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Quote Roundup for Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
When I'm reading a book sometimes I like to write down memorable quotes, so might as well list them for your reading pleasure.
"Morality does not conflict with holiness, but holiness is more a matter of separating that which should be separated than of protecting the rights of husbands and brothers."
"The general regularities of nature are observed accurately and finely enough for the technical requirements of Azande culture. But when technical information has been exhausted, curiosity turns instead to focus on the involvement of a particular person with the universe. Why did it have to happen to him? What can he do to prevent misfortune? Is it anyone's fault? This applies, of course, to a theistic world view. As with witchcraft only certain questions are answered by reference to spirits. The regular procession of the seasons, the relation of cloud to rain and rain to harvest, of drought to epidemic and so on, is recognised. They are taken for granted as the back-drop against which more personal and pressing problems can be solved. The vital questions in any theistic world-view are the same as for the Azande: why did this farmer's crops fail and not his neighbour's? Why did this man get gored by a wild buffalo and not another of his hunting party? Why did this man's children or cows die? Why me? Why today? What can be done about it? These insistent demands for explanation are focussed on an individual's concern for himself and his community. We now know what Durkheim knew, and what Frazer, Tylor and Marett did not. These questions are not phrased primarily to satisfy man's curiosity about the seasons and the rest of the natural environment. They are phrased to satisfy a dominant social concern, the problem of how to organise together in society. They can only be answered, it is true, in terms of man's place in nature. But the metaphysic is a by-product, as it were, of the urgent practical concern."
"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. In these cases the articulate, conscious points in the social structure are armed with articulate, conscious powers to protect the system; the inarticulate, unstructured areas emanate unconscious powers which provoke others to demand that ambiguity be reduced. When such unhappy or angry interstitial persons are accused of witchcraft it is like a warning to bring their rebellious feelings into line with their correct situation. If this were found to hold good more generally, then witchcraft, defined as an alleged psychic force, could also be defined structurally. It would be the anti-social psychic power with which persons in relatively unstructured areas of society are credited, the accusation being a means of exerting control where practical forms of control are difficult. Witchcraft, then, is found in the non-structure. Witches are social equivalents of beetles and spiders who live in the cracks of the walls and wainscoting. They attract the fears and dislikes which other ambiguities and contradictions attract in other thought structures, and the kind of powers attributed to them symbolise their ambiguous, inarticulate status...A witch cannot control himself, it is his nature to be angry and harm emanates from him."
"To sum up, beliefs which attribute spiritual power to individuals are never neutral or free of the dominant patterns of social structure. If some beliefs seem to attribute free-floating spiritual powers in a haphazard manner, closer inspection shows consistency. The only circumstances in which spiritual powers seem to flourish independently of the formal social system are when the system itself is exceptionally devoid of formal structure, when legitimate authority is always under challenge or when the rival segments of an acephalous political system resort to mediation. Then the main contenders for political power have to court for their side the holders of free-floating spiritual power. Thus it is beyond doubt that the social system is thought of as quick with creative and sustaining powers. Now is the time to identify pollution. Granted that all spiritual powers are part of the social system. They express it and provide institutions for manipulating it. This means that the power in the universe is ultimately hitched to society, since so many changes of fortune are set off by persons in one kind of social position or another. But there are other dangers to be reckoned with, which persons may set off knowingly or unknowingly, which are not part of the psyche and which are not to be bought or learned by initiation and training. These are pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself and which punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly denned. A polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone. Bringing pollution, unlike sorcery and witchcraft, is a capacity which men share with animals, for pollution is not always set off by humans. Pollution can be committed intentionally, but intention is irrelevant to its effect—it is more likely to happen inadvertently."
"Even more direct is the symbolism worked upon the human body. The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body."
"The Nuer examples suggest the following ways in which pollution beliefs can uphold the moral code:
(i) When a situation is morally ill-defined, a pollution belief can provide a rule for determining post hoc whether infraction has taken place, or not.
(ii) When moral principles come into conflict, a pollution rule can reduce confusion by giving a simple focus for concern.
(iii) When action that is held to be morally wrong does not provoke moral indignation, belief in the harmful consequences of a pollution can have the effect of aggravating the seriousness of the offence, and so of marshalling public opinion on the side of the right.
(iv) When moral indignation is not reinforced by practical sanctions, pollution beliefs can provide a deterrent to wrongdoers.
