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British social anthropologist best known for Purity and Danger (1966), in which she argued that ideas about pollution, dirt, and taboo are not irrational superstitions but systematic cultural classifications — ‘dirt is matter out of place,’ and what a society designates as dirty reveals what categories and boundaries that society needs to maintain. Her grid/group theory, developed in Natural Symbols (1970), offers a framework for understanding how social structure shapes symbolic and ritual life, applicable far beyond the ethnographic contexts she originally analyzed.
