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Purity and Danger
Professor Douglas makes points which illuminate matters in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science and help to show the rest of us just why and how anthropology has become a fundamentally intellectual discipline.
244 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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December 28, 2010Off this review:
Your final book, Purity and Danger, is considered a key text for social anthropology students. Why?
It’s regarded as quite old-fashioned now and the author Mary Douglas, who died recently, somewhat recanted on many of the things that she said. But, for me and still for many of my students, it’s a book that really opened my eyes. It showed me that you could theorize about things that you had always taken for granted and thought didn’t need explaining. Douglas set out to defamiliarize our own culture. One of her favourite party pieces is she goes through all the dietary prohibitions in Leviticus. She said, look at these carefully and you will see there’s a logic to them. What’s being prohibited in terms of eating is very often those animals or foodstuffs which don’t fit into a set category. For example, pigs don’t fall into any particular category because of their feet. In order to make sense of society, cultures like to group things. When objects fall outside those groups they are either reviled or revered.
The great thing for me is that I could take her theory back to the ancient world and use it in my studies. And the very first piece of work I had published was actually applying those kinds of ideas to the famous Vestal Virgins, priestesses of Rome who, I tried to argue (I’m not sure I believe this any more), were seen to be holy because they were made to fall between the different categories of gender. They were dressed partly as married women but they were made to be virgins. So, whether it was right or not it was reading Mary Douglas which made me think you could do something like that in the ancient world. It was really exciting.
Your final book, Purity and Danger, is considered a key text for social anthropology students. Why?
It’s regarded as quite old-fashioned now and the author Mary Douglas, who died recently, somewhat recanted on many of the things that she said. But, for me and still for many of my students, it’s a book that really opened my eyes. It showed me that you could theorize about things that you had always taken for granted and thought didn’t need explaining. Douglas set out to defamiliarize our own culture. One of her favourite party pieces is she goes through all the dietary prohibitions in Leviticus. She said, look at these carefully and you will see there’s a logic to them. What’s being prohibited in terms of eating is very often those animals or foodstuffs which don’t fit into a set category. For example, pigs don’t fall into any particular category because of their feet. In order to make sense of society, cultures like to group things. When objects fall outside those groups they are either reviled or revered.
The great thing for me is that I could take her theory back to the ancient world and use it in my studies. And the very first piece of work I had published was actually applying those kinds of ideas to the famous Vestal Virgins, priestesses of Rome who, I tried to argue (I’m not sure I believe this any more), were seen to be holy because they were made to fall between the different categories of gender. They were dressed partly as married women but they were made to be virgins. So, whether it was right or not it was reading Mary Douglas which made me think you could do something like that in the ancient world. It was really exciting.
September 8, 2009
This book is, of course, a classic. I mean, what does one really say about a classic of structuralist anthropology? The imprint of structural linguistics on this one is so fresh that at times it almost seems like a quaint historical document more than anything else. In any event, there's an easy mastery in the way that Douglas performs what is now a fairly standard maneuver. Find an opposition upon which some kind of subordinating value is founded, demonstrate that each side of the opposition negatively defines the other, note that the elucidation of limits occurs based on some kind of historically situated socially-organizing principle, and then, the best part, show that a certain kind of play within the liminal spaces between terms is what allows for their generation and regeneration. In other words - pure analytical win.
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August 30, 2011The most surprising thing about reading Mary Douglas's 1966 anthropological classic Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, was my sheer enjoyment of the thing. This is a theoretical work, written less for a lay audience than for Douglas's fellow cultural anthropologists, and yet her style is clean and lively, with barbs of wit to keep things interesting. ("This fashionable presentation," she quips at one point, "was supported by no evidence whatever.") As a result, it was far more entertaining than I had anticipated, and although Douglas's approach is now out of fashion for being overly rigid and/or simplistic, she introduced me to some ideas and dichotomies that will be worth thinking about during my . (On which subject, I haven't forgotten that second post on Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, but it occurred to me that the Douglas may be relevant to Gaitskill, so I thought I'd post on Douglas first.)
That said, there is a lot contained in this slim book, and I'm sorting out exactly what relation it may hold to analyzing disgust in non-ritual settings. Essentially, Douglas is writing about ritual cleanness and uncleanness, and the role that rituals of purity and pollution play in both "primitive" and "advanced" societies. Since her focus is on ritual cleanliness and pollution, she is only addressing certain kinds of situations in which disgust may or may not arise, and the disgust itself is not her main focus—something that makes 's dismissal of her points a bit unfair, in my opinion. Her overarching claim is that ritual pollution tends to reinforce the structure of a given society, defending the boundaries of that structure when they're threatened. As such (although this idea is more mine than Douglas's) the idea of pollution is fundamentally conservative, helping to maintain the status quo in the face of whatever forces may the threatening it.
For example, in one chapter she analyzes the esoteric food restrictions in the biblical book of Leviticus. Here the link with disgust seems relatively strong: foods forbidden the Israelites are described as unclean abominations, even when, to the casual reader, there seems little difference between them and the permitted foods. Following her usual pattern, Douglas first debunks a couple of previous schools of thought that attempted to explain the food prohibitions: she is satisfied neither by the idea that the prohibited foods are those associated with neighboring "heathen" clans (since the Israelites often incorporated foods and behaviors from their neighbors elsewhere), nor by the notion of an allegorical reading of these prohibitions (since it's possible for a reader to construct an allegorical reading of any combination of animals, and nothing of the sort is mentioned in the actual text). She neatly pokes holes in both theories, and is even more dismissive of the idea that these prohibitions rested on a pre-knowledge of modern hygienic requirements.
She suggests instead that the prohibited animals are those which exist at the uneasy boundaries of animal types, and which therefore are unclassifiable, seen as hybrid or monstrous. What makes her argument so persuasive, at least to this theological innocent, is that this is actually what the text itself says, whereas other interpretations are deductions away from textual evidence. For example, Leviticus specifically states that the category of animals which chew the cud and have cloven hooves are permitted for eating. If this is a distinct type of animal by the Hebrew classification system, then animals which have only one of these traits (cud-chewing or cloven hooves) would be seen as odd border-cases and possibly contaminating. And indeed, "unclean" animals include "the camel, the hare and the rock badger [hyrax], because they chew the cud but do not part the hoof...and the swine, because it parts the hoof but does not chew the cud." Similarly, animals which move by "swarming" are forbidden because the Hebrew word for "swarming" is an intermediate form of locomotion somewhere between walking and slithering, and can be applied to both earth-bound and water-bound creatures—disrupting more boundaries. Thus, in Leviticus,
Through declaring certain animals unclean for eating, the Leviticus author was helping to "create and control experience," (65), which Douglas argues is a key role for all ritual, both religious and secular. And indeed, she argues passionately that many of the dichotomies used by previous anthropologists working in this area are either totally misguided (the separation of "magic" from "religion," for example, which Douglas sees as residual Protestant bias against Catholics, and establishes a dichotomy unsupported by actual conversations with tribal people) or irrelevant to the questions she is asking. In both primitive and modern cultures, "dirt" occupies a similar systemic niche:
Thus ritual, and the ideas of purification and cleanliness, hold power to impose order against the threatening chaos. Despite Miller's complaints against Douglas, this is essentially the flipside of his own argument: he claims that a major component of our experience of disgust is a confrontation with the ever-changing, chaotic flux of "life soup," itself the perfect symbol of Douglas's "essential disorder." Yet "life soup" also holds huge amounts of power and potential—in fact, one of the threatening things about it is that it reminds each of us that our bodies and brains are only temporary organizations of matter. In the chapter "Power and Danger," Douglas analyzes this idea on the level of social structures:
She goes on to elucidate who, in a given society, is likely to be endowed with the conscious use of the power of disorder (often termed witchcraft or sorcery), and who is likely to be thought to inflict the danger of disorder unconsciously. This section seems particularly relevant to Veronica and to modern disgust in general, since our disgust is so often directed toward those in the margins (homo- and bisexuals; the homeless; the visibly mentally ill), and their contagion is often felt to endanger those around them without any conscious malicious effort on their part. This accords with Douglas's analysis: in the tribal cultures she cites, conscious and directed use of sorcery is usually associated with those who possess structural power: chieftans, kings, patriarchs. The magic associated with those on the structural margins is often thought to emanate from them without their conscious intention. In this passage, which strikes me as profoundly relevant to Mary Gaitskill, Douglas moves from general points to a discussion of Maori boys undergoing an initiation rite into adulthood:
I'm drawn to this idea of the disordered margins (source of so much of the disgusting) as both dangerous and powerful or compelling. And it's not just people passing through one stage of life into another: those who occupy ambiguous or double roles in a social structure are sometimes thought to be sources of dangerous pollution by the mere fact of their existence. Douglas brings up a number of examples in which groups or individuals who in practice hold some level of unacknowledged or uncertain power (Kachin wives, Jews in England, Joan of Arc, or the serf-like Mandari "clients," all of whom occupy uneasy, intermediate power positions) are thought to be involuntary sources of witchcraft.
"An angry person in an interstitial position": surely a useful formula to keep in mind.
There are certainly problematic elements in Purity and Danger. Probably the section which gave me the most pause was Chapter 5, "Primitive Worlds," in which the author searches for a principle to distinguish "primitive" societies from those properly classed "advanced." And there's a reason I've used some variation of the word "structure" so many times in this post: Douglas is a proponent of high anthropological Structuralism, which has since fallen out of favor for its reductionism and simplification of human societies. She herself is not unconscious of these criticisms, though, and does address them in the book. And although her Anglo-centrism is grating at times to a modern ear—when she uses the word "we" it is always synonymous with English Protestant, as if she expects that these will be her only readers—she also makes a genuine and respectable effort to demolish many of the more egregious assumptions made by early 20th-century anthropologists and psychologists about "primitive" peoples. Her chapter debunking psychology's equation of primitive rituals with infant and childhood stages of development is particularly scathing. So, as I said, surprisingly enjoyable as well as very thought-provoking.
