Mary Douglas
June 6th 2007 02:57
The death occurred on the 18th of May this year of Dame Mary Douglas, perhaps the most important anthropologist of religion in the last century. Her critique of modern religion, especially the post-Vatican II reforms in the Catholic Church, is both highly perceptive and lacerating. Her most influential work, Natural Symbols, explores how we "hold it together" as communities and as infividuals. The taken for granted realities that make up our cosmology are the most important, not the explicit, the exaplained.
The neo-conservative movement in the Catholic Church tries to push water uphill by insisting on the credal aspects of the Church without respecting the ritual and the cosmological. The bishops since the Council have been colour-blind rail signalmen, to use her apt image. She focussed on the abolition of friday abstinence as a case it point. In the stroke of a pen a millenium old tradition was swept aside. The same, even more plangently, can be said of the Latin Mass. When you toy so wantonly with the cosmology of a whole people bolts are likely to come out of the machine in unexpected places. Orthodoxy becomes an act of will on the part of the hierarchy, enforced with oaths of allegiance and threats of excommunication to members of parliament who vote the wrong way. The path of rebuilding a Catholic culture is not as immediately satisfying as wielding episcopal authority, but withoutan attempt at cosmos maintenance the bishops will soon have less authority than ticket collectors.
The neo-conservative movement in the Catholic Church tries to push water uphill by insisting on the credal aspects of the Church without respecting the ritual and the cosmological. The bishops since the Council have been colour-blind rail signalmen, to use her apt image. She focussed on the abolition of friday abstinence as a case it point. In the stroke of a pen a millenium old tradition was swept aside. The same, even more plangently, can be said of the Latin Mass. When you toy so wantonly with the cosmology of a whole people bolts are likely to come out of the machine in unexpected places. Orthodoxy becomes an act of will on the part of the hierarchy, enforced with oaths of allegiance and threats of excommunication to members of parliament who vote the wrong way. The path of rebuilding a Catholic culture is not as immediately satisfying as wielding episcopal authority, but withoutan attempt at cosmos maintenance the bishops will soon have less authority than ticket collectors.
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