Purity and Danger
An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
Why cultures revile what will not fit their categories, from dietary law to dirt, in the anthropologist's most argued-over book.
Mary Douglas asked why the prohibitions in Leviticus look arbitrary and argued that they are not: what gets called unclean is what refuses to sit inside a culture’s categories. From there the book moves outward to dirt, ritual and taboo generally, with the claim that ‘dirt is matter out of place’, a definition that turned a book about religion into one of the most borrowed ideas in anthropology.
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Mary Beard
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.
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