Life as Fashion Parade: The Anthropology of Mary Douglas

Extract

I had better begin my review of Mary Douglas’ Implicit Meanings by justifying my title, which might otherwise seem unjustly sneering. If we like to divide human activities into “work” and “play”, fashion parades are distressingly both and neither. People strain for the glory of leisure. Can fashion then be linked with art and sport as an exacting celebration of the human capacity for spontaneous creativity? It lacks surely their moral pretensions, appealing with crude honesty to envy, vanity, and the pursuit of the ephemeral. Yet in the concept of fashion and the event of the fashion parade are certain resemblances to the presuppositions of social anthropology, particularly as expressed in the work of Professor Douglas. They remind us sharply that culture is something made by people, and that choice can bring change, indeed that change should be seen as part of the nature of culture. Again, each set of fashions must, like a culture, have a certain internal consistency, partly explicit, partly implicit. Then, in fashion as in culture, the distinctions which we can make readily enough between the aesthetical, the ethical, and the utilitarian become difficult to apply in practice. Culture, like fashion, is first tailored to the human body and then in turn affects our perception of it.

This metaphor criticises, as well as elucidating, social anthropology. Inevitably, social anthropology tends to stress the autonomy and specificity of cultures, and thus tends to blur our perception of the underlying unity of human nature. Inevitably, too, social anthropology is attracted to the analysis of the more elaborate and formal patterns of human doing and thinking, kinship terminologies, the etiquette of gift exchange, ritual and mythology, neglecting the more formless and unspecific aspects of human behaviour.