The pangolin and al-Qa’eda

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

‘It’s no good attacking enclaves,’ Mary Douglas said, dissecting a piece of guinea fowl on her plate. ‘It just makes them more firmly enclaves.’

When I had lunch with her, she sat upright in her chair, not leaning on its back, a slight woman of 86 now, her bright dark eyes set off by silver hair. She was talking about Islamist terrorists, as classified in her own cultural theory, for she is an anthropologist, the greatest anthropologist, some say, that Britain has produced in the past half century. She was made a dame in the New Year’s honours.

Her sharp mind is still teeming with ideas. Her early fieldwork in the 1950s was with the Lele, in the heart of the Congo. She had studied at Oxford under E.E. Evans-Pritchard, when English anthropology was keen and fieldwork-based. Her understanding of the ritual role of the tree-pangolin may seem a long way from her more recent work, which has attracted interest since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. But there is a continuous connecting vein of analytical tenacity.

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.