Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas, a British Anthropologist, is among the foremost brilliant and intellectually creative scholars of her time. She was educated as a Catholic at the Sacred Heart Convent, in England, and from the start, she was keenly interested in religion. After that, she went to Oxford where she did a B.A degree in 1943. During her Degree at oxford, she fell under the influence of the famous social anthropologist E.E Evans-Pritchard, who was also interested in comparative religion. For some time Mary Douglas worked in the British Colonial office, where she encountered many social anthropologists, after some time she decided to dig deep in anthropology and went to Oxford and take a “conversion” course in anthropology and registered for the doctorate in anthropology in 1949 and went to Africa, to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), to study the folkways of a tribe, the Lele of the Kasai, for her Ph.D. under professor Evans-Pritchard in 1951.

Diving back within the history of anthropology, it's believed that modern anthropology was developed during the age of Enlightenment, in between a movement of 18th century Europe that focused on the facility of reason to advance society and knowledge. It is not clear that who created the field, study and definition of anthropology but, currently Anthropology is known as a systematic study of humanity, to understand our evolutionary origins, our distinctiveness as a species, and thus the good diversity in our kinds of social existence across the earth and thru time. In simple words, Anthropology is the study of what makes humans a human. Till today the World has seen many great brilliant anthropologists and Mary Douglas was one of them.