MARY DOUGLAS
2003
Writing in Circles: Ring Composition as a Creative Stimulus

Mary Douglas has been one of the world’s leading intellectuals for fifty years. Her work as a cultural anthropologist, springing first from fieldwork in the Belgian Congo from 1949 to 1950, earned her early fame.

Two of her books in particular, Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970), are true classics, studied by generations of scholars and graduate students. The range of her research has been remarkable, from African societies to the classifications of biblical law, from sociology to religion, from food to dirt. Many of her ideas have become the “common sense” of several academic fields, influencing thought not only in anthropology, but also in the social sciences in general as well as history, literature, religious studies, and cultural studies.

Her work, as did her Terry Lectures, focuses on the fundamentals of the way human beings think and perceive.

LECTURE SCHEDULE

Writing in Circles: Ring Composition as a Creative Stimulus
October 21, 2003	How to Recognize a Ring Composition	Audio Stream
October 22, 2003	Structured in Alternating Bands of Light and Dark	Audio Stream
October 28, 2003	Straight Reading Makes Nonsense of Circular Writing	Audio Stream
October 30, 2003	Speculations on the Idea of a Major Cultural Change	Audio Stream (part 1) (part 2)

Douglas's book, Writing in Circles: Ring Composition as a Creative Stimulus, published from the lecture is available at Yale University Press.