Leading Catholic academic dies at 86

BY ANABEL INGE
PROFESSOR Dame Mary Douglas, the leading British anthropologist who won admiration from biblical scholars for her work on the literary structure of Scripture, has died aged 86.
A Catholic, she was renowned for her extended fieldwork in the Kasai region of what was then the Belgian Congo which led to the publication of The Lele of the Kasai in 1963.
Three years later she published Purity and Danger, in which she unpacked the "abominations" of Leviticus, basing the rules concerning which foods are unclean and abominable on the Hebrew perception of holiness.
In 1970 she argued against the abolition of the Friday abstinence from meat in the Catholic Church, writing that the ritual was one that fostered the social cohesion of the group.
Prof Douglas was born in San Remo, Italy. She boarded at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton, south west London, then went to Oxford University.
She became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2006.