Customer Reviews

Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo

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All cultures have definite ideas about what is clean and what is dirty. Drawing from previous hallmark works on how cultures make classifications (Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked, etc.), Douglas makes clear and concise arguments about the use of ritual in separating that which is considered pure from what's considered unclean. The convincing argument she makes is that such rituals and clearly defined boundaries of purity reinforce a society's common definitions, increasing its unity and therefore its ability to work together to succeed. Additionally, Douglas alludes to Malinowski's anxiety-reduction theories of totems to theorize that clear definitions of right and wrong and of clean and unclean reduce the stress in a given society, helping everyone to know who they are and what is expected of them. In fact, she feels, a lack of such distinctions can be fatal to the integrity of a group. If everyone went on their own deciding what was good or bad, there would be chaos - the danger alluded to in the title.

A highlight of the book is the chapter titled "Abominations of Leviticus", in which she interprets the Jewish divisions between kosher and graev (no pork, no mixing of milk and meat, etc) in a cultural context. Here she shows that the Levites divided "pure" animals (deer, cattle, sheep, goats, etc) from those considered "mixed" (pig, rabbit, woodchuck), or having an undesireable combination of traits rather than just being dirty in aspect, as is commonly believed.

At the instigation of an anthropology teacher, I read this book when I was about 19 and found it shattering and profound. Now, however, returning to it years later (and having read in the meantime dozens of books on anthropology and anthropological issues, and having thought for years about what I thought I learned in this book) I'm not so sure it's as perceptive as I thought. In other words, I think what I may have found mind-blowing in my younger years was the insights of anthropology itself -- not so much the contributions of Ms. Douglas.

Having said that, there are four or five extremely interesting observations herein that will help explain, or at least clarify, some puzzling issues: why gangs "jump" initiates, why Muslims do not permit nonbelievers to enter Mecca, why frats "haze" their new recruits, etc., although you pretty much have to fill in those blanks for yourself: Ms. Douglas does not explicitly extend her theories to cover such aspects of modern society. I used to think the book was deep; now, I think (in general) that she doesn't go far enough with her theories, instead stopping short just when things are getting interesting.

Another unfortunate aspect of this book is that the author felt it necessary, in the first few chapters, to refute previous, erroneous ideas about filth and pollution. Unfortunately, many of the theories she refers to are complicated and difficult to follow, at least before you read the rest of the book. In other words, I think she should have left that section for last, instead just launching into her conclusions directly.

Why was one locust cleaner than the other? Man, I had no idea either till I picked up this book. In fact, I had no idea that Jewish dietary laws made any distinctions at all on the locust front. (I mean, as far as I'm concerned, you could leave the locusts off the menu altogether and it's a fair bet I wouldn't even notice.) Mary Douglas, extensively supported by a gaggle of other similarly academically endowed individuals in quote form, however, delves right into the whole locust conundrum and she does it in a truly fascinating manner. What begins as a graceful though predictable swan dive assessment of profanity as disruption of cultural order jack knifes thrillingly there in the middle to talk about physical creatures as metaphoric representations of religious and cultural values. The book starts out talking about dirt and ends up in a fascinating examination of how we as humans, both "primative" and "civilized", twist our concrete world to become metaphor for psychological and spiritual experience Cool, huh. Also, as an added treat, Douglas spends A LOT of time talking about the South American Lele cult of the pangolin. (For laypeople, that's that funny armadillo/anteater thing that looks quite alot like a pinecone.) Douglas takes some fairly weighty theories of cultural anthropology and turns them into an entertaining and infinitely readable piece. A nice trick. Oh, and did I mention the anteater? What's not to love?

Why do we let those close to us lick the same spoon, or eat off the same dish? Why kiss away tears but not snot? How do we learn to live with some filth and yet recoil at other dirt? And how does this all relate to "primitive" ritual, magical belief, and ethical culture?

This book manages to be accessible for the non-anthropologist or historian of religion, yet too densely argued and scattered for the novice. How can it be both? Douglas writes in a no-nonsense style that I enjoyed, when I could grasp her points. Too often, like many critics, she's engaged more in a grudge match with previous academics and uses a considerable amount of this text settling scores, some from the time of "The Golden Bough" and the formative years of her discipline. While she makes her own argument known, the details of tribes, the skipping about that many of the chapters engage in through time and culture make her intricately developed thesis appear probably more fractured and piecemeal than she intended.

