Science Quote by Mary Douglas

Douglas is doing what she does best: puncturing the comforting story that modern systems are categorically different from old ones. Swap “religious body” for “information network” and you don’t get liberation so much as a costume change. “Sects and hierarchies” maps neatly onto “bazaars and cathedrals” (a loaded nod to the famous open-source parable): one side claims purity through decentralization, the other claims order through authority. Douglas’s barb is that both arrangements are social technologies for managing trust, policing boundaries, and distributing legitimacy.

The line “call them what you like” is the knife twist. Labels are ideological cosmetics; the deeper machinery is classification, inclusion/exclusion, and the moral pressure to pick a camp. Her final sentence turns structural analysis into cultural diagnosis: groups don’t merely differ, they stabilize themselves by manufacturing an enemy within the shared space. Pointing “the finger of blame” isn’t an accident; it’s a maintenance ritual. Conflict clarifies identity, rallies members, and explains failure without interrogating the system’s own incentives.

Context matters: Douglas, an anthropologist by training who treated institutions as ecosystems of meaning, spent her career showing how “rational” modernity still runs on taboo, scapegoating, and sacred/profane distinctions. Read today, the quote feels almost uncomfortably current: open platforms vs. gatekeepers, “community” vs. “expertise,” each side convinced the other is corrupting the commons. Douglas isn’t being cynical for sport; she’s warning that our newest cathedrals are built from very old stones.