`Thought Styles collects together a number of Mary Douglas comparatively recent essays. The range of topics addressed is in some ways diverse, although the central theme that runs through many of the pieces, and the analytic approach and sensibility that are deployed throughout, give the collection coherence... [The book] constitutes a sustained advocacy of the value of and anthropological approach to topics which may be thought to fall within the province of other disciplines such as psychology, literary criticism and (certain forms of) sociology...Like much of Douglas best work, the book moves back and forth between different cultures and historical periods and uses the supposedly exotic to provide insights into `ordinary modern western culture. It espouses an explicit and well argued cultural relativism, but retains universalist explanatory resources, such as the typology of cultural types... Mary Douglas is one of those rare authors whose insight and imagination compel admiration even from readers who may be sceptical sbout her theoretical framework. In any case the theoretical framework could be used to account for such scepticism, - Sociological Research Online