Mary Douglas

An Intellectual Biography

Richard Fardon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415040921
• eBook ISBN: 9781134953080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century.
Richard Fardon covers Douglas' family background, and the pervasive influence of her catholic faith on her writings before providing an analysis of two of her most influential works; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). The final section deals with Douglas' more controversial writings in the fields of economics, consumption, religion and risk analysis in contemporary societies. Throughout, Fardon highlights the centrality of Douglas' role in the history of anthropology and the discipline's struggle to achieve relevance to contemporary, western societies.

Part I


BEGINNINGS: 1920s – 1950s

1 ‘ MEMORIES OF ACATHOLIC
GIRLHOOD ’ : 1920s AND 1930s

It has been the most passionate affirmation of Mary Douglas’s writings that the taken-for-granted beliefs, ideas and emotions of a period, place or person never be considered aside from the social circumstances which gave rise to them and then sustained them. This is not the weak notion that all ideas are born in social circumstances, but a stronger assertion that they continue to be part and parcel of the social world in which they are used. Beliefs are self-evident, or hotly contested, among people related to one another in specific ways. Among other people, differently related, the same ideas would need different interpretation. To break this rule of method at the outset would sever my account from the way its subject might want to see herself. Mary’s social background is the context in which to locate the inception of many of her ideas; but an account of these ideas must also show how their significance to her changed with her circumstances.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Margaret Mary Tew was born in San Remo on 25 March 1921, the first child of Phyllis Margaret Twomey (1900–33) and Gilbert Charles Tew (1884–1951). Her parents, who had married the previous year, were holidaying on the Italian Riviera en route for home leave from their colonial posting to Burma, where her father served in the Indian Civil Service as a District Commissioner for twenty-five years (1908–33). In one way or another both sides of the family were widely travelled; but in Mary’s recollection the Twomey connection was the more romantic as well as the more formative.

The Twomeys were of Irish ancestry and, like so many nineteenth-century Irish familes, by the twentieth century were scattered over much of the English-speaking world. Reference books record O’Twomey to be a well-known west Munster name predominantly associated with County Cork. In the mid-seventeenth century, O’Twomey was the most common name in the county after Murphy – one Sean O Tuama (1706–75), a publican of Croom, is said by MacLysarght (1972) to have been the most distinguished later bearer of the name. ‘Great grandfather Twomey’, Daniel Twomey (1830–1900), Mary’s mother’s grandfather and a picaresque character in family memory, raised seven children, most of whom went into the professions, and many of whom travelled and died abroad. They included a journalist who died in his twenties in Australia, and a doctor who died in his fifties in Nigeria, as well as emigrants to Canada and to the USA with land grant tickets. Great grandfather Twomey was able to educate his offspring from the proceeds of a chandlery called Bleak House, at Carrigh Touhil in Cork. On a small piece of land there, he kept animals awaiting slaughter to provision the ships that sailed to America. Until disabused of the idea by her American relatives, Mary long believed, on account of this land, that her great-grandfather had been a farmer. He married above himself and, on the collapse of his fortunes, his wife, a Ryan twelve years his junior, left him to take up residence on the Isle of Wight, at which he took to drink. Nonetheless, his efforts had seen his children into the professions and largely out of Ireland as middle-class emigrants.

Daniel Twomey’s son – another Daniel Twomey and Mary’s maternal grandfather (Sir Daniel Harold Ryan Twomey 1864–1935) – served in the Indian Civil Service (1882–1920), becoming Chief Judge in Rangoon for three years before his retirement in the year Mary’s parents married. Roman Catholic by birth, Mary’s grandfather had married May Ponsford, the daughter of a Protestant navy chaplain, who ran away from home to become a nurse at Guy’s Hospital. This, apparently formidable, lady fulfilled her promise to bring up Phyllis Twomey, Mary’s mother, as a Roman Catholic.

Tew, Mary’s maiden name, is an old Celtic name.¹ Her father (Gilbert Charles Tew 1884– 1951, Photograph 1), from Warwick, was of less remarkable antecedents than her mother, but clever. The working-class, grammar-school-educated, son of a gas works’ manager, he won a scholarship to read classics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and entered the colonial service, as a result of which her parents met. A passionate angler, he wrote numerous articles published both in Rangoon and Britain.² Mary attributes her own concern with literary style to her father’s sensitivity as an Edwardian essayist. A decade and a half older than his wife, whom he outlived by almost two decades, long years of quinine use – and frequent bouts of malaria – took a toll on his health in later life. Portraits suggest a lean and dapper man; his younger wife, buxom and pretty. Family shots from Burma show the couple dressed up for charades or playing with their children on a typically colonial veranda. To Gilbert Tew’s sufferings was added osteoporosis, which confined him to a wheelchair for the last four years of his life, when he was nursed by his younger daughter. He died, before seeing any of his grandchildren, in 1951: the year he attended the Douglases’ marriage.

