Mary Douglas

"Ritual is frozen poetry in action."

"We cannot understand others without understanding ourselves."

"The body bears the marks of cultural membership."

"Order and chaos are perpetually negotiated."

"What we exclude defines what we are."

"Every meal is a moral statement."

"Society breathes through its rituals."

"The anthropologist must become strange to the familiar."

"Categories are weapons as much as tools."

"Cleanliness is a social achievement, not a natural state."

"The sacred requires the existence of the profane."

"Meaning is made in the spaces between things."

"We are all trapped in our own classification systems."

"Ritual prevents chaos through repetition and form."

"The body is the first society we inhabit."

"What seems obvious is often invisible."

"Society is a conversation about boundaries."

"Symbols are the skeleton of social life."

"Every culture creates monsters to define itself."

"The primitive is a category, not a people."

"Purity is always a cultural achievement."

"We organize reality through narrative and symbol."

"The study of religion is the study of order-making."

"Ambiguity is the enemy of all meaning-making systems."

"Society survives through the regulation of the body."

"What is forbidden reveals what is valued."

"Rituals are solved problems given form."

"The anthropologist observes the observer observing."

"Every boundary is simultaneously physical and moral."

"We are all performing our culture continuously."