Mary Douglas and the Study of Religion

Author(s): F. B. Welbourn
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 3, Fasc. 1 (1970), pp. 89-95
Published by: BRILL
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1594817 .
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MARY DOUGLAS AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION
BY

F. B. WELBOURN
(University of Bristol, U.K.)

1954 The Lele of the Kasai, in D. Forde (ed.), African Worlds, London:
Oxford University Press for the International African Institute.
1959 The Lele, in A. Hastings (ed.), The Churchand the Nations, London:
Sheedand Ward.
1963 The Lele of the Kasai, London:Oxford UniversityPress for the Inter-
nationalAfrican Institute.
1963 Techniquesof sorcerycontrolin CentralAfrica,in J. Middletonand E. H.
Winter (eds.), Witchcraftandsorceryin East Africa, London:Routledge
and KeganPaul.
1966 Purity and Danger,London:Routledgeand KeganPaul (also Harmonds-
worth: Penguin1970).
1970 NaturalSymbols,London:Barrieand Rockliff.
1970 (ed.), Witchcraft Accusations and Confessions, London: Tavistock Publi-
cations.
This does not pretend to be a complete list of Professor Douglas'
vigorous writing during the last sixteen years. It is enough to suggest
that, after her, the study of religion can never be the same again. It
was Professor Evans-Pritchard who taught so convincingly that each
culture must be understood as a Gestalt; each feature, whether of
politics, economics, kinship, religion, perception even, fitting in with
every other feature. It must first be seen in its total local context
before we can engage in the hazardous attempt to compare it with
apparently similar features in other cultures. So effective was his
insistence on the integral part of religion in culture that some of his
pupils have almost reversed the Durkheimian scheme to study the
effect of religion on social structure. Professor Douglas would not
now go so far. She is concerned with consonance rather than causality.
Rightly, she refuses to define 'religion' but wishes 'to compare people's
views about man's destiny and place in the universe'. In the long run
it is useless to study 'pollution' or 'witchcraft and sorcery' in general
terms. The differences in the beliefs of different cultures are at least
as important as their similarities; and they are to be understood only
against the differences of political authority, of economic concern, of
kinship systems and the status of women.
At times she runs the danger of being purely Durkheimian. She
90 F. B. Welbourn

guards herself. In the essay in African Worlds on 'The Lele of the

Kasai' she writes that 'the manner in which they have chosen to exploit
their environment may well be due to the ritual categories through
which they apprehend it'. She is sometimes explosively aware of the
power of symbols to undergo independent development and change the
shape of the society which has created them; and Natural Symbols is,
more than anything else, a passionate pastoral plea for their restoration
in the contemporary West. But she writes as an anthropologist. She
must, she says, in Purity and Danger, oppose sociological reductionism
to the psycho-analytic reductionism which would explain culture in
terms of infantile experience. She must, in Natural Symbols, attack
those (presumably theologically-trained writers on comparative religion)
who suppose that ideas develop independently of social structure. The
first of these issues is too like the nature-nurture controversy. The
psycho-analytic anthropologists may have been too simplistes. But is
it not true, to use her phrase, that society consists of groups fitting
inside one another like Chinese boxes; and that, whatever the in-
dividualist mythology in which they may still speak, psycho-analysts
are concerned primarily with the innermost of these groups, the child
and its parents ? There is surely much yet to be said about the com-
plementary contributions to an understanding of man which can be
made by social and individual studies: studies, as it were, at the mole-
cular and atomic levels.
The second issue is more serious. Dr. Douglas' criticism may be
exaggerated. But it is certainly true that too many students of religion
ignore its social context and therefore present an incomplete, some-
times misleading, picture. Because they compare 'religious' features out
of their place in the total culture, they sometimes compare incom-
parables and often obscure the essentially human character of religious
behaviour. There is, in some circles, an attempt to argue that a depart-
ment of religious studies should study religion 'in its own terms';
and this is very different from the belief that they should study whole
men, and whole societies, as they attempt to give answers to questions
'about man's destiny and place in the universe'. The delight of reading
Dr. Douglas is that she shows so convincingly the relation between
religious behaviour and other detailed aspects of a particular culture.
She would not claim that she is always right, or that she has done more
than make a beginning. The challenge to students of religion is that,
instead of studying 'world religion'---or even one religion as a gener-
alized concept--each should go to his particular society, whether in
 Mary Douglas and the study of religion 91