Photograph 1 Gilbert Tew, Mary Douglas’s father, a passionate angler
Source: © Mary Douglas

Vignettes of early family life in Mary’s later writings are of the women on her mother’s side; her father’s parents died before she knew them. There was an eccentric Great Aunt Ethel, her maternal grandmother’s sister, ‘a caravan-dweller, a painter, the bohemian artist in the family [who] raised angora rabbits and ran a troop of Wolf Cubs. She ate nuts and fruit, and wore bright hand-woven garments, wooden beads, brilliant embroidered waistcoats which set off her white hair’ (1992hOAO: 49–50). Mary’s sister Pat Novy, whose illustrations adorn many of Mary’s books (and this one), seems to have inherited her artistic gifts. Then there is May Ponsford, Mary’s doughty maternal grandmother, chided by her son-in-law for wishing to learn Spanish in her old age in order to read Don Quixote in the original (in press, ‘Why I have to learn Hebrew’); and her mother’s friend, daughter of another colonial servant, her godmother and ‘London aunt’, who did not mean offence but embarrassed her student nephews and nieces by enquiring after visitors’ taste in tea with the politically incorrect, ‘Chink or Ink?’ (Douglas 1996h: 117). Strong and capable women, then, but women who belonged in a world now vanished.

From the age of five (in 1926) when she began school, Mary was left with her mother’s retired parents in Totnes, Devon, while her mother and father were in Burma. She later saw this as a difficult circumstance – common to the families of the Indian Civil Service – in which everyone was doing their best, but at the time she felt abandoned. In 1933, the year her mother died in London after a struggle with cancer, her father retired in poor health, and Mary and Pat were taken back into his care. Mary was transferred from a local school to continue secondary education as a boarder at the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton. As a result of family ties to the school, which her mother had attended (Photograph 2), and the bereavement, Mary and her sister received bursaries; otherwise the school would have been beyond their family means. Mary’s grandfather, with whom she and Pat had been living, died two years after his daughter. The years that Mary Tew spent at the Sacred Heart Convent were to be formative – even more than the years between twelve and seventeen are for most people – and are mentioned in every autobiographical summary of her life. Following separation from her parents, and the deaths of her mother and maternal grandfather, the young Mary seems to have found stability, and a sense of belonging, in this secure and secluded women’s world. The idealized organization of the convent school, where she was an outstanding pupil, serves in her later work as an implicit exemplar of her description of differentiated, hierarchical organizations as a focus of loyalty, commitment and order. Her education, and perhaps the relative absence of an adjacent generation in her upbringing, imparted a self-confidence little tested by conflict. But we must move cautiously in establishing the connections and backtrack a little.

Photograph 2 The Junior School (under ten years old) of the Sacred Heart Convent by the lake about 1906. Phyllis Twomey
– Mary Douglas’s mother – seated second from the left
Source: © Mary Douglas

THE SACRED HEART

The society of the Dames du Sacré Coeur was founded in Paris in 1800 by Saint Madeleine- Sophie Barat; she was canonized in 1925 (O’Leary 1992: 85). The statutes of the order, modelled on those of the Jesuits, had been drawn up by the Jesuit Père Varin. The order was to serve the double purpose of venerating the Sacred Heart and providing for girls’ education. To find the immediate origins of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus we must go back a further century and a quarter.

Under the influence of her director, the Jesuit La Colombière, Marguerite Marie Alacoque (d. 1690), a nun in the Salesian convent at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, practised a fervent mystical devotion to Christ which resulted in ecstasy. According to her account, on June 16, 1675, when praying before the sacrament, she saw Jesus ‘showing to her his heart on a flaming throne, surrounded by thorns and surmounted by a cross; and he told her that it was his will that a special devotion should be offered to his Sacred Heart in reparation for irreverences committed against him in the most holy sacrament, and that the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi should be set apart for this devotion.’

(Kolde 1911: 146–47)

Initially, the new devotion was not well received in Rome. However, the advocacy of the Jesuits, its popularity, and the miracles claimed of it, forced concessions to devotion to the Sacred Heart by stages. Marguerite Marie Alacoque was beatified in 1864, and during the final decades of the nineteenth century the standing of the devotion was ratified.

