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

Mary Douglas’s ideas of how enclavists behave was taken up by Emmanuel Sivan and his co-author as the starting point for their influential book called Strong Religion (University of Chicago, 2003). It fitted into the ten-year Fundamentalism Project sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

It would be nice to think that the American administration in its war on terror was now taking as much notice of Mary Douglas’s ideas as the academics. In Britain some in the Foreign Office have been struck by her analyses. Her current hope is that experts on culture, religion and politics can at least find a way by which extremists may be engaged in talk. The alternative is to reinforce antipathies. ‘If a sectarian enclave is never allowed to publish its dissident views, it will make itself heard by violent attacks on its enemies,’ she says. ‘If these people hate America anyway, and America attacks them, it increases the hostility of the enclave.’

In the past decade, Mary Douglas has been at work again on the first books of the Bible, finding a structure ignored for millennia in the book of Numbers. This has attracted huge admiration from biblical scholars as much as anthropologists.

The drawers of the filing cabinets in the study of her flat high above the plane trees near the British Museum read: Reviews, Leviticus, Family. I left her at her desk preparing for publication a book of essays that her father wrote on fly-fishing.