I am left with some questions vis-à-vis Douglas and my own project. Principally, what is the relationship between a person in a ritual state of pollution, a person who is disgusted, and a person who is (to some third party) disgusting? Is pollution synonymous with, or totally unrelated to, disgust? Obviously, given that I've spent this long writing about Douglas, I don't believe the two are irrelevant to one another, but neither do I believe they're identical. For one thing, pollution as Douglas is describing it is almost by definition a codified element of a social structure. Whereas the circumstances of the disgust emotion are socially constructed as well, it's not formalized in the same way, and it seems to me more individualized as well. There are things whole societies will find disgusting—indeed, there are things almost all humans, cross-culturally, find disgusting—but there are also many idiosyncratic quirks to the disgust reactions of individuals. There's no equivalent of Leviticus to tell us what's disgusting and what's not. In any case, teasing out exactly which of Douglas's writings on pollution are relevant to disgust, and what the relationship between the two might be, will be interesting fodder for future thought. In the meantime, I can't resist closing with one more quote, this one from Douglas's rich final chapter, examining rituals in which dirt and filth are sometimes re-contextualized as creative, positive forces. Those concerned about finding Douglas insensitive to the complexity of human society should rest easy:
That said, there is a lot contained in this slim book, and I'm sorting out exactly what relation it may hold to analyzing disgust in non-ritual settings. Essentially, Douglas is writing about ritual cleanness and uncleanness, and the role that rituals of purity and pollution play in both "primitive" and "advanced" societies. Since her focus is on ritual cleanliness and pollution, she is only addressing certain kinds of situations in which disgust may or may not arise, and the disgust itself is not her main focus—something that makes 's dismissal of her points a bit unfair, in my opinion. Her overarching claim is that ritual pollution tends to reinforce the structure of a given society, defending the boundaries of that structure when they're threatened. As such (although this idea is more mine than Douglas's) the idea of pollution is fundamentally conservative, helping to maintain the status quo in the face of whatever forces may the threatening it.
For example, in one chapter she analyzes the esoteric food restrictions in the biblical book of Leviticus. Here the link with disgust seems relatively strong: foods forbidden the Israelites are described as unclean abominations, even when, to the casual reader, there seems little difference between them and the permitted foods. Following her usual pattern, Douglas first debunks a couple of previous schools of thought that attempted to explain the food prohibitions: she is satisfied neither by the idea that the prohibited foods are those associated with neighboring "heathen" clans (since the Israelites often incorporated foods and behaviors from their neighbors elsewhere), nor by the notion of an allegorical reading of these prohibitions (since it's possible for a reader to construct an allegorical reading of any combination of animals, and nothing of the sort is mentioned in the actual text). She neatly pokes holes in both theories, and is even more dismissive of the idea that these prohibitions rested on a pre-knowledge of modern hygienic requirements.
She suggests instead that the prohibited animals are those which exist at the uneasy boundaries of animal types, and which therefore are unclassifiable, seen as hybrid or monstrous. What makes her argument so persuasive, at least to this theological innocent, is that this is actually what the text itself says, whereas other interpretations are deductions away from textual evidence. For example, Leviticus specifically states that the category of animals which chew the cud and have cloven hooves are permitted for eating. If this is a distinct type of animal by the Hebrew classification system, then animals which have only one of these traits (cud-chewing or cloven hooves) would be seen as odd border-cases and possibly contaminating. And indeed, "unclean" animals include "the camel, the hare and the rock badger [hyrax], because they chew the cud but do not part the hoof...and the swine, because it parts the hoof but does not chew the cud." Similarly, animals which move by "swarming" are forbidden because the Hebrew word for "swarming" is an intermediate form of locomotion somewhere between walking and slithering, and can be applied to both earth-bound and water-bound creatures—disrupting more boundaries. Thus, in Leviticus,
[I}n general the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world. (55)
Through declaring certain animals unclean for eating, the Leviticus author was helping to "create and control experience," (65), which Douglas argues is a key role for all ritual, both religious and secular. And indeed, she argues passionately that many of the dichotomies used by previous anthropologists working in this area are either totally misguided (the separation of "magic" from "religion," for example, which Douglas sees as residual Protestant bias against Catholics, and establishes a dichotomy unsupported by actual conversations with tribal people) or irrelevant to the questions she is asking. In both primitive and modern cultures, "dirt" occupies a similar systemic niche:
[D]irt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. [...] For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. (2 - 4)
Thus ritual, and the ideas of purification and cleanliness, hold power to impose order against the threatening chaos. Despite Miller's complaints against Douglas, this is essentially the flipside of his own argument: he claims that a major component of our experience of disgust is a confrontation with the ever-changing, chaotic flux of "life soup," itself the perfect symbol of Douglas's "essential disorder." Yet "life soup" also holds huge amounts of power and potential—in fact, one of the threatening things about it is that it reminds each of us that our bodies and brains are only temporary organizations of matter. In the chapter "Power and Danger," Douglas analyzes this idea on the level of social structures:
Granted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the materials of pattern. Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realised in it, but its potential for patterning is infinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both power and danger. (94)
She goes on to elucidate who, in a given society, is likely to be endowed with the conscious use of the power of disorder (often termed witchcraft or sorcery), and who is likely to be thought to inflict the danger of disorder unconsciously. This section seems particularly relevant to Veronica and to modern disgust in general, since our disgust is so often directed toward those in the margins (homo- and bisexuals; the homeless; the visibly mentally ill), and their contagion is often felt to endanger those around them without any conscious malicious effort on their part. This accords with Douglas's analysis: in the tribal cultures she cites, conscious and directed use of sorcery is usually associated with those who possess structural power: chieftans, kings, patriarchs. The magic associated with those on the structural margins is often thought to emanate from them without their conscious intention. In this passage, which strikes me as profoundly relevant to Mary Gaitskill, Douglas moves from general points to a discussion of Maori boys undergoing an initiation rite into adulthood:
Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry into his new status. [...] To behave anti-socially is the proper expression of [the Maori boys'] marginal condition. To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power. (96-97)
I'm drawn to this idea of the disordered margins (source of so much of the disgusting) as both dangerous and powerful or compelling. And it's not just people passing through one stage of life into another: those who occupy ambiguous or double roles in a social structure are sometimes thought to be sources of dangerous pollution by the mere fact of their existence. Douglas brings up a number of examples in which groups or individuals who in practice hold some level of unacknowledged or uncertain power (Kachin wives, Jews in England, Joan of Arc, or the serf-like Mandari "clients," all of whom occupy uneasy, intermediate power positions) are thought to be involuntary sources of witchcraft.
[The witchcraft] may lie dormant as they live their life peacefully in the corner of the sub-system in which they are intruders. But this role is in practice difficult to play coolly. If anything goes wrong, if they feel resentment or grief, then their double loyalties and their ambiguous status in the structure where they are concerned makes them appear as a danger to those belonging fully in it. It is the existence of an angry person in an interstitial position which is dangerous, and this has nothing to do with the particular intentions of the person. (102, emphasis mine)
"An angry person in an interstitial position": surely a useful formula to keep in mind.
There are certainly problematic elements in Purity and Danger. Probably the section which gave me the most pause was Chapter 5, "Primitive Worlds," in which the author searches for a principle to distinguish "primitive" societies from those properly classed "advanced." And there's a reason I've used some variation of the word "structure" so many times in this post: Douglas is a proponent of high anthropological Structuralism, which has since fallen out of favor for its reductionism and simplification of human societies. She herself is not unconscious of these criticisms, though, and does address them in the book. And although her Anglo-centrism is grating at times to a modern ear—when she uses the word "we" it is always synonymous with English Protestant, as if she expects that these will be her only readers—she also makes a genuine and respectable effort to demolish many of the more egregious assumptions made by early 20th-century anthropologists and psychologists about "primitive" peoples. Her chapter debunking psychology's equation of primitive rituals with infant and childhood stages of development is particularly scathing. So, as I said, surprisingly enjoyable as well as very thought-provoking.
I am left with some questions vis-à-vis Douglas and my own project. Principally, what is the relationship between a person in a ritual state of pollution, a person who is disgusted, and a person who is (to some third party) disgusting? Is pollution synonymous with, or totally unrelated to, disgust? Obviously, given that I've spent this long writing about Douglas, I don't believe the two are irrelevant to one another, but neither do I believe they're identical. For one thing, pollution as Douglas is describing it is almost by definition a codified element of a social structure. Whereas the circumstances of the disgust emotion are socially constructed as well, it's not formalized in the same way, and it seems to me more individualized as well. There are things whole societies will find disgusting—indeed, there are things almost all humans, cross-culturally, find disgusting—but there are also many idiosyncratic quirks to the disgust reactions of individuals. There's no equivalent of Leviticus to tell us what's disgusting and what's not. In any case, teasing out exactly which of Douglas's writings on pollution are relevant to disgust, and what the relationship between the two might be, will be interesting fodder for future thought. In the meantime, I can't resist closing with one more quote, this one from Douglas's rich final chapter, examining rituals in which dirt and filth are sometimes re-contextualized as creative, positive forces. Those concerned about finding Douglas insensitive to the complexity of human society should rest easy:
Of course, the yearning for rigidity is in us all. It is part of our human condition to long for hard lines and clear concepts. When we have them we have to either face the fact that some realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the concepts.
The final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction. (162)
August 21, 2007
It is an anthro classic about the meaning of purity and pollution. Douglas argues that many of the taboos regarding "polluted" or unclean objects in various societies have more to do with moral and symbolic impurity rather than actual hygiene. For one thing, she argues, things that cannot be neatly categorized into some preexisting and understandable category, are often considered impure /taboo/ dangerous.
