A tale of two picnics: a riff on Mary Douglas’ Deciphering a Meal

A tale of two picnics: A riff on Mary Douglas’ Deciphering a Meal. If she’d thought about it, Gertrude Stein might have written ‘A picnic is a picnic is a picnic’. But for the anthropologist Mary Douglas, a picnic, like a Tolstoyan family, is a picnic in its own way. In her 1972 article Deciphering …