A Very Personal Method

Mary Douglas's literary executor, Richard Fardon, is Professor of West African Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. A former student of Mary Douglas, his intellectual biography of her was published by Routledge in 1999, and updated by a Memoir in the Proceedings of the British Academy Memoir, 2010.

PART ONE: FAMILIAR FEELINGS A Feeling for Hierarchy Hooked on Fishing - Gilbert Tew, 1884-1951 The Gender of the Trout My Circus Fieldwork PART TWO: THINKING ABOUT CATHOLICISM IN LELE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The Lele of the Congo The Problem of Evil among the Lele: Sorcery, Witch-Hunt and Christian Teaching in Africa The Devil Vanishes Other Beings, Post-Colonially Correct The Cloud God and the Shadow Self PART THREE: TABOO AND RITUAL Taboo The Contempt of Ritual The Contempt of Ritual [Again] PART FOUR: CONTEMPORARIES On Franz Steiner: A Memoir On E. E. Evans-Prichard: from the Tablet Notebook On Levi-Strauss - Wild Pansies: Speaking Tenderly of its Layered Puff Pastry Effect Smothering the Differences: In a Savage Mind About Levi-Strauss On Clifford Geertz: The Self-Completing Animal PART FIVE: INCLUSION AS CONCLUSION Knowing the Code A Course off the Menu To Honour the Dead The Oracles of Love - A Play for AKT Sacraments and Society - An Anthropologist Asks What Women Could Be Doing in the Church Can a Scientist Be Objective about Her Faith? In Conversation with Deborah Jones EPILOGUE Original minds: Mary Douglas in Conversation with Eleanor Wachtel Granny Endpiece: The Golden Fish (the Brothers Grimm)

This is a priceless addition to the oeuvre of one of Britain's best known anthropologists. Who would have imagined that a lifetime of writing between the lines could be brought together as something so uniquely powerful, wicked and charming as this book. Richard Fardon has found Mary Douglas's words in all kinds of places, in all states of preparedness, enrolling many audiences and sometimes none -- and from the informal to the outrageous, from feelings to convictions, from wit to sarcasm. Running like a commentary alongside her major publications, it is as much an illumination of her world as of herself. Professor Marilyn Strathern University of Cambridge Mary Douglas gives unprecedented insights here into her formation, her reasons, her attachments and convictions; the material ranges widely, from some superb uncollected essays to unusually revealing interviews. The intellectual acerbity for which she was celebrated is undercut by the affections she shows, and her stringent endorsement of orderliness lightened by marvellous wit and empathy. The book is an exhilarating anthology, from a wise woman who has no peer, and whose thinking continues to resonate in the discipline of anthropology and far beyond. Marina Warner Professor, Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex Supervisors can inspire complex loyalties, but Richard Fardon has honoured Mary Douglas in ways few could expect, writing her Intellectual Biography (1999) and then, as her literary executor, editing two posthumous collections, one of which is A Very Personal Method...This book is an assemblage of articles published in unconventional places, lectures delivered to non-academic audiences, and material not intended for publication. Everything reveals an original thinker in the process of teasing out ideas, often by explaining them in detail to a lay audience...Undoubtedly specialists who have already engaged with her major works will find this selection of writings, untempered by the pressures of peer review, a fascinating insight to her way of thinking. But merely interested people (the original audience) will also find much to enjoy in her elegant writing. -- Pamela Shurmer-Smith