May 6, 2017
Ok, this was a pretty dry, academic read so I skimmed large parts of the book and re-read some of the core parts of it. Here's what I got from it:
Humans have an innate (biological?) need to categorise. It's what helped tribes to navigate this complex world to know what to eat and what not to, as well as understand and exploit tribal social structures. Those who understood social structures thrived. Categorization helped them make better decisions regarding food and society. It's no accident that dietary customs and social organisation are powerfully tied to the concepts of purity and pollution.
This need for ordering the world, to classify it (often wrongly), is a biological bias in how we perceive reality and crept into many other facets of life without the corresponding utility. These are seen in ancient dietary customs which dictates what to eat not based on nutritional benefits but on ordering and classifying organisms and living within that ordered reality.
Those who fall outside that order are punished and seen as vile (or also holy?) because they break our ordered reality. The desire to live within this ordered reality causes us to systematically push these 'others' into the fringes of society, to not have to deal with them. Be it pig meat in dietary laws, segregation in apartheid societies or untouchability in caste societies.
Some other cool takeaways are the power of rituals and how such inherently material things have a very real effect on how we feel. The author gives the example of an actor who struggles with executing her lines being able to suddenly better execute them with the help of the right props. .
Finally, another cool tidbit is how language affects the way we think about things. Be it caste 'purity', race 'pollution', 'impure' food, 'polluted' castes, blood 'purity', 'unclean' animal and ritual 'purification'.
A very valuable book though I wonder if it couldn't have been much shorter.
Humans have an innate (biological?) need to categorise. It's what helped tribes to navigate this complex world to know what to eat and what not to, as well as understand and exploit tribal social structures. Those who understood social structures thrived. Categorization helped them make better decisions regarding food and society. It's no accident that dietary customs and social organisation are powerfully tied to the concepts of purity and pollution.
This need for ordering the world, to classify it (often wrongly), is a biological bias in how we perceive reality and crept into many other facets of life without the corresponding utility. These are seen in ancient dietary customs which dictates what to eat not based on nutritional benefits but on ordering and classifying organisms and living within that ordered reality.
Those who fall outside that order are punished and seen as vile (or also holy?) because they break our ordered reality. The desire to live within this ordered reality causes us to systematically push these 'others' into the fringes of society, to not have to deal with them. Be it pig meat in dietary laws, segregation in apartheid societies or untouchability in caste societies.
Some other cool takeaways are the power of rituals and how such inherently material things have a very real effect on how we feel. The author gives the example of an actor who struggles with executing her lines being able to suddenly better execute them with the help of the right props. .
Finally, another cool tidbit is how language affects the way we think about things. Be it caste 'purity', race 'pollution', 'impure' food, 'polluted' castes, blood 'purity', 'unclean' animal and ritual 'purification'.
A very valuable book though I wonder if it couldn't have been much shorter.
November 28, 2020
3+
Ово је крајње субјективна оцијена књиге. Ја сам просто очекивао нешто друго/другачије.
Вјерујем да је у свјетлу антропологије то једно значајно дјело.
Ово је крајње субјективна оцијена књиге. Ја сам просто очекивао нешто друго/другачије.
Вјерујем да је у свјетлу антропологије то једно значајно дјело.
October 31, 2022
I originally started this book to learn more about fascist purity politics, but instead got an impassioned critique of early modernist anthropology � particularly James George Frazer, the author of the Golden Bough.
Mary Douglas picks apart the Hegelian argument that we developed, evolutionarily, from "savage" to "modern" peoples through a dialectical movement from magic to religion to science (from irrationality to rationality). Through a structuralist lens, she shows that "magical rituals" (as symbolic systems) are inherent to all human societies. In particular, she focuses on dirt, arguing that what disorders society, reveals to us far more about the ordering of society, than anything intrinsic to dirt itself. That which is dirty can only be understood against that which is clean. Dirtiness, the transformation of pure things into impure things, breaks down otherwise bounded social categories. Magical rituals then, are used to reinforce these social categories, by negating dirt, by throwing it out, by abjecting it. Through an analysis of dirt and exclusionary rituals, one comes to see the order of society.
There are two emancipatory consequences to Douglas's book. Firstly, it undermines colonial logics of progress. Every society wrestles with the impure and the pure. Every society utilises "magic" in the form of the symbolic and mythic. The proliferation of classifications in scientific discourse is a testament to that. Secondly, it alerts us to abjection as a political strategy. What a society excludes can be purposefully redeployed to undermine the very order of that society. Dirt can be used to make society reflexive to its own myths and thereby generate collective consciousness over a previously unseen injustice.
Let's now apply this logic to fascism and close-gated societies, ayyyy.
Mary Douglas picks apart the Hegelian argument that we developed, evolutionarily, from "savage" to "modern" peoples through a dialectical movement from magic to religion to science (from irrationality to rationality). Through a structuralist lens, she shows that "magical rituals" (as symbolic systems) are inherent to all human societies. In particular, she focuses on dirt, arguing that what disorders society, reveals to us far more about the ordering of society, than anything intrinsic to dirt itself. That which is dirty can only be understood against that which is clean. Dirtiness, the transformation of pure things into impure things, breaks down otherwise bounded social categories. Magical rituals then, are used to reinforce these social categories, by negating dirt, by throwing it out, by abjecting it. Through an analysis of dirt and exclusionary rituals, one comes to see the order of society.
There are two emancipatory consequences to Douglas's book. Firstly, it undermines colonial logics of progress. Every society wrestles with the impure and the pure. Every society utilises "magic" in the form of the symbolic and mythic. The proliferation of classifications in scientific discourse is a testament to that. Secondly, it alerts us to abjection as a political strategy. What a society excludes can be purposefully redeployed to undermine the very order of that society. Dirt can be used to make society reflexive to its own myths and thereby generate collective consciousness over a previously unseen injustice.
Let's now apply this logic to fascism and close-gated societies, ayyyy.
December 5, 2014
Some faults in methodology (Chapter 3, ‘The Abominations of Leviticus�), but these are acknowledged in the foreword to the 2002 edition (underlining the need to read around the work itself when approaching theses that can be considered classics). Interesting concepts of the interplay between the taboo and the holy, morality and cleanliness, purity and danger; how societies frame their worlds. Readable, with occasional humorous comments from the author. A good look at literary defamiliarization - opening up study of what seems and feels ordinary (i.e. looking at the familiar process of spring cleaning in unfamiliar terms as a secular ritual).
August 15, 2022
This book is deservedly on the list of the 100 most influential non-fiction books from the 20th century. The author, Mary Douglas, accidently creates a fissure against what she obviously holds most dear.
It’s always a blast from the past when reading a book from 1966 as this book is. There’s a presumption of Freudian psychology that’s given as true, with id, ego, and superego having magical powers, a ‘presentism� of the superiority of the now with the “savages� from the past, a Claude Levi-Strauss structuralism certainty in a world-view and Durkheim as a starting point and ending point for thinking about religion. The book is awash with various multiple absurdities that are given as true and made-up assertions such as people are only considered mentally ill when they submit themselves to institutions as the author will say at one point in this book.
All that aside, and I see those problematic given paradigms as pleasant asides in this simple book, because the main take away is her incredible insights into order and how that plays into how we really see the world and think about our being and non-being (her words), and how the absoluteness required in religion needs a sense of order and disorder, or holy versus the separateness implied by dirt (once again, her formulations).
Two Great Course Lectures I’ve been watching recently on higher order Biblical criticism cited Mary Douglas and this book for her insights on the Old Testament dietary and purity laws and how to think about them differently than the standard way. I want to note that in the preface to the 2002 edition of this book (which unfortunately for me this edition did not have) Mary Douglas tries to back track on what she clearly states in this version of the book regarding the dietary and purity laws and mentions (according to Wiki) that she didn’t mean what she said and people took her too far.
There is a reason I love reading Thomas Aquinas, because for him he tries to show reason precedes faith, but by doing that he lays the foundation for science, and similarly for Mary Douglas she opens a fissure by prioritizing order over purity (cleanliness) or danger. She is giving structure and a foundation for dietary and purity laws through her reasoned analysis which as she mentions in this book Maimonides did not, and as an aside, Maimonides was probably one of the top three thinkers that Aquinas relied on, the other two being Plotinus (by way of pseudo-Dionysius), and Augustine, who is always worth reading for other reasons.
I do want to mention that the author also paints some big brush generalizations correcting Frazer’s Golden Bough and other such overly simplistic social archeological assertions, and that is a big part of this book, but for me the real heart of the book was on religions and its necessity for finding order in a chaotic world.
Books like this one are fun to read as long as you put on your 1966 thinking cap and realize people were trapped inside an epistemological bubble and had no way out except when cracks started opening up inadvertently often by their staunchest defenders as this book ably demonstrates.
It’s always a blast from the past when reading a book from 1966 as this book is. There’s a presumption of Freudian psychology that’s given as true, with id, ego, and superego having magical powers, a ‘presentism� of the superiority of the now with the “savages� from the past, a Claude Levi-Strauss structuralism certainty in a world-view and Durkheim as a starting point and ending point for thinking about religion. The book is awash with various multiple absurdities that are given as true and made-up assertions such as people are only considered mentally ill when they submit themselves to institutions as the author will say at one point in this book.
All that aside, and I see those problematic given paradigms as pleasant asides in this simple book, because the main take away is her incredible insights into order and how that plays into how we really see the world and think about our being and non-being (her words), and how the absoluteness required in religion needs a sense of order and disorder, or holy versus the separateness implied by dirt (once again, her formulations).
Two Great Course Lectures I’ve been watching recently on higher order Biblical criticism cited Mary Douglas and this book for her insights on the Old Testament dietary and purity laws and how to think about them differently than the standard way. I want to note that in the preface to the 2002 edition of this book (which unfortunately for me this edition did not have) Mary Douglas tries to back track on what she clearly states in this version of the book regarding the dietary and purity laws and mentions (according to Wiki) that she didn’t mean what she said and people took her too far.
