Douglas Mary biography

Try the literature selection service. You can always turn off the advertisement. Mary Douglas. A Very Personal Method. Anthropological Writings Drawn from Life. Los Angeles et al. Thanks to her deep understanding of the Nature and Role of Ritual in Human Culture, Which Douglas Has Been Deveeloping Sincy Childhood, She to Understand adequatly how The African Societies that She Studies Function.

Ritual is Necessary Became People Are Unable to Easily Cut Their Ties with Particular Social Units. Higher Social Tension and More Perceptible Dividing Lines Between Units LEAD to MORE ELABOREBORETE RITALES. The text of the scientific work on the topic "Mary Douglas. Anthropological Writings Drawn from Life. Yuri Evgenievich Berezkin Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.

In England - of course, but it is unlikely in Russia, where they know little about it. The posthumous publication of chosen lectures and articles by Mary Douglas and on my table was by chance: they asked to write a review, although I have been reading an anthropological classics in St. Petersburg for a long time. Douglas in it was mentioned only in connection with other researchers.

But she, of course, deserves a separate conversation. The douglas included in the work of the work is located in a chronological sequence - not in the sequence of their initial appearance, but according to the stages of life and work of the author and the problems that interested Douglas in different years. The book is opened by a lecture given in the city of a lecture entitled "Feeling of the Hierarchy." This text made a great impression on me.

My youth passed in Soviet times. The hierarchical structures were not alien to this society, but neither my parents, nor even more, I myself did not come into contact with them. As for the software? I had nothing against family rituals like a Christmas tree for New Year or a cake for a birthday, but they went in free form- like walking on Mars on May 1 and November 7, when they “showed a salute”.

With the hierarchy, I rein only in the army after the university. It is easy to guess that this whole circus and booth - from the battalion to the state of the Sudarity - caused laughter and hatred. Of course, she was not the only Catholic among her colleagues, but almost the only one for whom this circumstance turned out to be an important factor in professional activity.

Those who have grown under the Soviet regime understand the views of Douglas more difficult than its compatriots. In the second or third quarter of the XX century. But if Europe gradually passed from a traditional society to a society based on the principles of rationality, in Russia the religion was sharply and almost completely taken beyond the scope of public life.

When the religion began to return, for officially recognized faiths, and above all, the main one, a difficult trace of cooperation and almost fraught with state security structures reached out. Of course, there were exceptions, but normally, the declaration of oneself as a representative of a certain faith for the Russian academic environment has always looked causing and made the colleague's professional suitability.

This is not about private life, but exclusively about a public position, but Douglas writes just about it. She quotes a wonderful episode when John Hatton, the famous researcher Naga Naga North-East India left his department in Cambridge and was looking for a successor. Meyer Fortes was rejected as a Jew, Audrey Richards as a woman. The conversation took place a few years after the Second World War, and in the position of Hatton it is not necessary to look for neither anti-Semitism, nor sexism, nor anti-Irish or some other wrong mood.

It’s just that he, for obvious reasons, wanted a neutral person in all respects by science, whose decisions will be due only to the interests of science itself. Does this mean that her belonging to the Catholic Church influenced the activities of Douglas? However, this very affiliation made it an anthropologist. Describing the life in the parental house, and then in the Catholic boarding school at the monastery, Douglas emphasizes how important the perception of society has become important for professional formation as a structured system of cells, and behavior at all levels as a ritual.

This is a precious understanding, the essence of which the author of the review is as difficult as the blind from birth about the rainbow, allowed her to easily learn the principles of the organization and the reasons for the collapse of the Congolese calendar of Casai, as well as any other traditional society. We will return to the ritual, and now about Lele. When in the city of Nyasa, the author still bore the maiden name of the tha.

Trips Douglas in Congo in and GG. Several articles included in the collection dedicated to Lele are excitingly interesting. They relate to Africa characteristic of Africa south of the Sahara Institute of Witchcraft and the fight against sorcerers. What is about about, everyone who in his youth has happened to read E. Ritter’s novel “Zulus Chuck”. Douglas believes that "faith in witchcraft in one form or another is known around the world." Such a statement requires a reservation.Witchcraft in its African or European form is incompatible with instructive shamanism.

Sha-MAN is a specialist who is “in position” and at the same time “by vocation” is supposed to treat people, although he can use his abilities for evil. However, the shaman does not need to be sought and identified, its status is recognized and the abilities are known to everyone. The shaman is not only the “chosen of spirits”, but also the spiritual leader, while the sorcerer is an impostor who is outside the society 3 and is not connected with him certain obligations.