This last point can be expanded. In a small scale society the machinery of retribution is never likely to be very strong or very certain in its action. We find that pollution beliefs reinforce it in two distinct ways. Either the transgressor is himself held to be the victim of his own act, or some innocent victim takes the brunt of the danger. This we would expect to vary in a regular manner. In any social system there may be some strongly held moral norms whose breach cannot be punished. For example, when self-help is the only way of righting wrong, people are banded for protection into groups which pursue vengeance for their members. In such a system there can easily be no way of exacting vengeance when a murder has been committed within the group itself; deliberately to kill or even to outlaw a fellow-member would be to offend against the strongest principle of all. In such cases we commonly find that pollution danger is expected to fall on the head of the fratricide. This is a very different problem from the pollution whose dangers fall, not on the head of the transgressor but on the innocent. We saw that the innocent Nuer husband is the one whose life is risked when his wife commits adultery. There are many variations on this theme. Often it is the guilty wife, sometimes it is the injured husband, often it is his children whose lives are endangered. The adulterer himself is not often thought to risk danger, though the Ontong Javanese hold this belief (Hogbin, p. 153). In the case of the fratricide above, moral indignation is not lacking. The problem is a practical question of how to punish rather than one of how to arouse moral fervour against the crime. The danger replaces active human punishment. In the case of adultery pollution the belief that the innocent are in danger helps to brand the delinquent and to rouse moral fervour against him. So in this case pollution ideas strengthen the demand for active human punishment. It is outside the scope of this study to collect and compare a large number of examples. But here is a field which it would be interesting to tackle by documentary research. What are the precise circumstances in which adultery pollution is thought to endanger the injured husband, the unborn or the living children, or the delinquent or innocent wife? Whenever danger follows secret adultery in a social system in which someone has the right to claim damages if adultery is known, the pollution belief acts as a post hoc detector of the crime."
"Similarly, when it is believed that a woman will miscarry if she has committed adultery while pregnant, and that her infant will die if she commits adultery while suckling it, someone may have a case for blood-compensation for every confessed adultery. If girls are normally married before puberty and are expected to go from pregnancy to delivery and from delivery to a three or four year suckling period, and then to new pregnancy again, the husband is theoretically insured against infidelity until her menopause. Furthermore, the behaviour of the wife herself is, in this way, very heavily sanctioned by risks for her children and for her own life in the hour of labour. All this makes good sense. Pollution beliefs here uphold marital relations. But we are still no nearer answering why it should be in some cases the husband who is the victim and in others the wife in child labour or the children, and in others again, as among the Bemba, the innocent party, whether the husband or the wife, who is automatically endangered. The answer must lie in a minute examination of the distribution of rights and duties in marriage and the various interests and advantages of each party. The varying incidence of danger allows moral judgment to point to different individuals: if the wife herself is endangered, even to the point of risking her life in child labour, indignation is summoned against her seducer. This suggests a society in which the wife is less likely to get a beating for her misconduct. If the husband's life is endangered then blame presumably falls on the wife or her lover. As a long shot (more for the sake of making some suggestion that can be tested than with much confidence in its soundness), could it be that the danger falls on the wife when, for some reason or other she cannot be openly chastised? Perhaps because the presense of her kinsfolk in the village protects her? Then we might expect that in the opposite case, when the danger falls on the husband, this gives him an added excuse for giving her a good beating, or at least summons the opinion of the community against her loose behaviour. Here I suggest that a society where marriage is stable and where wives are kept in control may be one in which the danger of adultery may fall on the aggrieved husband."
"So far we have discussed four ways in which pollution tends to support moral values. The fact that pollutions are easier to cancel than moral defects gives us another set of situations. Some pollutions are too grave for the offender to be allowed to survive. But most pollutions have a very simple remedy for undoing their effects. There are rites of reversing, untying, burying, washing, erasing, fumigating, and so on, which at a small cost of time and effort can satisfactorily expunge them. The cancelling of a moral offence depends on the state of mind of the offended party and on the sweetness of nursing revenge. The social consequences of some offences ripple out in all directions and can never be reversed. Rites of reconciliation which enact the burial of the wrong have the creative effect of all ritual. They can help to erase memory of the wrong and encourage the growth of right feeling. There must be an advantage for society at large in attempting to reduce moral offences to pollution offences which can be instantly scrubbed out by ritual."