There is a reason I love reading Thomas Aquinas, because for him he tries to show reason precedes faith, but by doing that he lays the foundation for science, and similarly for Mary Douglas she opens a fissure by prioritizing order over purity (cleanliness) or danger. She is giving structure and a foundation for dietary and purity laws through her reasoned analysis which as she mentions in this book Maimonides did not, and as an aside, Maimonides was probably one of the top three thinkers that Aquinas relied on, the other two being Plotinus (by way of pseudo-Dionysius), and Augustine, who is always worth reading for other reasons.
I do want to mention that the author also paints some big brush generalizations correcting Frazer’s Golden Bough and other such overly simplistic social archeological assertions, and that is a big part of this book, but for me the real heart of the book was on religions and its necessity for finding order in a chaotic world.
Books like this one are fun to read as long as you put on your 1966 thinking cap and realize people were trapped inside an epistemological bubble and had no way out except when cracks started opening up inadvertently often by their staunchest defenders as this book ably demonstrates.
July 12, 2022
"Hayatlarımıza ne zaman sıkı bir saflık, temizlik örüntüsü dayatılsa, hayatımız ya fazlasıyla rahatsız hale gelir ya da bu örüntü harfi harfine takip edildiğinde çelişkiye, edilmediğinde de riyakarlığa yol açar. Reddedilen şey sırf reddedildiği için ortadan kalkmaz. Hayatın kabul edilen kategorilere tami tamına uygun düşmeyen kısmı, olduğu gibi kalır ve dikkate alınmayı talep eder. Göstermeye çalıştığımız gibi, beden her türden sembolleştirmenin temel şeması olarak karşımıza çıkar. Temel bir fizyolojik göndermesi olmayan bir kirlilikten bahsetmek güçtür. Hayat bedendedir, bu yüzden beden büsbütün reddedilemez ve hayatı olumlamak gerektiğinden, William James'in de dediği gibi, en bütünlüklü felsefeler, reddedilmiş olanı olumlamanın nihai bir yolunu bulmak durumundadır."
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February 19, 2015Gabrys and other waste theorists turn to Douglas as a starting point for thinking about the relationship between dirt and systems and then variously amend her conclusions and criticize her methods. Gabrys represents Douglas as attentive to dirt as marking the boundaries of systems then presents as Serres as a necessary innovation in this thinking: “We cannot know systems without their dirt, he suggests� (670). But--Douglas� other contribution is her emphasis on rituals of cleansing and polluting as both having a materialist (medical-materialist) and social-symbolic grounding (35) such that these acts work upon the viscous honey-snot anomaly (dirt) in ways that include but also surpass marking the boundaries of a system. Here they are: force dirt into an existing category and treat accordingly; kill; quarantine; mark as dangerous; or treat as a super-signifier (39-40). Yet this analytical framework exceeds her own application of it to examples of societies maintaining traditional boundaries and hierarchies. If we step back from her anthropological approach that assumes rituals are static and instead see cultural practices as existing in open systems in which new objects circulate, we might see that this set of options reminds us that dirt is the object of continual cultural struggle and negotiation in regard to how to read it and what to do about it. These might be useful categories in understanding the nature and stakes of this struggle.That's my argument, anyway, for coming back to this text.
April 23, 2008
Filled with lively British wit!
The biggest assumption: everyone, everywhere, all the time, wants order in the world. That's what people do: whip up systems from molehills.
The next bigger assumption: everyone, everywhere, all the time build those systems from symbols. (cf Southwest Airlines: A Symbol of Freedom).
Analagous to L-S's culture always striving to overwrite nature - frameworks of "purity" protect, integrate, neutralize "danger."
Chapter one gives you a fun ride down memory lane - remember the days of Tylor, Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Malinowski? Remember structural functionalism? Those were BAD days! They loved the primitive as much as you or I, but they were WRONG about him/her!
Chapter three: the famous analysis of why Jews can't eat rock hares or rock lobsters. (Hint: it's not because of hygiene, and not because YHWH told them to).
Chapters nine and ten deal with issues where the system is rigged against itself (like a certain cultural system I know that loves freedom AND equality), or where the system has to symbolically destroy itself (and those odd situations where "dirt = purity.")
The biggest assumption: everyone, everywhere, all the time, wants order in the world. That's what people do: whip up systems from molehills.
The next bigger assumption: everyone, everywhere, all the time build those systems from symbols. (cf Southwest Airlines: A Symbol of Freedom).
Analagous to L-S's culture always striving to overwrite nature - frameworks of "purity" protect, integrate, neutralize "danger."
Chapter one gives you a fun ride down memory lane - remember the days of Tylor, Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Malinowski? Remember structural functionalism? Those were BAD days! They loved the primitive as much as you or I, but they were WRONG about him/her!
Chapter three: the famous analysis of why Jews can't eat rock hares or rock lobsters. (Hint: it's not because of hygiene, and not because YHWH told them to).
Chapters nine and ten deal with issues where the system is rigged against itself (like a certain cultural system I know that loves freedom AND equality), or where the system has to symbolically destroy itself (and those odd situations where "dirt = purity.")
May 17, 2017
Fascinating in its thesis that all societies are preoccupied with dirt and cleanliness. Especially her statement that our own ideas on cleanliness are arbitrary, and not based on an objective criterium of hygiene, is highly relevant and inviting.
On the other hand, I found the book to be quite the product of its time. Douglas for examples argues for using the term "primitive" when referring to cultures that are less technologically advanced. I wonder whether such an "us vs. them" mentality makes sense in this context, especially since many of the religions she discusses have been touched and influenced by Christianity. Where does one end, and the other begin? Are we not limiting our investigation by readily assuming an essential difference between the two?
On the other hand, I found the book to be quite the product of its time. Douglas for examples argues for using the term "primitive" when referring to cultures that are less technologically advanced. I wonder whether such an "us vs. them" mentality makes sense in this context, especially since many of the religions she discusses have been touched and influenced by Christianity. Where does one end, and the other begin? Are we not limiting our investigation by readily assuming an essential difference between the two?
October 31, 2023
This is so interesting as someone who never has had a "religious experience". Mary Douglas demonstrates how purity ritualistically affects our lives and showcases how different cultures and religions view purity. Even without religion being part of my life, I was able to reflect on my views of what I deem dirty and what I deem clean. I know I am not discussing the larger and more pressing issues that are brought up in the book but I think this piece can allow for and brings about much interpersonal reflection!
June 24, 2008
outdated, problematic methodology for an anthropological study, but faults acknowledged by the author in the foreword to the new edition. still, an interesting and insightful exploration of a previously untouched subject.
October 5, 2024
Mary Douglas conseguiu um feito comigo: foi a primeira das antropólogas clássicas que estuda sociedades ditas primitivas que me fez gostar desse tipo de pesquisa. Isso porque ela consegue fazer um movimento entre o que é estabelecido para essas sociedades e como isso se relaciona com o atual estágio da humanidade (sociedade Ocidental). Em Pureza e Perigo, Douglas analisa a função ritual que ajuda os seres humanos a lidarem com aquilo que classificam como desordem, impureza, poluição e, por isso, sinônimos de perigo. Ela explica como uma sociedade funciona como um sistema e como qualquer invasão ou perturbação desse sistema pode trazer sujeiras ou macular esse sistema de alguma forma trazendo o caos. Ela relaciona esse tipo de pensamento com a religião e com a separação dos gêneros, mas também levando em conta que o corpo feminino é poluído de penetrado e o masculino polui quando é extraído algo dele. Um livro com ideias e análise muito boas, em uma escrita que não cansa o leitor e sabe expor suas ideias de forma clara e que não perderam a relevância mais de meio século depois de sua publicação.
July 5, 2024
Pollution, defilement, contagion, marginality, ambiguity, and danger are just some of the topics that Douglas illuminates in this classic of the structuralist methodology. A field of study fecund with ideas. Stucturalists can't abide counter examples, however, so Doulgas spends a fair amount of time trying to explain the exceptions, and that bogs down the analysis in places. Sometimes the simple answer might be the lesson learned in the field of process improvement: Why do they do it that way? Because that's how it's always been done.
April 8, 2021
An analysis of purity and impurity in primitive (her word and she defends it) cultures including the Old Testament (Leviticus) and in isolated tribes studied by anthropologists. It is interesting and helpful in places, but the helpfulness of this book for me was mitigated somewhat by the fact that she has since recanted much of what she wrote about Leviticus. Nevertheless, I found it an engaging read and a good way to prepare myself for diving into the world of Leviticus because there is still much that is of value. If you are interested in reading it, persevere through the first 35 pages or so, they are a slog. It gets much better after that.
Read
May 1, 2021Tokarska-Bakir we wstępie próbuje przekonywać, że homofobia stała się nowym tabu społecznym, co byłoby zabawne, gdyby nie to, że jest smutne, bo świadczy o zaślepieniu na ludzką krzywdę.
Tłumaczenie jest nieciekawe, momentami naprawdę ciężko się czytało, szyk zdania pozostawia wiele do życzenia. Lepiej czytać oryginał.
Tłumaczenie jest nieciekawe, momentami naprawdę ciężko się czytało, szyk zdania pozostawia wiele do życzenia. Lepiej czytać oryginał.
March 27, 2024
Un rappel important qu’il n’a pas fallu attendre les biais pour découvrir le poids des préjugés culturels sur la recherche.
Un livre qui semble dater mais qui dégage une fraîcheur et une ouverture d’esprit, une tolérance qui font trop souvent défaut à l’heure où il est de bon ton d’émettre des avis comme des pets.
Un livre qui semble dater mais qui dégage une fraîcheur et une ouverture d’esprit, une tolérance qui font trop souvent défaut à l’heure où il est de bon ton d’émettre des avis comme des pets.