Africa or Amersham, and plot in detail the relations between religious

and total behaviour.
The Lele-among whom Dr. Douglas did her field work-recognized
almost no overt political authority. Seniority was respected and gave
to the older men rights over women-of marriage and giving in
marriage-through which they expressed their competition for status.
Njambi, God, was supreme; but his intervention in human affairs were
mediated through subordinate spirits living in the forest, and they
interpreted through the cults which, apart from that of twin-parents,
were wholly male in membership. The spirits controlled the fertility of
women and men's success in hunting. They might strike a whole village
with sickness. Their favour depended on right social relations in the
village, their displeasure on its breakdown. Sorcerers, motivated by spite,
might interfere with fertility, health, success in the hunt. Those most
frequently accused were those notorious for disturbing the peace--and
especially diviners, experts in the ritual which could be used for good
or evil ends. But, if diviners were consulted, they would direct suspicion
away from the village-to the spirits, the dead, to breach of cult rules
or sex pollution, to alien sorcerers-thus preserving the peace of the
village and making more likely the general acceptance of their verdict.
If social relations broke down so seriously that a particular individual
was accused, there was the ultimate test of the poison ordeal. It provided
an absolute, unchallengeable, solution to intolerable conflict. When it
was suppressed by the Belgians, a whole series of anti-sorcery cults
arose to take its place. But, in the essay 'Techniques of Sorcery',
Dr. Douglas suggests that-because of the finality of its verdict, and
despite the fact that new sorcery suspicions might immediately arise
to replace the old-the ordeal was the king-pin of sorcery beliefs,
without which their effect on the social structure is considerably
modified. It is hardly surprising that, with the removal of Belgian
control, the Lele should again have resorted to the ordeal.
The position of women was ambivalent. They were 'immeasurably
precious creatures ... at the same time as being despicably weak,
inferior beings'. On ritual occasions, when the power of the spirits
might endanger them, they were excluded from the forest. But the
grassland was their exclusive preserve, its fertility protected-like the
success of many practical enterprises-by rules of sexual continence.
Ideas of sex pollution encouraged marital fidelity and underlined the
'fact that a man's status was severely attainted by infringement of his
sexual rights.
92 F. B. Wclbourn

It is to pollution that Professor Douglas returns in Purity and

Danger; and perhaps its most remarkable achievement is to make far
more sense of the dietary rules of Leviticus than has been achieved by
Old Testament scholars. Set aside any theories of primitive hygiene or
irrational discipline and suppose that they are what they claim to be-
symbols of holiness. Domestic animals-cattle, sheep, goats (she should
not have included camels at this point)-were ruminant and cloven-
hoofed. They represented the divine order, the blessing of fertility.
Wild game which satisfied these conditions-antelope and mountain-
sheep-was clean. The camel, which chews the cud but does not part
the hoof, the swine which reverses these characteristics-these represent
chaos, the curse. All the other permissions and prohibitions can be
fitted, without difficulty, into the same dichotomy of order and chaos.
Society, as experienced, represents order. What distorts it is pol-
luting, unholy. What preserves and restores it is holy, sacred. There
is no confusion ('To talk about a confused blending of the Sacred and
the Unclean is outright nonsense'). But the unclean represents the
same cosmic powers and can, by ritual, be harnessed to sacred purposes.
Dirt is matter out of place and, as weeds composted can be restored
to enrich the land, so pollution (but, like couch grass, not all pollution)
can be come a source of blessing.
The most apt symbol for society is the human body; and bodily
functions become the symbols of social order and disorder. It is a
sociologist's task to make interpretations in this direction. But, to invert
Professor Douglas' argument, just as the body symbolizes everything
else, so it is equally true that everything else symbolizes the body. If
it is plausible today (to use Peter Berger's phrase) to interpret man in
terms of society, might it not be equally plausible (if no more complete)
to interpret society in terms of individual men, or both in terms of
nature? Much more needs to be done to bring the different reduction-
isms into dialogue so that we can know how the different layers and
directions of symbolism interact, leading out of, and back into, the
experience of the self with its body in society, both as part of nature.
As Edmund Leech says in A runaway world? the attempt to separate
man from nature is based on a false dichotomy. An infant, through
its mother, is in relation to both experienced as one, interprets each
through the other. As the two diverge, there is no rational basis for
supposing that either is primary in mediating the esxperience of the
other. Man, in his religious quest, must come to terms with both.
But, in each case, the attempt must be to find a Gestalt - to show
 Mary Douglasand the study of religion 93

