The pangolin and al-Qa’eda

25 April 2007

Christopher Howse meets Mary Douglas, Britain’s foremost anthropologist, and learns the connection between ritual taboos and al-Qa’eda’s cells

Her most celebrated early piece of elucidation was a chapter in her book Purity and Danger (1966) on the ‘abominations’ — things forbidden to be eaten — in the book of Leviticus. Animals with cloven hooves that did not chew the cud, she argued, were anomalies viewed as out of place in an ordered world. As such, they were like familiar household categories of dirt: matter out of place. It is not a question of germs, but of categorisation: food on my plate is clean, food on your plate is dirty, food on my jumper is dirty. ‘I was saying that unclassifiables provoke cognitive discomfort and reactions of disgust, hence negative attitudes to slime, insects and dirt in general.’

If her analysis of Levitical abominations was a tour de force, a striking statement in Purity and Danger would connect it with future work: ‘As a social animal, man is a ritual animal.’ This dictum was taken up in a chapter of her book Natural Symbols (1970) called with some irony, considering her own Irish blood, ‘The Bog Irish’. In it she argued that abstinence from eating meat on Fridays ‘was the only ritual which brought Christian symbols down into the kitchen and on to the dinner table in the manner of Jewish rules of impurity. To take away one symbol that meant something is no guarantee that the spirit of charity will flow in its place.’ But Friday abstinence was abolished by well-meaning Catholic bishops in 1967. It was a prime example of insensitivity to non-verbal signals. ‘It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by colour-blind signalmen,’ she wrote.

Dame Mary’s interests in systems of taboo, pollutions and dirt grew into an attempt to build a typology of cultures based on people’s need for classification. Are you in the group or out of it? If you are in it, what control do you accept on your life? For the past 30 years or so, Mary Douglas has been developing and refining — in collaboration and sometimes in sharp debate with fellow anthropologists — what has become known as Cultural Theory, with capital letters.

If you want Dame Mary’s Cultural Theory in a nutshell, it takes only two ideas and a pencil to understand. With the pencil, draw a vertical axis marked Grid and a horizontal axis marked Group. Group is the force that holds people together (either by defining themselves in opposition to the outside world, or through the pressure on them from the outside). Grid is the amount of classification that is imposed on people — what they wear or eat, where they live. So, high up on the axes of both Grid and Group, you find hierarchical societies. Low down, with little evidence of either Group or Grid influences, are the free-moving entrepreneurs. Where Grid is weak but Group is strong you find the sectarians, the enclavists.