"[Levy-Bruhl] noticed, as anthropologists have continued to notice ever since, the strenuous efforts that are made to bring the inward heart and mind into line with the public act. The contradiction between external behaviour and secret emotions is a frequent source of anxiety and of expected misfortune. This is a new contradiction which can arise from the act of purification itself. We should therefore recognise it as an autonomous pollution in its own right. Levy-Bruhl gives many examples of what he calls the bewitching effects of ill-will (p. 186). These pollutions, which lurk between the visible act and the invisible thought, are like witchcraft. They are dangers from the crevices of the structure, and like witchcraft their inherent power to harm does not depend either on external action or on any deliberate intention. They are dangerous in themselves."
"When male dominance is accepted as a central principle of social organization and applied without inhibition and with full rights of physical coercion, beliefs in sex pollution are not likely to be highly developed. On the other hand, when the principle of male dominance is applied to the ordering of social life but is contradicted by other principles such as that of female independence, or the inherent right of women as the weaker sex to be more protected from violence than men, then sex pollution is likely to flourish."
"If the principle of male domination is elaborated absolutely consistently, it need not necessarily contradict any other basic principles...But the principle runs into trouble if there is any other principel which protects women from physical control. For this gives women scope to play off one man against another, and so to confound the principle of male dominance. The whole society is especially likely to be founded on a contradiction if the system is one in which men define their status in terms of rights over women. If there is free competition between the men, this gives scope for a discontented woman to turn to her husband's or her guardian's rivals, gain new protectors and new allegiance, and so to dissolve into nothing the structure of rights and duties which had formerly been built around her. This sort of contradiction in the social system arises only if there is no de facto possibility of coercing women. For example, it does not appear if there is a centralised political system which throws the weight of its authority against women. Where the legal system can be exerted against women, they cannot make havoc of the system. But a centralised political system is not one in which male status is mainly phrased in terms of rights over women."
"Female pollution in a society of this type is largely related to the attempt to treat women simultaneously as persons and as the currency of male transactions. Males and females are set off as belonging to distinct, mutually hostile spheres. Sexual antagonism inevitably results and this is reflected int he idea that each sex constitutes a danger to the other. The particular dangers which female contact threatens to males express the contradiction of trying to use women as currency without reducing them to slavery."
"Although in some contexts they thought of women as desirable treasures, they spoke of them also as worthless, worse than dogs, unmannerly, ignorant, fickle, unreliable. Socially, women were indeed all of these things. They were not in the least interested in the men's world in which they and their daughters were swapped as pawns in men's games of prestige. They were cunning in exploiting the opportunities that came their way. If they connived, mother and daughter together could wreck any plants that they disliked. So ultimately men had to assert their vaunted dominance by charming, coaxing and flattering. There was a special wheedling tone of voice they used for women."
"Quarrelling was, like sexual intercourse, regarded as being destructive of the proper ritual condition of the village. It spoilt ritual and hunting. But quarrelling was always bad, while sexual intercourse was only bad on certain (rather frequent) occasions."
"We have traced this Delilah complex, the belief that women weaken or betray, in various extreme forms among the New Guinea Mae Enga and among the Lele of the Congo and the Yurok Indians of California. Where it occurs we find that men's anxieties about women's behaviour are justified and that the situation of male/female relations is so biased that women are cast as betrayers from the start."
"Notice that in this society the women are more anxious than the men about sexual pollution. If their children die (and the infant mortality is very high) they can be blamed for carelessness by the men."
"The teaching of Bemba girls in their puberty ceremonies helps us to relate these aspects of social structure and of women's ambitions to their fears of sex pollution. Dr. Richards records that the girls are strictly indoctrinated with the need to behave submissively to their husbands; interesting since they are reputed to be particularly overbearing and difficult to manage. The candidates are humiliated while their husbands' virility is extolled."
"If the Enga wife is a Delilah, he is Samson in the camp of the Philistines. If he feels humiliated he can he can bring the pillars of society tumbling down, for if all the husbands were to rise up and go the village would be ruined. No wonder that the women are anxious to flatter and cajole him. No wonder they would like to protect against the effects of adultery. The husband appears not to be dangerous or sinister, but shy, liable to be frightened off, needing to be convinced of his own masculinity and of the dangers thereof. He needs to be assured that his wife is looking after him, standing by to purify him, watching over the fire. He can do nothing without her, not even approach his own ancestral spirits. In her self-imposed anxieties about sex pollution the Bemba wife appears as the opposite number of the Mae Enga husband. Both find in the marriage situation anxieties concerning the structure of the wider society. If the Bemba woman did not want to stay at home and become an influential matron there, if she were prepared to follow her husband meekly to his village, she could relieve her anxiety about sexual pollution."
