This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century.

Richard Fardon is Professor of West African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

PART I Beginnings: 1920s-1950s 1 'Memories of a Catholic girlhood': 1920s and 1930s 2 Oxford years: 1940s 3 The Africanist: 1950s PART II Synthesis: 1960s 4 Purity and Danger revisited 5 Natural Symbols defended PART III Excursions and adventures: 1970s-1990s 6 Rituals of consumption 7 Verbal weapons and environments at risk 8 Returning to religion - in the contemporary West 9 Returning to religion - in the Old Testament PART IV Conserving anthropological modernism 10 Do institutions think? 11 The secret consciousness of individuals and the consecrated society