Science Quote by Mary Douglas

Cultural bias, for Mary Douglas, isn’t a personal flaw or a bad attitude; it’s architecture. Her point lands with the cool insistence of someone who studied how institutions quietly train our sense of what counts as “normal,” “rational,” “dirty,” “risky.” A culture, she argues, is not a playlist of customs you can export with enough goodwill and funding. It’s a patterned way of organizing social life - categories, roles, authorities, obligations - that makes certain beliefs feel self-evident.

The intent is to puncture a common modern fantasy: that values and practices can be lifted out of one society and dropped into another like modular furniture. Douglas is warning that what looks like a neutral policy fix (“import this model of schooling,” “copy that regulatory system,” “adopt these health behaviors”) is actually a wager on compatibility between social forms. If the receiving society doesn’t share an analogous underlying organization, the imported practice won’t just fail; it will mutate, get reinterpreted, or become symbolic window dressing.

Subtext: arguments about “cultural difference” are often arguments about power and structure. People invoke “culture” to explain outcomes, when the deeper engine is how a group is arranged - how it enforces boundaries, distributes trust, rewards conformity, and punishes deviance. Douglas’s line also pushes back against the patronizing idea that “modernization” is simply a matter of swapping in superior norms.

Context matters. Writing in the mid-to-late 20th century, Douglas was responding to anthropology’s shift away from seeing cultures as exotic collections of traits and toward seeing them as coherent systems. Her claim still needles today’s global policy world: you can’t scale a culture like software because it’s not code. It’s governance, lived.