The pangolin and al-Qa’eda

28 April 2007

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

‘Enclavists have formed a group of like-minded friends who reject the rankings, formalities and inequalities of the outside society. Their culture is radical and angry.’ Al-Qa’eda and its extremist predecessors are examples of enclavists in action. They might become dangerous when the enclave leaves mainstream society — like Mohammed shaking the dust of Mecca from his feet and setting off with the faithful remnant for Medina and the beginning of a new era. This need not be a geographical retreat. Indeed present-day enclavism is so dangerous because the internet has connected isolated adherents disaffected from their host societies and defined by their adherence to a common cause accessed through a computer terminal.

Mary Douglas’s own preference is for a hierarchical system, although, since hierarchy is so often misconstrued, the term ‘positional’ is more often used today. ‘People misunderstand hierarchies,’ she says, sipping a glass of claret at the lunch table. ‘They think it is all about the top to bottom relationship, but the people at the top can’t function without the co-operation of those below and at each side.’

It was as a boarder at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, that the 12-year-old Mary Tew, as she was, had found the structured support she needed when her mother died. As the custom was, her parents had left her, when they returned to Burma and the colonial service, at the age of five with her maternal grandparents, at Totnes. The Sacred Heart was the school that Antonia White, who had been there with Mary’s mother, described so chillingly in Frost in May. It was far from chilling to Mary Tew.

One of the markers she noticed in that hierarchical setting was that the girls wore white gloves on Holy Days and Sundays, and brown gloves when they went for their doctrine lessons, where they sat in a circle as a teacher taught them Catholic theology.

She is going to let some of her own grandchildren accompany her to Buckingham Palace for her daming. When she collected her CBE in 1992, she had found an animated discussion in the ladies’ cloakroom about whether the Queen would prefer to shake their sticky palms or come into contact with a gloved hand. The world is full of non-verbal symbols.