Mary Douglas trained as an anthropologist at Oxford University. Early in her career, she did fieldwork in the Belgian Congo under the auspices of the International African Institute. She taught at Oxford and the University of London. In 1977 she came to America as Director for Research on Culture at the Russell Sage Foundation, and in 1981 she went to Northwestern University as Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and was also a Visiting Professor at Princeton University.