Introduction

When the Times Literary Supplement printed a list of the ‘hundred books which have most infl uenced Western public discourse since the Second World War’ in 1995, side by side with texts by Freud, Wittgenstein, Orwell and Churchill stood Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger . Similarly, within the domain of academic scholarship, O’Brien (2008: 125, 143) observed that ‘for forty years’ Purity and Danger has held ‘formidable sway . . . over the sociological imagination of unclean things’, and this has continued to be true. Douglas contested the common presumption that purity and impurity discourses are confi ned merely to ‘primitive’ or ‘superstitious’ cultures and societies, instead arguing that such themes play an important boundarydrawing role in all human societies. The text was a founding work of cultural sociology and symbolic anthropology, and has had an important infl uence in research across the many areas of human life in which themes of purity and impurity feature.