be made of such things as dirt and pollution, food and meals, the biological body, speech, jokes, and material possessions.
