Mary Douglas

Dirt is matter out of place.

Anomalies are not to be ignored or explained away, but to be recognized as a challenge to the existing classification.

The body is a model which can represent any bounded system.

The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical body is seen as an image of society.

Culture, in its most general sense, is a system of shared meanings.

Risk is a cultural construct.

The perception of risk is always a social process.

We cannot understand pollution unless we understand the social order that defines it.

The human mind is a classifying mind.

Ritual is a way of acting out the categories of thought.

The individual's experience of his own body is always mediated by the social categories through which he perceives it.

The idea of pollution is a way of thinking about the boundaries of a system.

Grid and Group are two dimensions of social organization that shape how individuals perceive the world.

The more tightly knit the group, the more likely it is to perceive external threats.

The perception of danger is not a simple matter of objective assessment, but a complex interplay of cultural values and social structures.

The human mind abhors a vacuum, especially a conceptual one.

The symbolic order is not just a reflection of the social order, but actively constitutes it.

We are all engaged in the business of making sense of the world, and we do so through the categories and classifications that our culture provides.

The boundaries we draw around things are not natural, but social.

The idea of pollution is a way of maintaining order in a world that is constantly threatening to fall apart.