The centerpiece, therefore, stands out as the lasting reason for which this earlier book is known, and you can see from her later work that she returned to Leviticus with gusto. "The Abominations of Leviticus" pioneered a cultural approach to the laws not as health codes -- although she notes that ethical control, hygiene and dietary concerns may well be by-products of these Mosaic restrictions and allowances -- but as aesthetic counterparts drawn from the natural world to the cohesion that the military camp and the Hebrew tribes demanded for survival and identity. She reads the proscriptions and prescriptions as conceptual structures of what fit the divinely mandated order that the Hebrews strove to impose-- following God's will as they understood it-- on their natural surroundings. Here, Douglas provided a paradigm shift for scholars trying to figure out what had eluded them about these seemingly arbitrary do's and don'ts. I have to admit I was reminded of a Monty Python routine that takes glee in enumerating similarly detailed provisos and prohibitions.

Of value, too, remain cogent observations late in the book (my battered 1970 Pelican paperback may have different pagination) that relate to our own times. Most do not keep kosher or follow "primitive" rituals, but Douglas cautions us. We too follow our own elaborate yet apparently "natural" habits of cleanliness, and our own magical formulae. Douglas notes that when religions filter down to the masses, ordinary folks tend to minimize the philosophy and maximize the material benefits. Moral conformity and adherence to ritual guarantee, adherents are assured, continued prosperity. But, how long can the magic lamp be rubbed, she wonders? The danger comes when the magic, the pizazz of the ritual becomes vulnerable to disbelief. Too much stress on the ritual may lead to the exposure, as I compare it, of the charlatan and not the wizard behind the curtain. How does a religion safeguard itself against dissent? How keep the rituals potent and their promise fresh>

How do religions sustain their aura? Douglas suggests three ways. 1) Suggest an enemy's to blame for undoing the religion's good effect. Demons enter on cue and sinister forces can be blamed at work here. She faults this as a half-hearted answer that makes the religion appear weak, as if it cannot explain the whole of existence without resorting to boogeymen.
2) Attend to fine print, or else the incantation will not be efficacious. She likes this approach better, as the devil or angel as it were may lie in the details. Also, the audience and priests need to be cleansed, guilt-free-- again if the ritual fails, scapegoats often can be found close at hand to take the blame. This method also establishes moral purity and aspiration to a higher sense of communal goodness to bind the worshippers more closely to assure the success of the religious ritual. 3) Change its tack, as Douglas puts it. Religions can alter to meet the times, the mood, the circumstances.

Considering various "faith communities" in our curious parlance of our own generation's bureaucracies, applying Douglas' three responses to the present day secularizing drift and fundamentalist tendencies proves, now over forty years since its first publication, a salutary exercise in putting beliefs to the test. This book remains admittedly too much a collection of notes and readings rather than a tightly-knit thesis. Overall, its chapters move along fitfully, but Leviticus insights and the closing "The System Shattered & Renewed" retain their own verve for today.

(Image: the Routledge cover's genius, compared to my mangy, bird-nibbled, unclean $1 used Pelican 1969 copy with its René Magritte monochrome painting, pretty boring.)

This is one of the most famous and still relevant works about what are behind any given cultures concepts on cleanliness and impurity. Written in an accesible language so even interested laypersons can benefit from Mary Douglas' scholarly research. If you are intersted in Biblical criticism and/or anthropology - this book belongs in your bookshelf. It is simply a classic.

This book is considered a classic and laid groundwork for future anthropological work in religion and belief. Though some of Douglas' positions have been criticized or disputed in later years, this book is important at least in providing a snapshot of anthropology in her time and in understanding some of the fundamentals which underscore more modern research.

Having said that, it can be difficult to read at times, but is immensely interesting and at the least will open your eyes to new ways of considering the world around you. Things which seem natural to us might be determined by hidden cultural constructions which define who we are. The book provides cases from cultures around the world- West Africa, South America, India, Judea- whose diverse practices help underscore certain universal truths about what it means to be human.

This book is a good introduction to anthropological religion research, and is insightful on topics of the taboo and impure. A must read for those with interests in these areas.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, as this book tackles much more extensive subjects than simple 'taboos'. First, it has to be appreciated that when this book was written, anthropology was still reeling from pervasive structuralist dogmas which have 'polluted' the field for way too many years. While Douglas acknowledges the benefits of establishing a 'taxonomy of tribal religions' and is not averse to 'scrupulous cataloging of all ritual avoidances in a particular religion' (p. 167), she knows that any such an endeavor is necessarily arbitrary. She shoots Levi-Strauss straight out of the sky.

