Mary Douglas

"Discipline is achieved through systems of classification more than through force."

"What seems irrational often serves rational social purposes."

"The sacred requires isolation from the profane to maintain its power."

"Moral communities are bounded by rules about food and contact."

"Gender distinctions are maintained through bodily practices and taboos."

"The world makes sense only through the categories we impose on it."

"Understanding another culture means learning its systems of classification."

"Order is always threatened by what falls between categories."

"We expend enormous energy maintaining boundaries we consider natural."

"Cosmology and social structure are mirror images of each other."

"Purity law is always a comment on social relations."

"The forbidden is defined relative to the permitted."

"Society persists through systems of mutual obligation and gift exchange."

"Risk is evaluated through culturally constructed systems of danger."

"Modernity does not eliminate the sacred but displaces it."

"Every interaction involves an implicit negotiation of boundaries."

"Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement."

"The more food rules the person has, the more their identity becomes embedded in their dietary choices."

"Rituals work on the body through the body."

"Dirt is matter out of place."

"The body is a microcosm of society."

"What is sacred is determined by consensus."

"We cannot know the universe if we cannot know ourselves."

"Boundaries are sacred because they define the structure of meaning."

"Symbols are the language through which society speaks to itself."

"The natural body is a social construct."

"Order is created through the exclusion of ambiguity."

"Every culture draws a line between pure and impure."

"Cosmology shapes how we organize our daily lives."

"The anthropologist must abandon the assumption of the primitive."