SOC 201 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Mary Douglas
Document Summary
Anthropologist mary douglas explained that institutions survive only if their rightness can be explained as both reasonable/ logical and natural. Children"s questions about why women fish and men weave, then, are not likely to be responded to with explanations about their great-great-great-grandparents" preferences. Indeed, the original reason for the routine may have been forgotten by then. Institutions are inherently conservative; they change, but slowly. The fact that institutions are legitimized by both logic and appeals to the nature of things makes them difficult to change, because any attempt at change seems to be an attack on nature as well as logic. Consider the institution of the family in our own society. In recent times this institution has faced many challenges gays and lesbians, for example, have called on the legal system to grant them many of the rights that until now have been accorded only to heterosexual partners.
