Mary Douglas

"Natural categories are human inventions imposed on a continuous world."

"Organization requires constant effort against entropy and disorder."

"What seems natural is often deeply cultural."

"Rituals are the grammar through which societies speak to themselves."

"Cleanliness is a relative concept tied to our sense of order."

"The margin is where danger and transformation converge."

"Liminality unsettles because it exists between categories."

"Social hierarchies are maintained through subtle systems of classification."

"Every system of order necessarily creates its own disorder."

"What we exclude defines who we are."

"Patterns of consumption reveal underlying patterns of thought."

"Hospitality is a form of controlled crossing of boundaries."

"Hospitality creates moral obligations that persist over time."

"The meal is a microcosm of social organization."

"Food rules encode social values in the most intimate acts."

"Commensal relations create solidarity and mutual dependence."

"Distance in space reflects and creates distance in relationship."

"Proximity involves both comfort and threat."

"We fear what we cannot classify or predict."

"Social order requires constant vigilance against disorder."

"The sacred and secular are not universal categories but cultural constructions."

"Bodily waste fascinates because it crosses boundaries."

"Pollution is a metaphor for social transgression."

"Institutions survive by making their arbitrary rules seem natural."

"What appears disorganized may follow its own internal logic."

"Cultural analysis requires the humility to question one's own categories."

"The home is where we enact our deepest assumptions about order."

"Society is held together by invisible threads of obligation and reciprocity."

"Contradiction indicates we have not yet understood the system."

"Every culture creates its own monsters and boundaries."