Read
December 27, 2022This has not aged well �
May 4, 2024
I wish I was big brained enough to understand this : /
it was hard keeping up with the texts she reads in audiobook format
it was hard keeping up with the texts she reads in audiobook format
December 18, 2024
Incredible, and still holds up 50+ years later!
4.5 Stars
4.5 Stars
Read
January 2, 2023Last book of 2022
Purity and Danger (1966) presents a framework for understanding different societies and religions according to what they find pure and sacred and what they consider unclean and out of place. Cultures organize their experiences, values, and worldview into binary categories: either something is “dirty� and does not belong, or it is pure or holy. Sometimes, something � or someone � is both or neither. By looking at how other cultures make these distinctions, you can become more aware of how your own is organized.
Mary Douglas was one of the most distinguished anthropologists of modern times. Natural Symbols, another of her major works, is also available in Routledge Classics.
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Learn how our perception of what is dirty and what is sacred shapes our worldview.
You sit down for dinner. Just as you start eating, a pair of boots, caked in mud after a long day of garden work, is slammed onto your kitchen table. Gross. But hang on a moment. Would you say that the boots themselves are dirty? Or are they just not where they belong? And while the soil on the shoes may be dirty in your kitchen, would you still consider it dirty if it were in the garden, keeping your precious rhododendrons alive?
In her 1966 classic, Purity and Danger, author Mary Douglas questions the idea that objects or actions are unclean regardless of context. She proposes the opposite. By putting experiences into categories, such as dirty and pure, cultures can create order from an otherwise chaotic experience. Dirt and taboos keep these categories separate, and enforcing these distinctions hold societies together. When something, or someone, threatens this order, it becomes dangerous.
In this book, we’ll look at how Douglas extends this idea to describe � and criticize � how many earlier Western anthropologists had written about religions and cultures other than their own. These writers were often seeking to demonstrate that certain cultures were superior and “more evolved� than others. And, as you might expect, there was usually a one-way prejudice: those who subscribed to the larger religions more common in Western societies � often predominantly Judeo-Christian � were characterized as superior, and more deserving of fair academic study. Followers of smaller religions in non-Western and sometimes non-literate societies, on the other hand, were deemed inferior, and less deserving of attention.
These classifications are a problem for Douglas. But she provides an alternative way to interpret cultures and experiences: a system of comparing conceptions of dirt and purity across societies. Viewing one culture through the lens of another means that one is always going to seem out of place. By learning what one culture considers dirt or taboo in its own context, you can gain deeper insight into how people in that culture experience life.
As you’ll see, these ideas are closely linked to how societies decide what or who is holy or sacred, in addition to how different cultures deal with ambiguity � that is, people or rituals that don’t fit into either category of unclean or sacred.
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What’s so dirty about dirt?
Think back to your early childhood. Were you ever given any warnings of what to do to avoid something bad happening? Perhaps you were told such micro-taboos. For example, if you didn’t eat enough spinach or broccoli, you wouldn’t grow big and strong. Or maybe you were told that some catastrophe would happen, however fantastical and unlikely, if you didn’t go to bed on time.
Each of these warnings comes with a danger, a risk. This consequence for breaking the rules influences your behavior � and what you think is correct or inappropriate in your society. In other words, you learn from a young age what is unclean.
So what’s the reason for all this fuss? Well, the story goes that, if a community commits to recognizing certain ideas or objects as dirty or taboo, it is more likely to survive. By recognizing the same set of dangers, members stick together and have a unified experience.
Douglas defines dirt as matter that’s out of place. But how we make these decisions is far from universal. After all, dirt is relative, and only exists, as she writes, “in the eye of the beholder.� In other words, its uncleanness depends on its location, and whether we think it fits according to rules that we’ve learned � like those muddy boots on the kitchen table. If you thought that was gross, you probably learned at some point that dirt-encrusted footwear doesn’t belong on the table while you’re eating.
When we consider something dirty, it is a threat � a danger � to the rules and order you know and love. But each society is its own private universe, with its own set of customs, even if its conventions can still be influenced by outside factors. In one place, eating with your hands might be viewed as impolite or unhygienic by some: “Hands don’t belong in food,� they might say. In other places, it’s the norm, while eating with cutlery is considered unusual.
But much larger taboos than hygiene guidelines often play a more substantial role in ensuring that members of a community follow a pattern of conduct and maintain social order, especially when it comes to morality and spirituality. Now, these restrictions play out in different cultures in diverse ways, including dietary restrictions, warnings about sorcery and incest, and rituals for curing illnesses. In the following sections, you’ll get an idea of a few of these, as well as Douglas’s recommendations for how to interpret them.
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Chewing the cud
At this point, we’re about to dive into an example that has perhaps received the most critical attention from this book. But please keep in mind that there’s a caveat, one that you’ll hear about at the end of this section.
Get ready! The example of the hour is� pigs. They live on farms, they make funny noises � you know all about them. But what’s a pig got to do with purity?
In the Old Testament, the Book of Leviticus XI outlines many dietary laws for followers of ancient Judaism to observe. Oxen, sheep, and goats are okay to eat, for example, but camels and rock badgers and hippopotamuses are considered unclean � and abominable. Douglas questions the explanations for these restrictions. Specifically, she singles out the command to avoid eating pork.
According to this book of the Bible, pigs are unclean because they have a “cloven hoof� but do not “chew the cud� � that’s just when animals partially digest food, and then move the food back into the mouth, chew it again, and then swallow. Appetizing, huh? Cows, sheep, and goats do this, but pigs do not.
The origins of this dietary guideline have been widely debated for centuries. Some have said it was originally a question of hygiene and health � pigs were sometimes a risk to both. You might’ve heard variations on this before: that pigs carried certain diseases, for example, or that refraining from eating pork in Judaism, Islam, and others was a matter of safety due to the hot climate of today’s Middle East. This school of thought aims to explain rituals through hygiene and physiology. It’s known as medical materialism, and Douglas firmly rejects it. She also dismisses another common interpretation, that such ritual beliefs are completely random and have no connection to a culture’s view of uncleanness.
Instead, she writes that the instruction not to eat pork is much more an external, physical expression of the ancient Jews� goal to be spiritually pure and achieve holiness. Since each of the sections in the Book of Leviticus repeats the phrase “be holy, for I am holy,� by restricting these foods and behaviors, one can become holy � or at least closer to God.
And now for a fun fact interlude about the word “holy.� Sacred rules, such as these dietary laws, are also a way of separating � you could say, dirt from purity. The Latin word for holy, sacer, is related to a sense of restriction. Similarly, the Hebrew root for holy, k-d-sh, is also related to separation or setting something apart. In some translations of Leviticus, such as in the theologian Ronald Knox’s version, the phrase “be holy, for I am holy� is even translated as “I am set apart and you must be set apart like me.�
Finally, as promised at the beginning of this section, here’s the caveat to this whole section, which came nearly 40 years after Purity and Danger was first published: In the preface to the 2002 edition, Douglas confesses to some mistakes in her interpretation of why pigs were off limits but cows, sheep, and goats were not. Among her three main mistakes, she wrote, the most major one was to assume that a rational, compassionate God would even create so-called abominable creatures in the first place.
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Rethinking what’s primitive and modern
Before we move on, a quick note on terminology: Douglas uses the words “modern� and “primitive.� These are the same words that earlier anthropologists and religious scholars, especially throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, had used to describe what they called more and less “advanced� cultures and belief systems. These earlier voices tend to argue that such primitive societies lived according to fear, whereas modern societies were more based on science and rational thought.
Douglas, writing in the 1960s, criticizes this earlier usage and definitions, though she defends using the same terminology. She would later write that this was a way, based in racism, of discrediting or looking down on foreign cultures and religions.
She also suggests an alternative explanation. Primitive cultures center around the individual’s attempts to interpret one’s experiences. Each person has a close connection with the forces of the universe � such as the elements. When someone does or experiences an event, they directly interact with the universe.
Take, for example, the !Kung Bushmen in what is today called the Republic of Botswana. The !Kung people believe that they can influence the weather by releasing a force called N!ow. This happens when a hunter wears a kind of makeup resembling the animal he has just killed. The meteorology constantly changes depending on the complex combinations of hunters and successfully hunted.
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Ambiguity: when something is both sacred and unclean
In some cultures, the lines between uncleanness and sacredness become obscured, or polluted. Take the dietary restrictions of the Lele people of the Kasaï-Occidental, a former province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
What the Lele should and shouldn’t eat is, for the most part, very clearly laid out. Only men can eat certain parts of animals, while other parts are just for women, and still others exist just for children, or pregnant women. Certain animals are entirely off limits for everyone. So far, so good. But when it comes to animals with an ambiguous status, things start getting more interesting.
Flying squirrels are neither birds nor completely earth-bound animals, so they’re to be avoided by adults, though apparently it’s sort of okay if children eat them. There’s no danger or punishment for doing so; they just advise against it.
Another animal with ambiguous status in the Lele community is the forest pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater. The pangolin transcends even more of the Lele culture’s typical categories. As its name suggests, the pangolin has scales, similar to those of a fish. But � and this is key � it can climb trees, unlike a fish. Unlike most other scaled creatures, too, the pangolin gives birth one at a time and nurses its young.
For the Lele people, the pangolin is unique. It’s the animal counterpart to humans who give birth to twins. Both pangolins and parents of twins are believed to be sources of fertility. You can see this in the Leles� formal rituals. Unlike the flying squirrel, which is considered an anomaly and generally avoided, the pangolin has a special status. When members of the Lele community eat the pangolin’s meat as part of a ceremony, they are thought to receive its fertility.
Here, this in-between state isn’t a drawback; it symbolizes power. The pangolin is at once unclean, since it’s not for casual dining. But it’s also sacred, since it plays an important role for the community’s survival in creating future generations.
