Purity and Danger

An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo

Professor Mary Douglas, Mary Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136489273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Purity and Danger is acknowledged as a modern masterpiece of anthropology. It is widely cited in non-anthropological works and gave rise to a body of application, rebuttal and development within anthropology. In 1995 the book was included among the Times Literary Supplement's hundred most influential non-fiction works since WWII. Incorporating the philosophy of religion and science and a generally holistic approach to classification, Douglas demonstrates the relevance of anthropological enquiries to an audience outside her immediate academic circle. She offers an approach to understanding rules of purity by examining what is considered unclean in various cultures. She sheds light on the symbolism of what is considered clean and dirty in relation to order in secular and religious, modern and primitive life.

1 Ritual Uncleanness

DOI: 10.4324/9781315015811-2

Our idea of dirt is compounded of two things, care for hygiene and respect for conventions. The rules of hygiene change, of course, with changes in our state of knowledge. As for the conventional side of dirt-avoidance, these rules can be set aside for the sake of friendship. Hardy's farm labourers commended the shepherd who refused a clean mug for his cider as a ‘nice unparticular man’:

‘“A clane cup for the shepherd,” said the maltster commandingly.

‘“No — not at all,” said Gabriel, in a reproving tone of considerateness. “I never fuss about dirt in its pure state and when I know what sort it is … I wouldn't think of giving such trouble to neighbours in washing up when there's so much work to be done in the world already.”’

In a more exalted spirit, St. Catherine of Sienna, when she felt revulsion from the wounds she was tending, is said to have bitterly reproached herself. Sound hygiene was incompatible with charity, so she deliberately drank of a bowl of pus.

Whether they are rigorously observed or violated, there is nothing in our rules of cleanness to suggest any connection between dirt and sacredness. Therefore it is only mystifying to learn that primitives make little difference between sacredness and uncleanness.

For us sacred things and places are to be protected from defilement. Holiness and impurity are at opposite poles. We would as soon confound hunger with fullness or sleeping with waking. Yet it is supposed to be a mark of primitive religion to make no clear distinction between sanctity and uncleanness. If this is true it reveals a great gulf between ourselves and our forefathers, between us and contemporary primitives. Certainly it has been very widely held and is still taught in one cryptic form or another to this day. Take the following remark of Eliade:

‘The ambivalence of the sacred is not only in the psychological order (in that it attracts or repels), but also in the order of values; the sacred is at once “sacred” and “defiled”.’

(1958, pp. 14–15)

The statement can be made to sound less paradoxical. It could mean that our idea of sanctity has become very specialised, and that in some primitive cultures the sacred is a very general idea meaning little more than prohibition. In that sense the universe is divided between things and actions which are subject to restriction and others which are not; among the restrictions some are intended to protect divinity from profanation, and others to protect the profane from the dangerous intrusion of divinity. Sacred rules are thus merely rules hedging divinity off, and uncleanness is the two-way danger of contact with divinity. The problem then resolves into a linguistic one, and the paradox is reduced by changing the vocabulary. This may be true of certain cultures. (See Steiner p. 33.)

For instance, the Latin word sacer itself has this meaning of restriction through pertaining to the gods. And in some cases it may apply to desecration as well as to consecration. Similarly the Hebrew root of k-d-sh, which is usually translated as Holy, is based on the idea of separation. Aware of the difficulty translating k-d-sh straight into Holy, Ronald Knox's version of the Old Testament uses ‘set apart’. Thus the grand lines ‘Be ye Holy, Because I am Holy’ are rather thinly rendered:

‘I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt; I am set apart and you must be set apart like me.’

(Levit. 11.46)

If only re-translation could put the whole matter right, how simple it would be. But there are many more intractable cases. In Hinduism, for example, the idea that the unclean and the holy could both belong in a single broader linguistic category is ludicrous. But the Hindu ideas of pollution suggest another approach to the question. Holiness and unholiness after all need not always be absolute opposites. They can be relative categories. What is clean in relation to one thing may be unclean in relation to another, and vice versa. The idiom of pollution lends itself to a complex algebra which takes into account the variables in each context. For example, Professor Harper describes how respect can be expressed on these lines among the Havik peoples of the Malnad part of Mysore state:

‘Behaviour that usually results in pollution is sometimes intentional in order to show deference and respect; by doing that which under other circumstances would be defiling, an individual expresses his inferior position. For example, the theme of the wife's subordination towards the husband finds ritual expression in her eating from his leaf after he has finished …’

In an even clearer case a holy woman, sadhu, when she visited the village, was required to be treated with immense respect. To show this the liquid in which her feet had been bathed:

‘was passed round to those present in a special silver vessel used only for worshipping, and poured into the right hand to be drunk as tirtha (sacred liquid), indicating that she was being accorded the status of a god rather than a mortal…. The most striking and frequently encountered expression of respect-pollution is in the use of cow-dung as a cleansing agent. A cow is worshipped daily by Havik women and on certain ceremonial occasions by Havik men…. Cows are sometimes said to be gods; alternatively to have more than a thousand gods residing in them. Simple types of pollution are removed by water, greater degrees of pollution are removed by cow-dung and water…. Cow dung, like the dung of any other animal, is intrinsically impure and can cause defilement — in fact it will defile a god; but it is pure relative to a mortal … the cow's most impure part is sufficiently pure relative even to a Brahmin priest to remove the latter's impurities.’

(Harper, pp. 181–3)

It is obvious that we are here dealing with symbolic language capable of very fine degrees of differentiation. This use of the relation of purity and impurity is not incompatible with our own language and raises no specially puzzling paradoxes. So far from there being confusion between the idea of holiness and uncleanness, here there is nothing but distinction of the most hair-splitting finesse.

Eliade's statements about the confusion between sacred contagion and uncleanness in primitive religion were evidently not intended to apply to refined Brahminical concepts. To what were they intended to apply? Apart from the anthropologists, are there any people who really confuse the sacred and the unclean? Where did this notion spring from?

Frazer seems to have thought that confusion between uncleanness and holiness is the distinctive mark of primitive thinking. In a long passage in which he considers the Syrian attitude to pigs, he concludes:

‘Some said it was because pigs were unclean; others said it was because pigs were sacred. This … points to a hazy state of religious thought in which the idea of sanctity and uncleanness are not yet sharply distinguished, both being blent in a sort of vaporous solution to which we give the name taboo.’

(The Spirits of the Corn and Wild, II, p. 23)

Again he makes the same point in giving the meaning of taboo:

‘Taboos of holiness agree with taboos of pollution because the savage does not distinguish between holiness and pollution.’

(Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, p. 224)

Frazer had many good qualities, but originality was never one of them. These quotations directly echo Robertson Smith to whom he dedicated The Spirits of the Corn and Wild. Over twenty years earlier Robertson Smith had used the word taboo for restrictions on ‘man's arbitrary use of natural things, enforced by dread of supernatural penalties’ (1889,p. 142). These taboos, inspired by fear, precautions against malignant spirits, were common to all primitive peoples and often took the form of rules of uncleanness.

‘The person under taboo is not regarded as holy, for he is separated from approach to the sanctuary, as well as from contact with men, but his act or condition is somehow associated with supernatural dangers, arising, according to the common savage explanation, from the presence of formidable spirits which are shunned like an infectious disease. In most savage societies no line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of taboo.’

According to this view the main difference between primitive taboo and primitive rules of holiness is the difference between friendly and unfriendly deities. The separation of sanctuary and consecrated things and persons from profane ones, which is a normal part of religious cults, is basically the same as the separations which are inspired by fear of malevolent spirits. Separation is the essential idea in both contexts, only the motive is different — and not so very different either, since friendly gods are also to be feared on occasion. When Robertson Smith added that;- ‘to distinguish between the holy and the unclean marks a real advance above savagery’, to his readers he was saying nothing challenging or provocative. It was certain that his readers made a big distinction between unclean and sacred, and that they were living at the right end of the evolutionary movement. But he was saying more than this. Primitive rules of uncleanness pay attention to the material circumstances of an act and judge it good or bad accordingly. Thus contact with corpses, blood or spittle may be held to transmit danger. Christian rules of holiness, by contrast, disregard the material circumstances and judge according to the motives and disposition of the agent.

‘ … the irrationality of laws of uncleanness from the standpoint of spiritual religion or even of the higher heathenism, is so manifest that they must necessarily be looked upon as having survived from an earlier form of faith and of society.’

(Note C, p. 430)

In this way a criterion was produced for classing religions as advanced or as primitive. If primitive, then rules of holiness and rules of uncleanness were undistinguishable; if advanced then rules of uncleanness disappeared from religion. They were relegated to the kitchen and bathroom and to municipal sanitation, nothing to do with religion. The less uncleanness was concerned with physical conditions and the more it signified a spiritual state of unworthiness, so much more decisively could the religion in question be recognised as advanced.

Robertson Smith was first and foremost a theologian and Old Testament scholar. Since theology is concerned with the relations between man and God, it must always be making assertions about the nature of man. At the time of Robertson Smith anthropology was very much to the fore in theological dis-cussion. Most thinking men in the second part of the nineteenth century were perforce amateur anthropologists. This comes out very clearly in Margaret Hodgen's The Doctrine of Survivals, a necessary guide to the confused nineteenth century dialogue between anthropology and theology. In that formative period anthropology still had its roots in the pulpit and parish hall, and bishops used its findings for fulminating texts.