At the outset, Douglas provides lucid and incisive critique of primitive 'anthropologists' a la Fraser, evolutionary anthropologists like Robertson Smith and (approvingly) Durkheim, whose emphasis on the social context paved the way for Douglas herself. This is not just a show - by putting Frazer in his place she opens up the questions of what is 'savage', 'primitive', 'magical' and 'ritualistic' - Frazer "disseminated a false assumption about the primitive view of the universe worked by mechanical symbols, and another false assumption that ethics are strange to primitive religion' (P. 28). In other words, MD lays out how preconceived notions about the superiority of the Western mind effectively preclude one from empiricism.

The essential point is that purity/pollution concepts in any given society have to be viewed teleologically: they tell as something about the distribution of power within the society and the boundaries to the outside. The taboo/pollution laws keeps away the outsider. The point of (seemingly arbitrary and absurd) food rules of Israelites and Hindus is not to prevent people from eating unhealthy food (the 'medical hypothesis') but rather to separate those belonging to the tribe from those who don't. By following the dietary laws ('thou shalt avoid the camel, the hare and the rock badger!') one follows the Jewish law (halacha) or Islamic law (sharia) and in effect meditates on the oneness, purity and completeness of God. In other words, "Be ye Holy" means no more than "Be ye separate" (P.58).

Thus, dietary law helps the Israelite cast off the yoke of an undifferentiated mind, dissolving an inexorable relationship to nature, wildlife and other cultures. Suddenly, man is alone in the universe in which he can only rely on his compatriots and the omnipotent warlike YHWH deity. By the virtue of such differentiation, man no longer considers himself a 'primitive' - an attitude we recognize today by the contempt an evangelical Xian has for 'savages' who view the universe as personal and intelligent, responsive to signs, symbols, gestures, gifts. No, the evangelical missionary wants to end this relationship to the living universe which cares about human-animal and human-cosmos relationships (P.87) and instead supplant it with a dead book. One might argue that adoption of a monotheistic religion requires a steep price to pay - no less than separation from a living breathing universe.

The notions of purity/pollution are socially highly coercive yet are accepted as real because they bring about clarity and social order. one might see an internal contradiction here - by following dietary, sexual, social restrictions, man tries to appease forces of the universe and thereby garner a iota of freedom. Yet in some way they serve to both further entangle him into social slavery and to provide him with connection to fellow human and non-human beings and powers. Such a view might be valid, if one did not take into account the third dimension - that of impersonal power - that is achieved through ritual.

The central theme of the book has to do with analysis of magic, witchcraft and sorcery. Douglas proposes that because man is a 'ritual animal', magic is inherent in one's social position. Powerful members of a society naturally wield magic in order to protect the tribe. On the other hand, sorcery and witchcraft are the means through which marginal members of the society vent their anger/resentment against the establishment. She also provides much interesting discussion on the role of magic/pollution in the relationship between the sexes, and even in the never-ceasing cacophony of inner voices that belong to different subpersonalities within one's self. It gets much more complicated because one socially sanctioned way to obtain more power is precisely to delve into the social cracks which are inaccessible during the normal daily life. Thus, in a ritualistic context, it may be necessary to temporarily go mad, indulge in incest, adultery, even kill. In this way, pollution acts as a sacrificial entrance into the holy.

I found the book to be thought-provoking. Douglas' sweep is broad, comprehensive yet never without an awareness of the limitations inherent in anthropological analysis that comes from the outside and tries to generalize across different languages, tribes and religions. This is not dry sterile scholarship but rather synthesis by a well-meaning student of the human condition. I recommend it.

This may be an entertaining book if you want to read stories of foreign cultures and habits, but I don't think it meets the scientific standards of anthropology. The subtitle of the book is "an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo", but this is an overstatement. You will not find any true analysis in it. Every time the author approaches an analytic question or theory, she soon lets go of her thread and diverges into another irrelevant story. While reading this book, I asked myself several times "wait a second, what does this have to do with pollution or taboo?", "what was the subject matter of this chapter again?" and "what conclusions can be drawn from all these examples?". My questions were left unanswered, so this book was a very frustrating read. It deals with an interesting topic but the author just doesn't manage to gain any interesting insights. A few disconnected thoughts scattered among colourful stories is all you get in terms of analysis. Very disappointing.

Douglas's view of ritual across human cultures paints an accurate and thought-provoking picture. Her analysis of the cause and effect of ritual will satisfy not only the scholar, but also the general reader. Of particular interest is the section on Moses and the Torah.

"Purity and Danger" is one of the best anthropology books...PERIOD. You will never look at taboos/pollution/dirt the same way again, after you read this book. Well, let me rephrase that: if this book doesn't give you a new insight into these matters, it is because you have already been exposed to Douglas's ideas and were not aware of it. I think that this book is essential for anyone in the social sciences. It is a great read, and is very powerful. Social science at its best.