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Witches and sorcerers: when someone doesn’t fit the mold
Now, not all cultures worship cases of ambiguity. Certain humans exist outside the typical patterns of society. They are in what Douglas calls a marginal state. Basically, the people of their community cannot explain whether these marginal-state people belong or not, whether they are unclean or pure. That makes them seem dangerous.
Depending on the culture and the reason for their anomalous status, these people are frequently viewed as witches or sorcerers. Unborn children also often count as being in a marginal state when cultures can’t explain their existence as living or not yet alive.
As with the flying squirrels and pangolins in the Lele people, this can take a turn in a few directions.
On the one hand, people in marginal states can be viewed as a threat, to be avoided. Perhaps they’re not dangerous themselves, but their community might think they attract fear or bad luck. Or they might be believed to release evil powers unto the world through their actions.
Take, for example, the fear of the evil eye, which is present in many cultures and religions and is thought to exert some kind of spiritual curse on the victim. Alternatively, if someone is suspected of having magical powers, they could also be feared for producing external symbols of evil, such as their ability to cast spells, curses, or other forces with harmful consequences.
Certain societies draw a distinction between witchcraft and sorcery. Those thought to practice sorcery could use their powers for good or evil. In Central Africa, for example, sorcery is sometimes used in medicine. Some cultures even recognize those with heightened spiritual power by giving them positions of authority in the community, as well as the power to bless or curse its members.
In European history, Joan of Arc might be considered to have existed in a marginal state for several reasons. She was a woman who wore armor and men’s clothing; she fought in battles; she was accused of witchcraft; and she was born a peasant but claimed to have divine inspiration.
For modern-day examples of people in marginal states, Douglas suggests formerly incarcerated individuals and former residents of psychiatric hospitals. In general, society views these people with an intolerant and suspicious attitude; they represent a danger because they seem out of place.
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Dirt is matter out of place. By deciding what is unclean and what is pure or sacred, societies put the world into categories. It’s a way of understanding and interpreting experience according to these patterns, as well as establishing and maintaining order in a community. All cultures do this differently. Their rules and rituals help decide what belongs and what � or who � is dangerous. People in marginal states don’t fit into either category, and how cultures treat them varies.
Purity and Danger (1966) presents a framework for understanding different societies and religions according to what they find pure and sacred and what they consider unclean and out of place. Cultures organize their experiences, values, and worldview into binary categories: either something is “dirty� and does not belong, or it is pure or holy. Sometimes, something � or someone � is both or neither. By looking at how other cultures make these distinctions, you can become more aware of how your own is organized.
Mary Douglas was one of the most distinguished anthropologists of modern times. Natural Symbols, another of her major works, is also available in Routledge Classics.
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Learn how our perception of what is dirty and what is sacred shapes our worldview.
You sit down for dinner. Just as you start eating, a pair of boots, caked in mud after a long day of garden work, is slammed onto your kitchen table. Gross. But hang on a moment. Would you say that the boots themselves are dirty? Or are they just not where they belong? And while the soil on the shoes may be dirty in your kitchen, would you still consider it dirty if it were in the garden, keeping your precious rhododendrons alive?
In her 1966 classic, Purity and Danger, author Mary Douglas questions the idea that objects or actions are unclean regardless of context. She proposes the opposite. By putting experiences into categories, such as dirty and pure, cultures can create order from an otherwise chaotic experience. Dirt and taboos keep these categories separate, and enforcing these distinctions hold societies together. When something, or someone, threatens this order, it becomes dangerous.
In this book, we’ll look at how Douglas extends this idea to describe � and criticize � how many earlier Western anthropologists had written about religions and cultures other than their own. These writers were often seeking to demonstrate that certain cultures were superior and “more evolved� than others. And, as you might expect, there was usually a one-way prejudice: those who subscribed to the larger religions more common in Western societies � often predominantly Judeo-Christian � were characterized as superior, and more deserving of fair academic study. Followers of smaller religions in non-Western and sometimes non-literate societies, on the other hand, were deemed inferior, and less deserving of attention.
These classifications are a problem for Douglas. But she provides an alternative way to interpret cultures and experiences: a system of comparing conceptions of dirt and purity across societies. Viewing one culture through the lens of another means that one is always going to seem out of place. By learning what one culture considers dirt or taboo in its own context, you can gain deeper insight into how people in that culture experience life.
As you’ll see, these ideas are closely linked to how societies decide what or who is holy or sacred, in addition to how different cultures deal with ambiguity � that is, people or rituals that don’t fit into either category of unclean or sacred.
---
What’s so dirty about dirt?
Think back to your early childhood. Were you ever given any warnings of what to do to avoid something bad happening? Perhaps you were told such micro-taboos. For example, if you didn’t eat enough spinach or broccoli, you wouldn’t grow big and strong. Or maybe you were told that some catastrophe would happen, however fantastical and unlikely, if you didn’t go to bed on time.
Each of these warnings comes with a danger, a risk. This consequence for breaking the rules influences your behavior � and what you think is correct or inappropriate in your society. In other words, you learn from a young age what is unclean.
So what’s the reason for all this fuss? Well, the story goes that, if a community commits to recognizing certain ideas or objects as dirty or taboo, it is more likely to survive. By recognizing the same set of dangers, members stick together and have a unified experience.
Douglas defines dirt as matter that’s out of place. But how we make these decisions is far from universal. After all, dirt is relative, and only exists, as she writes, “in the eye of the beholder.� In other words, its uncleanness depends on its location, and whether we think it fits according to rules that we’ve learned � like those muddy boots on the kitchen table. If you thought that was gross, you probably learned at some point that dirt-encrusted footwear doesn’t belong on the table while you’re eating.
When we consider something dirty, it is a threat � a danger � to the rules and order you know and love. But each society is its own private universe, with its own set of customs, even if its conventions can still be influenced by outside factors. In one place, eating with your hands might be viewed as impolite or unhygienic by some: “Hands don’t belong in food,� they might say. In other places, it’s the norm, while eating with cutlery is considered unusual.
But much larger taboos than hygiene guidelines often play a more substantial role in ensuring that members of a community follow a pattern of conduct and maintain social order, especially when it comes to morality and spirituality. Now, these restrictions play out in different cultures in diverse ways, including dietary restrictions, warnings about sorcery and incest, and rituals for curing illnesses. In the following sections, you’ll get an idea of a few of these, as well as Douglas’s recommendations for how to interpret them.
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Chewing the cud
At this point, we’re about to dive into an example that has perhaps received the most critical attention from this book. But please keep in mind that there’s a caveat, one that you’ll hear about at the end of this section.
Get ready! The example of the hour is� pigs. They live on farms, they make funny noises � you know all about them. But what’s a pig got to do with purity?
In the Old Testament, the Book of Leviticus XI outlines many dietary laws for followers of ancient Judaism to observe. Oxen, sheep, and goats are okay to eat, for example, but camels and rock badgers and hippopotamuses are considered unclean � and abominable. Douglas questions the explanations for these restrictions. Specifically, she singles out the command to avoid eating pork.
According to this book of the Bible, pigs are unclean because they have a “cloven hoof� but do not “chew the cud� � that’s just when animals partially digest food, and then move the food back into the mouth, chew it again, and then swallow. Appetizing, huh? Cows, sheep, and goats do this, but pigs do not.
The origins of this dietary guideline have been widely debated for centuries. Some have said it was originally a question of hygiene and health � pigs were sometimes a risk to both. You might’ve heard variations on this before: that pigs carried certain diseases, for example, or that refraining from eating pork in Judaism, Islam, and others was a matter of safety due to the hot climate of today’s Middle East. This school of thought aims to explain rituals through hygiene and physiology. It’s known as medical materialism, and Douglas firmly rejects it. She also dismisses another common interpretation, that such ritual beliefs are completely random and have no connection to a culture’s view of uncleanness.
Instead, she writes that the instruction not to eat pork is much more an external, physical expression of the ancient Jews� goal to be spiritually pure and achieve holiness. Since each of the sections in the Book of Leviticus repeats the phrase “be holy, for I am holy,� by restricting these foods and behaviors, one can become holy � or at least closer to God.
And now for a fun fact interlude about the word “holy.� Sacred rules, such as these dietary laws, are also a way of separating � you could say, dirt from purity. The Latin word for holy, sacer, is related to a sense of restriction. Similarly, the Hebrew root for holy, k-d-sh, is also related to separation or setting something apart. In some translations of Leviticus, such as in the theologian Ronald Knox’s version, the phrase “be holy, for I am holy� is even translated as “I am set apart and you must be set apart like me.�
Finally, as promised at the beginning of this section, here’s the caveat to this whole section, which came nearly 40 years after Purity and Danger was first published: In the preface to the 2002 edition, Douglas confesses to some mistakes in her interpretation of why pigs were off limits but cows, sheep, and goats were not. Among her three main mistakes, she wrote, the most major one was to assume that a rational, compassionate God would even create so-called abominable creatures in the first place.
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Rethinking what’s primitive and modern
Before we move on, a quick note on terminology: Douglas uses the words “modern� and “primitive.� These are the same words that earlier anthropologists and religious scholars, especially throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, had used to describe what they called more and less “advanced� cultures and belief systems. These earlier voices tend to argue that such primitive societies lived according to fear, whereas modern societies were more based on science and rational thought.
Douglas, writing in the 1960s, criticizes this earlier usage and definitions, though she defends using the same terminology. She would later write that this was a way, based in racism, of discrediting or looking down on foreign cultures and religions.
She also suggests an alternative explanation. Primitive cultures center around the individual’s attempts to interpret one’s experiences. Each person has a close connection with the forces of the universe � such as the elements. When someone does or experiences an event, they directly interact with the universe.