At the Vatican Council of 1870, the majority of the bishops asked for the elevation of the feast [of the Sacred Heart] to the rank of a double (i.e., a feast at which the antiphon is said both before and after the psalm) of the first class (i.e., one which takes precedence in case two feasts fall on the same day) with octave (i.e., lasting through eight days, with special emphasis upon the celebration on the last day), but it was then granted only to the Jesuit order, in recognition of their services in spreading the devotion. The rank was extended to the whole Church, though without an octave, by Leo XIII in 1889.

(Kolde 1911: 147)

Accounts claim earlier precedents for devotion to the Sacred Heart and elaborate upon its symbolism.

Every form of cult rendered to Christ’s humanity has for its ultimate or total object the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the God-Man Christ in His concrete totality…each particular form of devotion [has its particular proximate or special object] composed of a psychological (or spiritual) element and a sensible element that has some intelligible connection with the psychological element. In the devotion to the Sacred Heart the special object is Jesus’ physical heart of flesh as the true natural symbol of His threefold love: the human love, sensible and spiritual (infused supernatural charity), and the divine love of the Word Incarnate.

(Moell 1967: 818)

Precedents for this interpretation have been sought in the scriptural promise of living waters in the Old Testament which were fulfilled at Christ’s death in the piercing of His side. ‘From the first Pentecost on, the waters of salvation (the Spirit) have flowed from the pierced heart of the Messiah.’ Over the years, a complex ritual has been created that ‘springs from the character of this special object’ (Moell 1967: 818).

Specific forms of the devotion are: celebration of the feast on the Friday following the second Sunday after Pentecost with the act of reparation prescribed by Pius XI; observance of the monthly First Friday with Holy Hour, votive Mass, and communion of Reparation; annual renewal of Leo XIII’s act of consecration on the feast of Christ the King; the litany and other prayers; consecration of families, nocturnal adoration and enthronement of the Sacred Heart in the home.

(Moell 1967: 818)

The details of these accounts are less important to my immediate purpose than the complex nexus of symbolism, ritual practice and authoritative interpretation on which they rest. Incorporation into the convent school involved introduction to a richly constructed world, but not simply as a set of dogmas. The convent school was also a setting, an institution in the sense Mary Douglas was later to favour, within which beliefs, attitudes and ideas were given a practical life. This educational experience helps us understand what it might have meant to her later when she titled works as: Purity and Danger, Natural Symbols, Rules and Meanings, Implicit Meanings, and How Institutions Think. The eighteen-year-old Mary Tew, who went up to Oxford University, was already equipped with much of her intellectual mindset and many of her ethical precepts (Turney 1996: 84). Of course, she shared her educational background with thousands of young women who did not go on to become noted anthropologists. Nonetheless, the influences of her schooling are very specific and left distinct traces. Before exploring these in greater detail, it is necessary to fill in a little of their broad context.

ENGLISH CATHOLICISM IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Very probably the [Roman Catholic] Church in England had, in proportion to the number of Catholics, more convent schools than the Church in any other part of the world and the effect of this on the character of religious practice was not inconsiderable.

(Hastings 1991: 144)

Growth in the number of convents had been helped by anti-clerical laws passed in Germany and France which brought many continental nuns to work in England, as many as 300 from France alone (Hastings 1991: 143; O’Leary 1992: 79). Their influence strengthened the existing overseas links of the English Catholic community. In the earlier part of the century, tensions between Anglicans and Roman Catholics still ran strongly. The composition of the Catholic community in England and Wales, numbering about two million in 1920, had been changed by large-scale Irish immigration – impelled by the famines and attracted by the jobs provided by industrialization – from the 1840s onwards. This predominantly working-class population had come to outnumber the ‘old dissent’ – the English recusants consisting of old gentry families and the nineteenth-century converts from the Oxford Movement. The class structure of the Catholic Church in England thus tended to be divided between the upper classes and manual labourers, a structure unlike that of the other main churches. The consequences of this difference for Catholic life in the earlier part of the century were considerable. Working-class religiosity was based on a mixture of

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Table of contents

• COVERPAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• MARY DOUGLAS’S MONOGRAPHS AND COLLECTED ESSAYS: A NOTE ON REFERENCING STYLE
• PART I: BEGINNINGS: 1920s – 1950s
• PART II: SYNTHESIS: 1960s
• PART III: EXCURSIONS AND ADVENTURES: 1970s – 1990s
• PART IV: CONSERVING ANTHROPOLOGICAL MODERNISM