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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
Having once berated (by letter) the present editor of New Blackfriars for feeding his readers on the ersatz provender of bloated book-reviews, I find myself involved in the same offence. My excuse is that I have rarely read a book which has aroused in me such ambivalence of reaction as Dr Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols. My hope is that this extended reviewed will encourage other people to read this book, which it would be unjust to ignore totally, and pernicious to accept entirely. The book is of significance in both anthropology and theology; is it perhaps the turn of an intellectual tide, a theological anthropology moving in to the vacuum left by secular theology?
This, I believe, is the author’s intention: to carry out a counterrevolution in the social sciences, so that anthropology and sociology, whose origins were so deeply rooted in the wish of the French positivists and British agnostics to reveal and shatter the foundations of faith, will now become instruments for demasking the social causes of all religious attitudes including atheism, agnosticism and indifference, and for indicating the social patterns which favour faith in the Incarnation and the Eucharist. This intention does credit to Mrs Douglas as a Christian, and the examination of ethnographic material which it has provoked reveals her brilliance as an anthropologist. Underlying it all, however, is, I consider, an appalling error, or paradigm of errors. But let us see what she has to say.
page 424 note 1 Natural Symbols, Explorations in Cosmology, by Douglas, Mary. Barrie & Rockliff, The Cresset Press, London, 1970, 170 pp., 45sGoogle Scholar.
page 425 note 1 Chapter 10, ‘The System Shattered and Renewed’.
page 425 note 2 Dr Douglas herself introduced me to this book. For an examle of the influence of both T. S. Kuhn and Dr Douglas on contemporary sociology, see S. B. Barnes, ‘Paradigms‐scientific and social’, Man, March 1969, pp. 94–102.
page 426 note 1 For a whole‐hearted use of process rather than taxonomy, see The Ritual Process, by Turner, Victor W., Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969Google Scholar.
page 427 note 1 See Spirit Mediumship and Society inAfrica, edited by Beattie, John and Middleton, John, Routledge adn Kegan Paul, 1969Google Scholar.
page 427 note 2 This is not to say Dr Douglas is dishonest; on the contrary, she parades her value judgements with blatant honesty.
page 428 note 1 Professor Turner's approach suggests a very satisfying explanation. See op. cit., p. 191ff.
page 429 note 1 See Dilalectic in Practical Religion, edited by Leach, E.R., Cambridge Papers in Socila Anthropology, C. U. P., 1968Google Scholar.
page 430 note 1 Anybody who feels this is unfair should commpare what Dr Douglas has to say on Ritualism with the attitude of the Epistle to the Hebrews, or, more generally, the Biblical symbolism of the Temple. cf my ‘Priest and Anthropologist’, New Blackfriars, November 1968, p. 79.
page 431 note 1 It is interesting to note that V. W. Turner takes a far more sympathetic view of both Protestantism and Eastern Religion. Compare The Ritual Process, pp. 196–199 with Natural Symbols, pp. 163–165.
page 432 note 1 For an onslaught on the ‘mirror image’ view of ritual, see Peter Rigby in Dialectic in Practical Religion, op. cit., p. 169.
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