Ria Reis presents the work of Mary Douglas

In 1949 Mary Douglas, then 28 years old, started her lifelong search for a sociological theory of meaning. A theory to help understand how in specific ecological and historical contexts people, simultaneously create particular patterns of society and organize knowledge, produce beliefs and ritual, in compatible patterns.
Unlike other social scientists of her day Douglas approached this question not by focusing on order, but by using disorder and dirt, what is despised and abhorred, as window to what order is about. Her focus on ordinary life allowed her to refocus her anthropological gaze from the small scale societies to the complex world of industrialised societies.
Mary Douglas has been one of the most productive anthropologists, publishing a book or collection of essays on the most widely differing topics every second or third year of her long career that culminated in her being knighted by the queen.
Ria Reis is Associate Professor in the department of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and Professor of medical anthropology at Leiden University Medical Center, department of Public Health and Primary Care (LUMC/PHEG) and Fellow of the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands.