Implicit Meanings: Mary Douglas: Collected WorksImplicit Meanings was first published to great acclaim in 1975. It includes writings on the key themes which are associated with Mary Douglas' work and which have had a major influence on anthropological thought, such as food, pollution, risk, animals and myth. The papers in this text demonstrate the importance of seeking to understand beliefs and practices that are implicit and a priori within what might seem to be alien cultures. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 8 | |
Social and religious symbolism of the Lele | 34 |
Animals in Lele religious symbolism | 47 |
Techniques of sorcery control in Central Africa | 63 |
Sorcery accusations unleashed | 77 |
Looking back on the 1950s essays | 95 |
Critical essays | 99 |
Couvade and menstruation | 170 |
The healing rite | 180 |
Obituary of Godfrey Lienhardt | 188 |
Looking back on the 1960s essays | 193 |
Essays on the a priori | 197 |
1975 | 199 |
Environments at risk | 204 |
The depoliticisation of risk | 218 |
1975 | 101 |
Pollution | 106 |
If the Dogon | 116 |
The meaning of myth | 131 |
Jokes | 146 |
Do dogs laugh? | 165 |
Deciphering a meal | 231 |
Selfevidence | 252 |
Rightness of categories | 284 |
Looking back on the 1970 essays | 310 |
Index | 314 |
Other editions - View all
Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology Professor Mary Douglas,Mary Douglas Limited preview - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
accused African analogy analysis animals anomaly anthropologists anti-sorcery argument Asdiwal Azande Begetters behaviour beliefs blue duiker cassowary claim clan classification cognitive Cokwe context contrast couvade cult group culture Deuteronomy Dinka diviner Dogon Douglas duiker Durkheim Edmund Leach environment essays example exemplars exogamy experience express fish forest grassland hama human hunt idea initiation interpretation Israelites joke Kabengabenga Karam Kasai killed kind kinship knowledge language Lele Lévi-Strauss Leviticus London magic marriage Mary Douglas meal meaning meat medicine menstruation metaphor myth nature Ndembu Nuer organisation Pale Fox pangolin pattern poison ordeal political pollution primitive problem Purity and Danger question raffia palm reality recognise relations religion religious risk rites ritual rules sacred sexual social structure society sorcery spirits symbolic taboo techniques themes theory thought tion tribal tribes Tsimshian universe village whole witchcraft women young
Popular passages
Page 217 - Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger; An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966...
Page 279 - Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, The likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, The likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth...
Page 140 - Poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions; whereas the mythical value of the myth is preserved even through the worst translation.
Page 150 - A joke is a play upon form. It brings into relation disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by the appearance of another which in some way was hidden in the first.
Page 106 - In these cases the person under taboo is not regarded as holy, for he is separated from approach to the sanctuary as well as from contact with men; but his act or condition is somehow associated with supernatural dangers, arising, according to the common savage explanation, from the presence of formidable spirits which are shunned like an infectious disease. In most savage societies no sharp line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of taboo just indicated, and even in more advanced nations the...
Page 150 - The joke merely affords opportunity for realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity. Its excitement lies in the suggestion that any particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and subjective.
Page 112 - Sacredness as an attribute is not absolute; it is brought into play by the nature of particular situations. A man at home, in his tribe, lives in the secular realm; he moves into the realm of the sacred when he goes on a journey and finds himself a foreigner near a camp of strangers.
Page 232 - This is fair for literary criticism, but when we are talking of grammar, coding, and the 'science of the concrete',7 it is not enough. For analysing the food categories used in a particular family the analysis must start with why those particular categories and not others are employed. We will discover the social boundaries which the food meanings encode by an approach which values the binary pairs according to their position in a series. Between breakfast and the last nightcap, the food of the day...
Page 109 - For us dirt is a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feeling is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things has been violated.