Dame Mary Douglas, DBE FBA (25 March 1921 – 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture, symbolism and risk, whose area of speciality was social anthropology.

Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.

After their mother's death, the sisters were raised by their maternal grandparents and attended the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton.

She published on such subjects as risk analysis and the environment, consumption and welfare economics, and food and ritual, all increasingly cited outside anthropology circles.

[7] When Mary Douglas started her fieldwork in the late 1940s in the Belgian Congo, British social anthropology was a small elite discipline dominated by men who, as Edmund Leach caustically commented, saw themselves as gentlemen scholars.

[8] Entry to this elite club involved undertaking intense ethnographic fieldwork following the model developed by Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Island.

Douglas described a society in which older men collectively controlled key resources, women, cult membership and knowledge of divination and sorcery.

Many younger Lele had taken advantage of European education and had migrated to the capital, Kinshasa where they thrived as professionals, entrepreneurs or catholic priests.

This changed the nature of sorcery accusations which were increasingly used as a way for young Lele priests to attack and destroy traditional religion through the purging of older sorcerers and their sinful practices.

In contrast to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who takes a structuralist approach, Douglas seeks to demonstrate how peoples' classifications play a role in determining what is considered abnormal and their treatment of it.

Douglas dismantles a common euro-centric misconception that rituals and rites for cleanliness were devised with hygiene or sanitation as its goals.

The avoidance of pork in Islam is often considered as having a hygienic basis, or that incense was used to mask body odors rather than symbolizing the ascending smoke of sacrifice.

[20]Douglas then proceeds to establish the notion that humans have a tendency to structure objects and situations around them into schema, well-organized systems.

In The Abomination of Leviticus she states that the dietary laws were not based on medical materialism, but rather social boundaries, deeming that what is pure and impure is a way for a society to structure human experiences.

[25] Evans-Pritchard observed that while the Azande were aware of the technical causes of such events, they attributed the social consequences (the harm) to human agency in the form of witchcraft.

Thus younger men attributed their various misfortunes to their older relatives who were members of and had access to the knowledge of religious cults and the economic benefits of such membership.

[15] Many younger Lele had taken advantage of colonial education and had migrated to the capital, Kinshasa where they thrived as professionals, entrepreneurs and Catholic priests.

[27] Mary Douglas also used historical anthropology to explore the ways in which the concept of sin was used to explain misfortune and allocate blame.

She examined the ways in which leprosy was linked to sin and used in 12th century Europe to allocate blame and protect from threats to the social order.

[28] Douglas observed that in contemporary societies in the global North, risk has, for the most part, replaced witchcraft/sorcery and sin as the explanation for misfortune.

While the concept of an accident, a random chance event, exists in contemporary society, there is strong pressure to ascribe all misfortune to human error, especially by those who have suffered its direct consequences.

As the sociologist, Judith Green notes disasters and tragedies ‘are [by definition] the outcome of poorly managed risks, rather than the inevitable misfortunes that we all suffer from time-to-time’.

In her account of events, Shoesmith argued that modern society’s inability to accept that some risks are unavoidable, and the fact that in the wake of a scandal a political and media feeding frenzy will not abate until someone is ‘named, blamed and shamed’, create huge challenges for those who work within particularly salient, sensitive and arguably invidious parts of the public sector.