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Mary Tew Douglas (born 1921) was a British anthropologist and social thinker of international fame.
Mary Tew Douglas was born in San Remo, Italy, to Phyllis Twomey and Gilbert Charles Tew, and was the eldest of two daughters. She was educated as a Catholic at the Sacred Heart Convent, Roehampton, in England, and she was keenly interested in religion all her life. As an anthropologist she kept on with her faith. At Oxford (where she did a B.A. degree in 1943) she fell under the influence of the famous social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who was also interested in comparative religion; he died a Catholic. Douglas wrote a biography of her mentor in 1980.
She interrupted her graduate study at Oxford to be a volunteer in World War II in the British Colonial Office working on penal reform. Afterwards she earned a bachelor of science degree in 1948 in anthropology and went to Africa, to the Belgian Congo (now Republic of Congo), to study the folkways of a tribe, the Lele of the Kasai, for her Ph.D.
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