In AF, the power of the sorcerer is explained by the possession of fetishes and involvement in secret cults. The strength of the fetishes is enclosed in themselves, and not in the mythological characters that would be considered to be in them. The sorcerer's activity is a surrounding secret. For Siberia or America, all this is not characteristic. The only range of the New World, where witchcraft appears in ethnographic descriptions, is the zone of distribution of the culli pueblo in the south-west of the United States.

The role of missions in socio-cultural changes that covered the world after the beginning of the era of great geographical discoveries has been little studied in our historical science. If we talk about equatorial Africa, it was the missionaries that created the infrastructure there, which the administration could relate to. It is natural that missionaries sought to eradicate witchcraft and “superstitions” associated with it, contrary to faith in a single and good God.

The religion, which replaced the traditional cults, however, was far from the enlightened and humane European model - it was the Catholicism of the sample G. In the traditional society, Lele, like many other $ and liability groups, men who initiated and dedicated to esoteric cults were considered the ability to kill enemies with the help of witchcraft.

Children, women and other uninitiated sorcerers could not be. The protection against witchcraft was the patronage of the initiation of relatives. In the pre-colonial period, elderly men saved their property and had large polygamy families, trying to move the time for young rivals to marry. Young united in the age classes-groups, who had a common wife-a captive captured by enemies.

After the cessation of the wars, but while maintaining the former cults, young men fell into a disadvantage in relation to the elders, as they lost the chance to increase their status due to a successful raid on the enemy village. The only factor that was able to limit gentocracy during this period was faith in witchcraft: the young could have been charged to those men who were dedicated to secret cults, but they themselves remained firmly protected from such accusations.

The accused of witchcraft was not killed, but they were threatened with exile with the corresponding loss of social positions. Missionary propaganda, which began in Casai in the middle of the xg. The transformation into Christians provided young people with access to women who would otherwise be at the disposal of the elderly. As a result, society was divided into two strata: young, despised the former rituals and beliefs, and the elderly.

Since young people were the main participants in collective hunts, their isolation, including the territorial one, in the nearby, but a separate village undermined both prestige and the economy of those who remained faithful to tradition. The period of the coexistence of Christianity and traditional cults was accompanied by a number of douglas of dramatic incidents described by the conflict of rights and obligations according to the new and old systems, but it did not last long - the cults disappeared as their adherents died out.

But not this process of changing beliefs, but the final transition to Christianity led to the most dramatic consequences. Here Douglas is not just as a European anthropologist, but as a person familiar with Catholic doctrine, the analyst fully used her capabilities. She examines in detail the essence of the concept of “evil” in the traditional picture of the world Lele and in Catholicism.

For Lele in the pre -Christian period, the “evil” was impersonal and relative, but after the adoption of Christianity it began to be associated with the devil as an antipode of God. Struggling against witchcraft, Christianized Lele began to explain the activities of the sorcerers with the influence of these people of the devil, and it was difficult to object to such a position to Catholic missionaries.

The newly made Christians were convinced that only the sorcerer himself could eliminate the consequences of witchcraft, which for this 1C should renounce the relations with the devil. Accordingly, the main task was the search for sorcerers, that is, knocking out confessions from the suspected. As a result, in G. Since 1 everyone could enter into a relationship with the devil, no children, 3 nor women were now protected from suspicions.

The further disintegration of social ties and PAU-F Perosis were due to both the destruction of the well-established J social structure and the transition from natural Ho-Fs to a market economy, in which the preservation of many 2-terrible rural population with low labor productivity is not justified.Now Kasai, as you know, is the area of ​​the endemic civil war, one of the most dysfunctional regions of the world.

In this sense, Douglas continues the trace of A. Radcliffe Brown and the English school of social J anthropology. The source material is quite ethnographic - the idea of ​​Bantu about the presence of several entities in each person. Simplifying, we can say that the inhabitants of the Congo distinguish the animated physical body of a person, which is an object of social relations, his shadow and his difficultly determined internal essence.

Douglas does not fall to the trivialities like the fact that one of the souls of a person was associated with his shadow, etc. In this case, it is not so much interested in the social structure: the ban on leagging someone else's shadows only refers to people, the relations between whom the father and son, the elder and younger brother are asymmetric, while the grandfather and two friends, who are members of different generic divisions, can be about.

Violation of the ban do not worry. It also follows a tour into history. The appearance of the ancient Jews of the idea of ​​an invisible and not having the image of the deity of “Cloud God” was, according to Douglas, a reaction to the idea of ​​God as a king was recorded in iconography of the 1st millennium. Being a denial of the idea of ​​the God-Tsar, the image of the “cloud God” could not arise earlier than the idea of ​​kingdom arose.

This idea is based on an analysis of the images of an anthropomorphic character characteristic of the Levant and the islands of the Mediterranean on the throne surrounded by cherubs. But all such observations are just the beginning of the analysis.