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Part I
Anthropology
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1
Purity as danger
‘Purity and Danger revisited’ at fifty
Richard Fardon
Mary Douglas’s slim volume of 1966, Purity and Danger, provides the point of departure for this volume. Let me begin with a critic, for whom it was also a setting-out:
‘Purity’ is one of those traps for the scholarly that Wittgenstein warned us about, a typical philosophical problem about words. Sometimes the screen of my PC goes blank and a little box appears with the message: ‘You have done an illegal action,’ then appears an error number and a penalty. It is often like this when we use the word ‘purity’: we get into trouble when we seem to assign to it some specific existence. The screen goes blank, the penalty is confusion; one error [in Purity and Danger] was to have picked out bits and pieces of the biblical laws on impurity, with no eye for the whole text. Another error was to have paid attention to the word ‘purity’, whereas all the attention in the Bible is on impurity. Another again was to focus on the puzzling concept, forgetting that it is always known in a series of actions for removing impurity. The remedy is to log off and start again, focusing on impurity.
(Douglas, 2004: 159)
This critique of the famous analysis of ‘The Abominations of Leviticus’ in chapter 3 of Purity and Danger is Mary Douglas’s own, from 2004 in the last of her late trilogy of works on the Pentateuch. Jacob’s Tears collected essays on all five books of the ‘Old Testament’ (the earlier volumes of the trilogy had analysed the book of Numbers in 1993 (Douglas, 1993, 1999a), and Leviticus in 1999). To say someone is their own worst critic is generally a compliment: here is an author who does not spare herself when examining her faults. While there would be some truth to this in Mary’s case, since she was very conscious of her scholarly shortcomings when speaking to specialists in the historical study of religions, so far as her anthropology goes, I am struck more by the fact that the critique of 2004 either hardly applies to what she wrote in 1966 or is explicitly anticipated then. Her self-criticism is unfair to her younger self. Admittedly, Mary’s definition of the ‘whole text’ has enlarged by 2004, but Purity and Danger is already insistent about the need for holistic analysis of systems of classification. Contrary to the self-critic’s charge, the earlier book pays little attention to ‘purity’, as opposed to ‘holy’: ‘purity’ is mentioned just once in the chapter on ‘The Abominations of Leviticus’. An analysis of what follows from impurities can proceed quite effectively without needing a consideration of what constitutes purity.1 Purity and Danger is centrally about rituals for removing ‘impurity’, if we allow that very broad translation for a class of ‘out-of-place-ness’ ranging from dirt to moral pollution. The respects in which Jacob’s Tears and Purity and Danger differ most markedly are not those the self-critic cites. What they are, I return to at the end.
It is a decade and a half since my Intellectual Biography of Mary Douglas was published in 1999, so it must be a few years longer since I wrote ‘Purity and Danger revisited’, one of the two chapters making up its central section that reflected on the pivotal works in her career (the other chapter was about Natural Symbols). I have hardly revisited Purity and Danger, the book (let alone my own chapter about it), since then, other than to check Mary’s references to ‘matter out of place’, a phrase that became associated with her name, and via her, erroneously with Lord Chesterfield.2 After editing the last two volumes of Mary’s collected papers for publication (Douglas, 2013a, 2013b), I promised myself that was definitively that. But the editors’ theme of purity and impurity drew me in, not least since I had just drawn upon ideas of extreme pollution in analysing postcolonial politics in a West African film (Fardon & la Rouge, 2016).
What also attracted me to revisiting Purity and Danger once more was my failure to recollect in any specific way what it had to say about ‘purity’, albeit that was half of the title of Mary’s most famous book. I tended to think about the book in terms of ‘danger’, or even more so in terms of the ‘pollution’ and ‘taboo’ of its subtitle. Was there really as little about purity as my recollection suggested? Picking up a first edition that retained its dust jacket, I read Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. The title word ‘Danger’ stood out in red that matched two red stripes framing the central white vertical panel of the cover against which the rest of the title and subtitle were in black. Fancifully, this seemed a visual clue that the graphic designer had felt similarly to me, and that Mary had not rejected the interpretation. The name, Mary Douglas, associated itself with the word ‘Danger’, being set in the same red type.
