Mary Douglas was born on 25 March 1921 in Sanremo, Italy. Her book, Purity and Danger, is regarded as a seminal work for anthropologists. Beginning in the Colonial Office in 1945, she enrolled at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology in 1947 and conducted fieldwork with the Lele. In 1951, she was made Lecturer of Social Anthropology at University College London, eventually becoming Professor. Douglas moved to the US in 1977 as Foundation Research Professor of Cultural Studies at the Russel Sage Institute. She retired as Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University in 1988.
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy, she was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1992 and made Dame in 2007. A follower of Émile Durkheim, she promoted structuralist analysis and was interested in comparative religion. Notable works include The Lele of Kasai (1963), Natural Symbols (1970), Risk and Culture (with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky 1983), How Institutions Think (1987), Risk and Blame (1992), Leviticus as Literature (1999), and Jacob’s Tears (2004).