"In all the examples quoted of this kind of pollution, the basic problem is a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it. The Enga want to fight their enemy clans but yet to marry with their clans women. The Lele want to use women as the pawns of men, and yet will take sides with individual women against other men. The Bemba women want to be free and independent and to behave in ways which threaten to wreck their marriages, and yet they want their husbands to stay with them. In each case the dangerous situation which has to be handled with washings and avoidances has in common with the others that the norms of behaviour are contradictory. The left hand is fighting the right hand, as in the Trickster myth of the Winnebago."
"We can come to sympathise with St. Paul's extraordinary demand that in the new Christian society there should be neither male nor female. The cases we have considered may throw some light on the exaggerated importance attached to virginity in the early centuries of Christianity. The primitive church of the Acts in its treatment of women was setting a standard of freedom and equality which was against the traditional Jewish custom. The barrier of sex in the Middle East at that time was a barrier of oppression, as St. Paul's words imply: "Baptised into Christ, you have put on Christ: there can be neither Jew, nor Greek, nor bond nor free, there can be neither male nor female, for you are all one man in Christ Jesus." (Gal. 3. 28) In its effort to create a new society which would be free, unbounded and without coercion or contradiction, it was no doubt necessary to establish a new set of positive values. The idea that virginity had a special positive value was bound to fall on good soil in a small persecuted minority group. For we have seen that these social conditions lend themselves to beliefs which symbolise the body as an imperfect container which will only be perfect if it can be made impermeable. Further, the idea of the high value of virginity would be well-chosen for the project of changing the role of the sexes in marriage and in society at large (Wangermann). The idea of woman as the Old Eve, together with fears of sex pollution, belongs with a certain specific type of social organisation. If this social order has to be changed, the Second Eve, a virgin source of redemption crushing evil underfoot is a potent new symbol to present."
"In the course of any imposing of order, whether in the mind or in the external world, the attitude to rejected bits and pieces goes through two stages. First they are recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage they have some identity, they can be seen to be unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from, hair or food or wrappings. This is the stage at which they are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. But a long process of pulverizing, dissolving and rotting awaits any physical things that have been recognised as dirt. In the end, all identity is gone. The origin of the various bits and pieces is lost and they have entered into the mass of common rubbish. It is unpleasant to poke about in the refuse to try to recover anything, for this revives identity. So long as identity is absent, rubbish is not dangerous. It does not even create ambiguous perceptions since it clearly belongs in a defined place, a rubbish heap of one kind or another"
"In this final stage of total disintegration, dirt is utterly undifferentiated. Thus a cycle has been completed. Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order. So it started from a state of non-differentiation; all through the process of differentiating its role was to threaten the distinctions made; finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character. Formlessness is therefore an apt symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay."
"In the same book Eliade goes on to assimilate with water two other symbols of renewal which we can, without labouring the point, equally associate with dust and corruption. One is symbolism of darkness and the other orgiastic celebration of the New Year (pp. 398-9)."
"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....Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise."
"Where sexual purity is concerned it is obvious that if it is to imply no contact between the sexes it is not only a denial of sex, but must be literally barren. It also leads to contradiction. To wish all women to be chaste at all times goes contrary to other wishes and if followed consistently leads to inconveniences of the kind to which Mae Enga men submit. High-born girls of 17th century Spain found themselves in a dilemma in which dishonour stood on either horn. St. Theresa of Avila was brought up in a society in which the seduction of a girl had to be avenged by her brother or father. So if she received a lover she risked dishonour and the lives of men. But her personal honour required her to be generous and not to withhold herself from her lover, as it was unthinkable to shun lovers altogether. There are many other examples of how the quest for purity creates problems and some curious solutions."