Less fancifully, of more than twenty translations of Purity and Danger,3 the titles of all but two appear to be more or less literal translations of the original. In European languages the available translations for ‘purity’ mostly draw either on that same Latin root or on the root that gives us the compound Reinheit in German.4 An obvious, literal French translation was available but not used, which is interesting given that it was the earliest translation and the team involved in it of great distinction: Maurice Godelier was series editor of Maspero’s Bibliothèque d’anthropologie; the Belgian structuralist anthropologist and fellow Central Africanist Luc de Heusch wrote the preface; and Anne Guérin was the translator of several books of British anthropology as well as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; moreover, the book was indebted to French social theory more than to any other school. I wish I had asked Mary who made the decision to call the translation ‘On Dirt’ (De la souillure), and to subtitle it either études or essai(s) sur la or les notion(s) de pollution et de tabou (even the English subtitle varies with the later addition of a definite article before ‘concepts’: ‘an analysis of [the] concepts of pollution and taboo’). All those little variations in French and English make a difference to the kind of book we might anticipate: an analysis of some concepts, essays on the (plural) notions, studies of the (singular notion)… and so on? How unified was it all meant to be as a theory? I ought to have asked Mary who finalised the English title too. The French main title seems on reflection to capture more of the essence of the argument, though the English title has clearly done the book no harm, since Purity and Danger was welcomed into so many conversations outside Mary’s own discipline of social anthropology. And maybe a plural set of reflections (essays or studies) was more accurate than ‘an analysis’. By the way, the other title I know to differ from the original is the Japanese translation (1972, transliterated as Kegare to Kinki), which a SOAS colleague told me picks up the original subtitle, ‘pollution and taboo’.5
The chapter I wrote about ‘Purity and Danger revisited’ did not have much to do with what might now be called the ‘impact’ agenda, that is to say the wider influence of the book, although I did begin by noting how Mary’s style of argument had been changed by embracing a role as a public intellectual, writing for the popular magazines of wider diffusion of the time, like New Society and The Listener. My interest focused on the place this 1966 book occupied in Douglas’s intellectual development seen against the background of modern British social anthropology in the post-war decades. Contemporary reviews suggest Purity and Danger was received in the discipline as a largely uncontroversial version of Oxford anthropological orthodoxy derived from French sociology. It was anti-evolutionary and holistic, as was the discipline, and its most famous examples demonstrated the importance of classificatory schemes and the anomalies they produced, which chimed with the impact of continental structuralism. The example of ‘The Abominations of Leviticus’, and particularly that singular anomaly the pig, as well as the Lele’s boundary-crossing pangolin, respectively inauspicious and auspicious, were the most cited, and extracts about them were frequently anthologised. The message that most readers retained from Purity and Danger was that humans classified; that their classifications were driven by criteria; but the world was more unruly than the classifications humans devised for it; hence some of the world did not fit classifications. When attention fell upon them, those things in the world that did not fit classificatory criteria became the object of special attention as anomalies. While the animals, pigs and pangolins captured readers’ imaginations, human boundary crossers were also prominent, including the Anuak master of the fishing spear and the Christian concept of a divinity incarnate, which illustrated how boundaries could be smashed through voluntary death to release a force for good. Boundary crossing anomalies, the book argued, could be treated in a gamut of ways: reclassified, physically controlled (by exile or elimination), avoided, labelled dangerous or used to enrich life.
Looked at this way, Purity and Danger cleared the ground for Natural Symbols in 1970 which was the work crucial to my biographical account in explaining Douglas’s later writings on ‘grid and group’ as they morphed into ‘cultural theory’. Defilement had to be looked at in terms of a total structure of thought, what would be called a cosmology in Natural Symbols, where degrees of formalisation in behaviour are related to the strength of constraining, collective organisation.