Parish ethnologists took sides as pessimists or optimists on the prospects of human progress. Were the savages capable of advancement or not? John Wesley, teaching that mankind in its natural state was fundamentally bad, drew lively pictures of savage customs to illustrate the degeneracy of those who were not saved:

‘The natural religion of the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws and all other Indians, is to torture all their prisoners from morning to night, till at length they roast them to death… . Yea, it is a common thing among them for the son, if he thinks his father lives too long, to knock out his brains.’

(Works, vol. 5, p. 402)

I need not here outline the long argument between the progressionists and degenerationists. For several decades the discussion dragged on inconclusively, until Archbishop Whately, in an extreme and popular form, took up the argument for degeneracy to refute the optimism of economists following Adam Smith.

‘Could this abandoned creature,’ he asked, ‘entertain any of the elements of nobility? Could the lowest savages and the most highly civilised specimens of the European races be regarded as members of the same species? Was it conceivable as the great economist had asserted, that by the division of labour these shameless people could “advance step by step in all the arts of civilised life” ?’

(1855, pp. 26–7)

The reaction to his pamphlet, as Hodgen describes it, was intense and immediate:

‘Other degenerationists, such as W. Cooke Taylor, composed volumes to support his position, assembling masses of evidence where the Archbishop had remained content with one illustration… . Defenders of the eighteenth century optimism appeared from all points of the compass. Books were reviewed in terms of Whateley's contention. And social reformers everywhere, those good souls whose newly acquired compassion for the economically downtrodden had found a comfortable solvent in the notion of inevitable social improvement, viewed with alarm the practical outcome of the opposite view… . Even more disconcerted were those scholarly students of man's mind and culture whose personal and professional interests were vested in a methodology based upon the idea of progress.’

(pp. 30–1)

One man finally came forward and settled the controversy for the rest of the century by bringing science to the aid of the progressionists. This was Henry Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). He developed a theory and systematically amassed evidence to prove that civilisation is the result of gradual progress from an original state similar to that of contemporary savagery.

‘Among the evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilisation of the world has actually followed is the great class of facts to denote which I have found it convenient to introduce the term “survivals”. These are processes, customs, opinions and so forth, which have been carried by force of habit into the new society … and … thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has evolved. (p. 16)

The serious business of ancient society may be seen to sink into the spirit of later generations and its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore.’ (p. 71)

(Primitive Culture I, 7th Edn.)

Robertson Smith used the idea of survivals to account for the persistence of irrational rules of uncleanness. Tylor published in 1873, after the publication of The Origin of Species, and there is some parallel between his treatment of cultures and Darwin's treatment of organic species. Darwin was interested in the conditions under which a new organism can appear. He was interested in the survival of the fittest and also in rudimentary organs whose persistence gave him the clues for reconstructing the evolutionary scheme. But Tylor was uniquely interested in the lingering survival of the unfit, in almost vanished cultural relics. He was not concerned to catalogue distinct cultural species or to show their adaptation through history. He only sought to show the general continuity of human culture.

Robertson Smith, coming later, inherited the idea that modern civilised man represents a long process of evolution. He accepted that something of what we still do and believe is fossil; meaningless, petrified appendage to the daily business of living. But Robertson Smith was not interested in dead survivals. Customs which have not fed into the growing points of human history he dubbed irrational and primitive and implied that they were of little interest. For him the important task was to scrape away the clinging rubble and dust of contemporary savage cultures and to reveal the life-bearing channels which prove their evolutionary status by their live functions in modern society. This is precisely what The Religion of the Semites attempts to do. Savage superstition is there separated from the beginnings of true religion, and discarded with very little consideration. What Robertson Smith says about superstition and magic is only incidental to his main theme and a by-product of his main work. Thus he reversed the emphasis of Tylor. Whereas Tylor was interested in what quaint relics can tell us of the past, Robertson Smith was interested in the common elements in modern and primitive experience. Tylor founded folk-lore: Robertson Smith founded social anthropology.

Another great stream of ideas impinged even more closely on Robertson Smith's professional interests. This was the crisis of faith which assailed those thinkers who could not reconcile the development of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Ritual Uncleanness
• 2. Secular Defilement
• 3. The Abominations of Leviticus
• 4. Magic and Miracle
• 5. Primitive Worlds
• 6. Powers and Dangers
• 7. External Boundaries
• 8. Internal Lines
• 9. The System at War with Itself
• 10. The System Shattered and Renewed
• Bibliography
• Index