Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas was a British anthropologist best known for Purity and Danger (1966), a study of the symbolic logic of pollution, dirt, and taboo across cultures. She argued that ideas of ritual impurity are not primitive superstitions to be dismissed but expressions of a coherent symbolic system through which societies classify and defend their own sense of order, famously describing dirt as matter out of place. Douglas later developed grid-group cultural theory, a framework for classifying the ways different types of social organization generate different worldviews and attitudes toward risk, which influenced anthropology, sociology, and policy studies concerned with public perceptions of danger.