Mary Douglas’ theory of purity and pollution in Purity and Danger. Each type is distinguished by characteristic structures of classification, power, and moral order operating at the individual cognitive level. The theory is tested in coastal Kenya, an area that typifies the challenges faced across Africa in providing rural communities with safely managed water. Mary Douglas shows that to examine what is considered as unclean in any culture is to take a looking-glass approach to the ordered patterning which that culture strives to establish. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion. Dame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA (25 March 1921 – 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. This is especially true of Judaic studies and biblical studies which have produced many important books and articles on purity and purification rituals. Her perceptive view of how cultural norms are dramatized and affirmed constituted a valuable … 2. Scholars of particular religious traditions have treated purity . 4. 3. In her work, Mary Douglas (1921-2007) clearly reveals her concern with social order. ‘Culture and Communication: Towards an Ethnographic Critique of Media ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Edward W. Said Cultural Critique, 1 (1985): 89–107. We apply Mary Douglas’ cultural theory to rural waterpoint management and discuss its operationalisation in pluralist arrangements through networking different management cultures at scale. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(1) (2007): 39–49. Such an approach affords a universal understanding of the rules of purity which applies equally to secular and religious life and equally to primitive and modern societies. ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, Raymond Williams New Left Review, 82 (1973): 3–16. Auteur des célèbres ouvrages De la souillure et Comment pensent les institutions, Mary Douglas (1921-2007) est également l’une des premières anthropologues à s’être intéressée aux risques dans les sociétés industrielles. Starting from a wide range of materials from primitive groups, Douglas developed major ideas about ritual, symbolic deviation, social limits and compared cosmologies. Mary Douglas and cultural anthropology. In chapter 1 of her famous "Purity and Danger", titled "Ritual Uncleanness", structuralist anthropologist Mary Douglas bases her distinction between the clean and sacred and the unclean and unsacred, while refuting dominant attitudes in 19 th century British anthropology.Douglas argues with the "evolution of culture" paradigm represented by thinkers such as James Frazer and Robertson Smith. Critiques on Mary Douglas' Theories 157 matters in considerable depth. This article offers an introduction to grid-group cultural theory (also known as grid-group analysis, Cultural Theory or theory of socio-cultural viability), an approach that has been developed over the past thirty years in the work of the British anthropologists Mary Douglas and Michael Thompson, the American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, and many others. 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