Take, for example, the !Kung Bushmen in what is today called the Republic of Botswana. The !Kung people believe that they can influence the weather by releasing a force called N!ow. This happens when a hunter wears a kind of makeup resembling the animal he has just killed. The meteorology constantly changes depending on the complex combinations of hunters and successfully hunted.
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Ambiguity: when something is both sacred and unclean
In some cultures, the lines between uncleanness and sacredness become obscured, or polluted. Take the dietary restrictions of the Lele people of the Kasaï-Occidental, a former province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
What the Lele should and shouldn’t eat is, for the most part, very clearly laid out. Only men can eat certain parts of animals, while other parts are just for women, and still others exist just for children, or pregnant women. Certain animals are entirely off limits for everyone. So far, so good. But when it comes to animals with an ambiguous status, things start getting more interesting.
Flying squirrels are neither birds nor completely earth-bound animals, so they’re to be avoided by adults, though apparently it’s sort of okay if children eat them. There’s no danger or punishment for doing so; they just advise against it.
Another animal with ambiguous status in the Lele community is the forest pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater. The pangolin transcends even more of the Lele culture’s typical categories. As its name suggests, the pangolin has scales, similar to those of a fish. But � and this is key � it can climb trees, unlike a fish. Unlike most other scaled creatures, too, the pangolin gives birth one at a time and nurses its young.
For the Lele people, the pangolin is unique. It’s the animal counterpart to humans who give birth to twins. Both pangolins and parents of twins are believed to be sources of fertility. You can see this in the Leles� formal rituals. Unlike the flying squirrel, which is considered an anomaly and generally avoided, the pangolin has a special status. When members of the Lele community eat the pangolin’s meat as part of a ceremony, they are thought to receive its fertility.
Here, this in-between state isn’t a drawback; it symbolizes power. The pangolin is at once unclean, since it’s not for casual dining. But it’s also sacred, since it plays an important role for the community’s survival in creating future generations.
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Witches and sorcerers: when someone doesn’t fit the mold
Now, not all cultures worship cases of ambiguity. Certain humans exist outside the typical patterns of society. They are in what Douglas calls a marginal state. Basically, the people of their community cannot explain whether these marginal-state people belong or not, whether they are unclean or pure. That makes them seem dangerous.
Depending on the culture and the reason for their anomalous status, these people are frequently viewed as witches or sorcerers. Unborn children also often count as being in a marginal state when cultures can’t explain their existence as living or not yet alive.
As with the flying squirrels and pangolins in the Lele people, this can take a turn in a few directions.
On the one hand, people in marginal states can be viewed as a threat, to be avoided. Perhaps they’re not dangerous themselves, but their community might think they attract fear or bad luck. Or they might be believed to release evil powers unto the world through their actions.
Take, for example, the fear of the evil eye, which is present in many cultures and religions and is thought to exert some kind of spiritual curse on the victim. Alternatively, if someone is suspected of having magical powers, they could also be feared for producing external symbols of evil, such as their ability to cast spells, curses, or other forces with harmful consequences.
Certain societies draw a distinction between witchcraft and sorcery. Those thought to practice sorcery could use their powers for good or evil. In Central Africa, for example, sorcery is sometimes used in medicine. Some cultures even recognize those with heightened spiritual power by giving them positions of authority in the community, as well as the power to bless or curse its members.
In European history, Joan of Arc might be considered to have existed in a marginal state for several reasons. She was a woman who wore armor and men’s clothing; she fought in battles; she was accused of witchcraft; and she was born a peasant but claimed to have divine inspiration.
For modern-day examples of people in marginal states, Douglas suggests formerly incarcerated individuals and former residents of psychiatric hospitals. In general, society views these people with an intolerant and suspicious attitude; they represent a danger because they seem out of place.
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Dirt is matter out of place. By deciding what is unclean and what is pure or sacred, societies put the world into categories. It’s a way of understanding and interpreting experience according to these patterns, as well as establishing and maintaining order in a community. All cultures do this differently. Their rules and rituals help decide what belongs and what � or who � is dangerous. People in marginal states don’t fit into either category, and how cultures treat them varies.
January 29, 2018
I came to this book looking for some inspiration re modern environmentalist culture’s outlook on chemical pollution. I knew that this was not the topic of the book but I was hoping perhaps for some transferability. Alas, the ideas within were not transferable in any meaningful manner I could make out.
This book contains exactly one coherently developed argument - an attempt to explain the dietary restrictions in Leviticus by reference to an alleged abhorrence of inter-categorized forms of being (pigs are forbidden because they do not chew the cud but do have cloven hooves - a blurring of the ruminant type). No surprise that this is the one part of the book that the author later retracted - not because it is any more or less nonsense than the rest, but because she made the mistake of stepping so far into specificity that she could be pinned down and refuted.
The rest of the book is a long-form contemplation of anthropological subjects loosely related to cleanliness. It lacks the tight reasoning, thoroughness, clarity of term, and weighting or refutation of contrary evidence or counter-arguments to be called an “analysis� - it is more a monotonous series of claims - claims about the beliefs of other people, and, with very little humility (although far more than was prevailing in the 1960s), the alleged motivations and structures behind those beliefs. It has not held up well.
I understand that this is a classic of structural anthropology. In which case, more’s the pity for the field.
This book contains exactly one coherently developed argument - an attempt to explain the dietary restrictions in Leviticus by reference to an alleged abhorrence of inter-categorized forms of being (pigs are forbidden because they do not chew the cud but do have cloven hooves - a blurring of the ruminant type). No surprise that this is the one part of the book that the author later retracted - not because it is any more or less nonsense than the rest, but because she made the mistake of stepping so far into specificity that she could be pinned down and refuted.
The rest of the book is a long-form contemplation of anthropological subjects loosely related to cleanliness. It lacks the tight reasoning, thoroughness, clarity of term, and weighting or refutation of contrary evidence or counter-arguments to be called an “analysis� - it is more a monotonous series of claims - claims about the beliefs of other people, and, with very little humility (although far more than was prevailing in the 1960s), the alleged motivations and structures behind those beliefs. It has not held up well.
I understand that this is a classic of structural anthropology. In which case, more’s the pity for the field.
February 21, 2019
Para Mary Douglas, a sujeira é uma condição simbólica que afronta uma ordenação e classificação sistemática de coisas anteriormente estabelecidas. Nas palavras dessa autora: "Se pudermos abstrair patogenia e higiene de nossa noção de sujeira, estamos diante da velha definição de sujeira como tópico inoportuno. Essa é uma abordagem muito sugestiva. Implica duas condições: um conjunto de relações ordenadas e uma contravenção desta ordem. Sujeira, então, não é nunca um acontecimento único, isolado. Onde há sujeira há sistema. Sujeira é um subproduto de uma ordenação e classificação sistemática de coisas, na medida em que a ordem implique rejeitar elementos inapropriados".
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Ao admitir uma episteme como sistema de pureza, Mary Douglas quer indicar a posição hegemônica de sistemas de ideias em frequente disputa simbólica com aquilo que não é "enquadrado" como limpo � ou seja, a própria sujeira, o próprio perigo � e que, portanto, deve ser expurgado, recalcado sob pretexto de manutenção da ordem, da pureza. Daí o fato de que o par sujeira/limpeza passa ao largo das noções de patogenia/higiene enquanto dados fisiológicos, mas como formas elementares do pensamento humano com origem cultural em associação direta com o tema da coesão social.
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Uma forma interessante de pensar o ideário modernizante europeu, baseado no autocontrole e na racionalidade técnico-científica e seus modelos de "higienização moral" que buscam limpar os elementos julgados como "perigosos".
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Ao admitir uma episteme como sistema de pureza, Mary Douglas quer indicar a posição hegemônica de sistemas de ideias em frequente disputa simbólica com aquilo que não é "enquadrado" como limpo � ou seja, a própria sujeira, o próprio perigo � e que, portanto, deve ser expurgado, recalcado sob pretexto de manutenção da ordem, da pureza. Daí o fato de que o par sujeira/limpeza passa ao largo das noções de patogenia/higiene enquanto dados fisiológicos, mas como formas elementares do pensamento humano com origem cultural em associação direta com o tema da coesão social.
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Uma forma interessante de pensar o ideário modernizante europeu, baseado no autocontrole e na racionalidade técnico-científica e seus modelos de "higienização moral" que buscam limpar os elementos julgados como "perigosos".
June 16, 2016
In the 1960s, Mary Douglas destroyed a lot of crap assumptions about "primitive" people with this little book. Rules about "clean" and "dirty" aren't just medical or just hygienic. People from "primitive" cultures are just as clever and smart as we are; they don't expect it to rain after the rain dance any more than Christians expect peace-on-earth after Christmas prayers. She shows how these and some other doozies were still floating around in anthropology and other early 20th Century "common sense," albeit in disguise. She succeeded in her field, and this is rightfully considered a milestone there, but I think on the "common sense" front there is still work to be done.
Douglas doesn't come at you with a lot of highfalutin theory, she just pulls outrageous stuff from the "old boys" and then counters it with evidence from ethnography and critical thinking. When you read this book, you not only learn a lot of fun facts about various peoples around the world but I think you also learn how to think more clearly or more critically.
In the mean time, there is even more evidence from ethnography and Douglas's own more recent work ... I mean... this book was originally published in 1966... still. Fun to read and good fuel to fire up the brain.
Douglas doesn't come at you with a lot of highfalutin theory, she just pulls outrageous stuff from the "old boys" and then counters it with evidence from ethnography and critical thinking. When you read this book, you not only learn a lot of fun facts about various peoples around the world but I think you also learn how to think more clearly or more critically.
In the mean time, there is even more evidence from ethnography and Douglas's own more recent work ... I mean... this book was originally published in 1966... still. Fun to read and good fuel to fire up the brain.