In addition to vagaries surrounding its subtitle, albeit Mary tells us it took a half a dozen years to research, Purity and Danger has an incomplete bibliography and thoroughly inadequate index, which together made it difficult to read the text other than consecutively. But the last decade or so has given us e-books, and so in revisiting Purity and Danger again, I have additionally used a searchable version to confirm my sense that, insofar as we deal with purity and impurity as words (rather than as concepts which might be named in different ways) their presence in the text is highly uneven. They are particularly prominent in the introductory and concluding chapters which, in the way of such things, were probably written together last. Douglas’s ‘Introduction’ recommends the holistic appreciation of classification, approached through attention to the rituals of redress for infractions that occur, and related to the organisation of experience and the capacity for reflection. These are the same recommendations as almost forty years later.
The introduction tells us that ‘anyone approaching rituals of pollution nowadays would seek to treat a people’s ideas of purity as part of a larger whole’ because
rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience. So far from being aberrations from the central project of religion, they are positive contributions to atonement. By their means, symbolic patterns are worked out and publicly displayed… Within these patterns disparate elements are related and disparate experience is given meaning.
… ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. […] No one knows how old are the ideas of purity and impurity in any non-literate culture: to members they must seem timeless and unchanging. But there is every reason to believe that they are sensitive to change. The same impulse to impose order which brings them into existence can be supposed to be continually modifying or enriching them.
The more we know about primitive religions the more clearly it appears that in their symbolic structures there is scope for meditation on the great mysteries of religion and philosophy. Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. Wherever ideas of dirt are highly structured their analysis discloses a play upon such profound themes. This is why an understanding of rules of purity is a sound entry to comparative religion. […] The Pauline antithesis of blood and water, nature and grace, freedom and necessity, or the Old Testament idea of Godhead can be illuminated by Polynesian or Central African treatment of closely related themes.
The reader might reasonably anticipate the substantive chapters that follow will present considerable discussion of case studies of ‘purity’. But explicitly, there is little such, and what there is concerns two instances primarily: the particular concerns of Brahmans in the Indian caste system (1966: chaps. 1, 2, 7, 9) who find ‘distinction of the most hair-splitting finesse’ in the pure/impure system, and a passing reference in the famous Leviticus analysis, ‘the dietary laws would have been like signs which at every turn inspired meditation on the oneness, purity and completeness of God’ (1966: 67). Analogies to purity other than in an Indian context are very few (1966: 154 for Yurok; 1966: 155 Bemba), a point noted by Luc de Heusch who wonders about the translatability of the African instances of infraction into concern with purity as such. The concluding chapter (Chapter 10, ‘The System Shattered and Renewed’) returns to the themes of the introduction, as if the book had been concerned centrally with ‘purity’, and proceeds to a denunciation of practices to achieve whatever it is that purity symbolises.
The quest for purity is pursued by rejection. It follows that when purity is not a symbol but something lived, it must be poor and barren. It is part of our condition that the purity for which we strive and sacrifice so much turns out to be hard and dead as a stone when we get it.
[…] 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.
One solution is to enjoy purity at second hand […] Sometimes the claim to superior purity is based on deceit […]
Whenever a strict pattern of purity is imposed on our lives it is either highly uncomfortable or it leads into contradiction [which] if closely followed leads to hypocrisy. That which is negated is not thereby removed. The rest of life, which does not tidily fit the accepted categories, is still there and demands attention. The body, as we have tried to show, provides a basic scheme for all symbolism. There is hardly any pollution which does not have some primary physiological reference. As life is in the body it cannot be rejected outright. And as life must be affirmed, the most complete philosophies, as William James put it, must find some ultimate way of affirming that which has been rejected.
So purity in practice is wildly fanciful, an impossible rejection of embodiment. Other than as symbol, purity, in short, is the danger. While the conclusion is plausible, it hardly flows from the argument of the book which, in the tradition of the British social anthropological tradition of the period, much indebted to Emile Durkheim, has anatomised rules through their anticipated and actual infraction.
Natural Symbols (1970) threads purity and impurity through its argument more fully than Purity and Danger had done four years earlier. Distancing itself from any discussion of purity per se, the book concerns itself with what it calls the ‘purity rule’ and/or ‘purity code’. It particularly emphasises the the...