how the symbols fit with the empirical experience into a consistent
whole. And what Professor Douglas demonstrates is fascinating and
instructive. Because it is at the margins of society that danger threatens,
it is the excretions of the body to which pollution beliefs attach. The
question is why, from the common stock of symbols available to all
men, the rituals of different cultures draw selectively. Why, for the
same problem, some employ empirical, others ritual, control. In society
after society she shows not, perhaps, why the selection is made but how
it fits into the total experience. This, of course, is a study limited to
pollution beliefs. It does not raise what some might regard as the
major issues of why some cultures are monotheistic, some have an
array of spirits; of why ancestor cults are by no means universal in
primal societies. Nor, at any depth does she do what, at an early stage,
she says is necessary-try to understand other people's ideas by first
confronting our own. (Why, sociologically, do women wear bras? What
is the pollution introduced by immigrants into housing estates?)
But the possibilities are there; and she has suggested a method. It
is to the second question that she returns in Natural Symbols, though
perhaps she does more to throw light on our own predicament by
looking through the eyes of others. This is, surely, a proper task for
anthropology; and it is the easier way. We are more likely to under-
stand ourselves reflected in others than others reflected in ourselves.
Starting from Bernstein's distinction between positional and personal
families, the restricted and the elaborated code, Dr. Douglas suggests
that social experience must be described in two dimensions - that of
'group', the experience of a bounded social unit, and that of 'grid', of
ego-centred relationships. One of my perplexities is that she includes
kinship under the latter. In The ritual process Professor V. W. Turner
distinguishes between the experience of patri- and matri-lateral rela-
tionships in a patrilineal society. I should suggest that, in Dr. Douglas's
terms, the former corresponds to group, the latter to grid; while, in
English bilateral society, both belong to group. This is one of the
many uncertainties of Dr. Douglas' scheme which needs clarification.
But it does not reduce the value of her basic contention that the religion
of a society is consonant with its experience of the two factors. In the
extreme, where grid and group are both high, there will be a complex
regulative cosmos with a combination of dangerous and benign ele-
ments and a developed ritual; where both are low, there will be a
benign unstructured cosmos, unmagical, weakly condensed symbols,
personal religion. The former corresponds to an ideal Catholicism
94 F. B. Welbourn

(that, no doubt, of Dr. Douglas' own experience); the latter to the

inevitable conclusion of Protestantism, contemporary 'progressive' Ca-
tholic priests and the hippies. Those of us who have been brought up
on Bernstein's elaborated code, must use it to recognize that society
is now demanding a return to body-symbolism and that this is available
in historic Christianity. It is no criticism of her analysis, though it may
be of her theology, to say that the central Christian symbol is that of
the broken body, set against the image of the desert journey and of
meeting Christ 'without the camp' (the locus of chaos and pollution).
This may be a point at which theological insights challenge the political
and the contemporary sociological search for order and demand both
a different social policy and a different sociological analysis. There is
also the question whether Professor Turner's distinction between struc-
ture and communitas (op. cit.) provide a necessary modification of Dr.
Douglas' scheme. I suspect that communitas corresponds to her 'low
group, low grid'. But whereas she sees this as an alternative (and not
very desirable) social structure, he sees it as a permanent element in
all healthy societies, constantly challenging the inhumanity of structure.
A synthesis of the two approaches might go a very long way towards
a deeper understanding of comparative religion, if (to repeat) we
will each take them as new tools with which to study the particular
societies in which we have some claim to immediate knowledge. It
would be profitable, also, to use them to study not only religion but
the development of the sciences, both natural and social.
In her introduction to Witchcraft Accusations and Confessions she
pursues the theme of consonance between different forms of witchcraft
(how often students of religion write as though it were a homogeneous
phenomenon!) and their overall social setting and applies the same
thinking to the theories of withchcraft-belief which have been offered
by anthropologists. Half of the eighteen contributions to this sym-
posium in honour of Professor Evans-Pritchard are concerned with
Africa and have much that is new and valuable to say. For instance,
l)r. Ruel's account of the Banyang describes a situation where, far
from witchcraft being attributed to the maleficence of others, 'most
illnesses and almost all deaths following upon illness are believed to
be consequent upon a person's own witchcraft actions'. Four of the
other contributions are from historians-of Europe and of England-
who bring anthropological insights to bear on diachronic and archival
material of a kind which is, by its nature, inaccessible to those engaged
in synchronic field work. It is possible, for instance, to obtain a far
 Mary Douglas and the study of religion 95

larger number of alleged cases of witchcraft from a defined area;

and to trace the rise and fall in the numbers through the changing
social circumstances of a long period. The possibility opens up of
fruitful cooperation between anthropologists and historians over a
wide area of phenomena; and theologians (or students of religion)
should ask whether they have a further contribution to make which is,
by definition, lacking in these other disciplines. There is, for instance,
the fundamental problem raised by Mr. Thomas about the reasons for
the growth of scepticism and the decline of witchcraft accusations. If
it is true that accusations increased in the early seventeenth century
because Protestants abilished Catholic counter-magic, how was it that
the Puritans were to see witchcraft beliefs not only as nonsense but
as blasphemy? This, again, has to do with the complex and inter-
dependent social and religious developments which were to produce
the empirical sciences as a Puritan adventure, and then to divorce
them from overt religion. It is all very relevant to what happened in
colonial, and is likely to happen in post-colonial, Africa.