July 21, 2023
Classic anthropology text about purity and cleanliness patterns across both ancient and modern cultures. The author notes that in the past scholars had looked at this topic in overly narrow ways (just focusing on one specific culture), so she prefers to err on the side of being overly interdisciplinary and jumping into lots of areas she doesn't know as well, such as in her interpretations of the kosher laws of Leviticus, which she later walked back.
It is also clear that the book represents a big shift in the field of anthropology, from covering "primitive" or "tribal" (that term is also now, but you know what I mean) people as a less advanced stage of development than the culture of the anthropologist. This led to a lot of 19th century analysis (especially Frazier with whom she really has an axe to grind) trying either to find a set path of development which all people follow, along which we could locate and thus rank various peoples (with the end point being enlightened Westerners), or else to clarify what exactly made primitive cultures and religions so different form our own (one idea being an emphasis on magic and ritual over logic and ethical behaviour, making the Reformation a big step forward). Douglas, writing in the 1950s, says fairly explicitly that part of her generation's goal is to break down this patronising and racist assumption and I think part of this book's great success was the way it defamiliarised the reader's own culture and used the same comparative analysis towards it as towards the Lele pangolin cult.
I'm not sure I am totally convinced by Douglas' examples of purity rituals in modern society. She notes that although some of what we do is rational (based on the germ theory of disease), it is also because we just like things clean; we practised a lot of these rituals even before we knew about microbes, and we often follow them far beyond scientific guidelines (as anyone who scrubbed their groceries with Clorox in the first months of the pandemic will know).
The other side of the coin is analysing "tribal" rituals as being less strange and superstitious than they appear. The Winnebago Trickster, who treats his own anus as separate from himself and punishes it by setting it on fire, is a parable for our emergence from subjectivity and realisation that we are dependent on each other. The Ndembu witchdoctor who cures a sick man by extracting a tooth from his body is actually facilitating a kind of group therapy session whereby the grievances of the community towards the man are aired and dealt with.
As for the general point of the book, it is a bit scattershot and I'm not sure I totally got it, or if there even is one. But I think I would summarise it thus: people are keenly aware of the structure of the world around them, and need this structure to be consistent. Aberrations cause us to feel a sense of unease and the way to deal with this is by rituals which explain away or manage these changes. William James defined dirt as "matter out of place" (he also divided cultures into pessimistic, dirt-affirming ones and optimistic dirt-rejecters; she thinks all have a bit of both). Animals also need to be classified as belonging in land or water, domestic or wild.
This leads to her discussion about the animals forbidden in the Hebrew bible, which as I have mentioned she retracted but it interested me so I'll summarise. The exact list of animals prohibited by the Bible has always perplexed commentators (even more so the birds, since we don't know how to translate them). Philo said that these were the tastiest meats, and thus were enjoined to discourage hedonism. Maimonides thought it was related to health, but was confused about the prohibition on pork, and punted that it was because pigs live in unclean conditions. Douglas' theory is that the forbidden animals are anomalies. Clean animals chew their cud and have split hooves, a pattern which commonly goes together. The pig, having split hooves but not chewing its cud, is a forbidden anomaly.
In Eliade points out the ambivalence of the term "sacred", which can sometimes also mean "defiled". This fits the meaning of the Hebrew word קדש which means "set apart", possibly for good or bad reasons. This duality is present in purity rituals: something aberrant can be holy or shunned; purifying or contaminating. Pollution represents death, which is not in itself a negative thing, just a part of life that upsets our usual order of things and needs to be dealt with ritually in order to be contained.
P.S. Having read this book I'm still not sure I have a clear understanding of what social anthropologists do. I would guess that the division of labour is that if you are just studying a tribal group's beliefs, that's folklore; if you're just studying a modern society (usually using some quantitative methods), that's sociology; and then social/cultural anthropologists try to cover both without distinction?
It is also clear that the book represents a big shift in the field of anthropology, from covering "primitive" or "tribal" (that term is also now, but you know what I mean) people as a less advanced stage of development than the culture of the anthropologist. This led to a lot of 19th century analysis (especially Frazier with whom she really has an axe to grind) trying either to find a set path of development which all people follow, along which we could locate and thus rank various peoples (with the end point being enlightened Westerners), or else to clarify what exactly made primitive cultures and religions so different form our own (one idea being an emphasis on magic and ritual over logic and ethical behaviour, making the Reformation a big step forward). Douglas, writing in the 1950s, says fairly explicitly that part of her generation's goal is to break down this patronising and racist assumption and I think part of this book's great success was the way it defamiliarised the reader's own culture and used the same comparative analysis towards it as towards the Lele pangolin cult.
I'm not sure I am totally convinced by Douglas' examples of purity rituals in modern society. She notes that although some of what we do is rational (based on the germ theory of disease), it is also because we just like things clean; we practised a lot of these rituals even before we knew about microbes, and we often follow them far beyond scientific guidelines (as anyone who scrubbed their groceries with Clorox in the first months of the pandemic will know).
When we honestly reflect on our busy scrubbings and cleanings in this light we know that we are not mainly trying to avoid disease. We are separating, placing boundaries, making visible statements about the home that we are intending to create out of the material house. If we keep the bathroom cleaning materials away from the kitchen cleaning materials and send the men to the downstairs lavatory and the women upstairs, we are essentially doing the same thing as the Bushman wife when she arrives at a new camp. She chooses where she will place her fire and then sticks a rod in the ground. This orientates the fire and gives it a right and left side. Thus the home is divided between male and female quarters.Also she thinks money is a ritual; not really sure I understand why. I think that secular/rationalist societies are still in an ongoing process of analysing and discarding rituals, but possibly also discovering that they miss them and need some new ones?
The other side of the coin is analysing "tribal" rituals as being less strange and superstitious than they appear. The Winnebago Trickster, who treats his own anus as separate from himself and punishes it by setting it on fire, is a parable for our emergence from subjectivity and realisation that we are dependent on each other. The Ndembu witchdoctor who cures a sick man by extracting a tooth from his body is actually facilitating a kind of group therapy session whereby the grievances of the community towards the man are aired and dealt with.
As for the general point of the book, it is a bit scattershot and I'm not sure I totally got it, or if there even is one. But I think I would summarise it thus: people are keenly aware of the structure of the world around them, and need this structure to be consistent. Aberrations cause us to feel a sense of unease and the way to deal with this is by rituals which explain away or manage these changes. William James defined dirt as "matter out of place" (he also divided cultures into pessimistic, dirt-affirming ones and optimistic dirt-rejecters; she thinks all have a bit of both). Animals also need to be classified as belonging in land or water, domestic or wild.
This leads to her discussion about the animals forbidden in the Hebrew bible, which as I have mentioned she retracted but it interested me so I'll summarise. The exact list of animals prohibited by the Bible has always perplexed commentators (even more so the birds, since we don't know how to translate them). Philo said that these were the tastiest meats, and thus were enjoined to discourage hedonism. Maimonides thought it was related to health, but was confused about the prohibition on pork, and punted that it was because pigs live in unclean conditions. Douglas' theory is that the forbidden animals are anomalies. Clean animals chew their cud and have split hooves, a pattern which commonly goes together. The pig, having split hooves but not chewing its cud, is a forbidden anomaly.
In Eliade points out the ambivalence of the term "sacred", which can sometimes also mean "defiled". This fits the meaning of the Hebrew word קדש which means "set apart", possibly for good or bad reasons. This duality is present in purity rituals: something aberrant can be holy or shunned; purifying or contaminating. Pollution represents death, which is not in itself a negative thing, just a part of life that upsets our usual order of things and needs to be dealt with ritually in order to be contained.
P.S. Having read this book I'm still not sure I have a clear understanding of what social anthropologists do. I would guess that the division of labour is that if you are just studying a tribal group's beliefs, that's folklore; if you're just studying a modern society (usually using some quantitative methods), that's sociology; and then social/cultural anthropologists try to cover both without distinction?
November 2, 2020
Lost her at the reconstitution of the categories of "primitive" and "modern" around the notion of differentiation. Her argument here is that modern cultures differentiate between the objective and the subjective, while primitive cultures experience all as subjective/objective. Even bracketing how unPC and misleading this temporal thematization is, I think it's still a mistake.
An example: she thinks of the Homeric texts as embodying the undifferentiated and primitive mind, where things, all things, even emotions and personal actions, seem to occur from without. But let's remember that this is also the mode of the "modern" mind sometimes. Quoting Levi-Strauss, "I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I�, no ‘me.� Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance."
An example: she thinks of the Homeric texts as embodying the undifferentiated and primitive mind, where things, all things, even emotions and personal actions, seem to occur from without. But let's remember that this is also the mode of the "modern" mind sometimes. Quoting Levi-Strauss, "I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I�, no ‘me.� Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance."
November 9, 2017
"Taxonomy and Taboo"; Frazer is out, but Freud is in. I still find the idea by which this book was recommended to me, that concepts of impurity come from things which do not fit cleanly into a taxonomic scheme, to be intriguing, but I found this book unconvincing. There are sections which are all citation, where no idea is really developed, and then there are sections filled with assertions and assumptions that demand significantly more citation and justification.
Now that I've read it, I would actually recommend reading it backwards. I felt like the final chapter was perhaps the most coherent.
I did find the bit about entrances and exits to be interesting; I jokingly wanted to read this to analyze "strict churches" like the OpenBSD and Rust communities, and I think this is pretty relevant. One could certainly write a silly explanation of why OpenBSD continues to use CVS in terms of the entrances and exits bit (chapter 7).
Now that I've read it, I would actually recommend reading it backwards. I felt like the final chapter was perhaps the most coherent.
I did find the bit about entrances and exits to be interesting; I jokingly wanted to read this to analyze "strict churches" like the OpenBSD and Rust communities, and I think this is pretty relevant. One could certainly write a silly explanation of why OpenBSD continues to use CVS in terms of the entrances and exits bit (chapter 7).
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