"To switch the metaphor, a garden is not a tapestry; if all the weeds are removed, the soil is impoverished. Somehow the gardener must preserve fertility by returning what he has taken out. The special kind of treatment which some religions accord to anomalies and abominations to make them powerful for good is like turning weeds and lawn cuttings into compost. This is the general outline for an answer to why pollutions are often used in renewal rites. Whenever a strict pattern of purity is imposed on our lives it is either highly uncomfortable or it leads into contradiction if closely followed, or it 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."
"This splendid passage invites us to compare dirt-affirming with dirt-rejecting philosophies."
"Beyond that, what other rules would objective scholarship need, to distinguish different kinds of religion according to these general criteria? The answer is that the task is utterly beyond the scope of objective scholarship. This is not for the technical reason that the field work is missing. Indeed, the scantier the field research the more practicable the comparative project appears. The reason lies in the nature of the material itself. All live religions are many things. The forma! ritual of public occasions teaches one set of doctrine. There is no reason to suppose that its message is necessarily consistent with those taught in private rituals, or that all public rituals are consistent with one another, nor all private rituals. There is no guarantee that the ritual is homogeneous, and if it is not, only the subjective intuition of the observer can say whether the total effect is optimistic or pessimistic. He may follow some rules for arriving at his conclusion; he may decide to add up each side of a balance sheet of evil-rejecting and evil-affirming rites, scoring each one equally. Or he may weight the score according to the importance of the rites. But whatever rule he follows he is bound to be arbitrary. And even then he has only come to the end of the formal ritual. There are other beliefs which may not be ritualised at all, and which may altogether obscure the message of the rites. People do not necessarily listen to their preachers. Their real guiding beliefs may be cheerfully optimistic and dirt-rejecting while they appear to subscribe to a nobly pessimistic religion."
"This cult has obviously very many different kinds of significance. Here I limit myself to commenting on two aspects: One is the way it achieves a union of opposites which is a source of power for good: the other is the seemingly voluntary submission of the animal to its own death."
"A strong millenial tendency is implicit in the way of thinking of any people whose metaphysics push evil out of the world of reality."
"Most religions promise by their rites to make some changes in external events. Whatever promises they make, death must somehow be recognised as inevitable. It is usual to expect that the greatest metaphysical development goes with the most pessimism and contempt of the good things of this life. If religions such as Buddhism teach that individual life is a little thing and that its pleasures are transient and unsatisfying, then they are in a strong philosophical position for contemplating death in the context of the cosmic purpose of an all-pervading Existence. By and large primitive religions and the ordinary layman's acceptance of more elaborate religious philosophies coincide: they are less concerned with philosophy and more interested in the material benefits which ritual and moral conformity can bring. But it follows that those religions which have most emphasised the instrumental effects of their ritual are most vulnerable to disbelief. If the faithful have come to think of rites as means to health and prosperity, like so many magic lamps to be worked by rubbing, there comes a day when the whole ritual apparatus must seem an empty mockery. Somewhere the beliefs must be safeguarded against disappointment or they may not hold assent. One way of protecting ritual from scepticism is to suppose that an enemy, within or without the community, is continually undoing its good effect. On these lines responsibility may be given to amoral demons or to witches and sorcerers. But this is only a feeble protection for it affirms that the faithful are right in treating ritual as an instrument of their desires, but confesses the weakness of the ritual for achieving its purpose. Thus religions which explain evil by reference to demonology or sorcery are failing to offer a way of comprehending the whole of existence. They come close to an optimistic, healthy-minded, pluralistic view of the universe...Another way of protecting the belief that religion can deliver prosperity here and now is to make ritual efficacy depend on difficult conditions. On the one hand the rite may be very complicated and difficult to perform: if the least detail gets into the wrong order, the whole thing is invalid. This is a narrowly instrumental approach, magical in the most pejorative sense. On the other hand the success of the rite may depend on the moral conditions being correct: the performer and audience should be in a proper state of mind, free of guilt, free of ill-will and so on. A moral requirement for the efficacy of ritual can bind the believers to the highest purposes of their religion...The third way is for the religious teaching to change its tack. In most everyday contexts it tells the faithful that their fields will prosper and their families flourish if they obey the moral code and perform the proper ritual services. Then, in another context, all this pious effort is disparaged, contempt is thrown on right behaviour, materialistic objectives are suddenly despised. We cannot say that they suddenly become religions of non-attachment, promising only disillusionment in this life. But they travel some way along this path."
"I am tempted to suppose that very many primitive religions which offer material success with one hand, with the other protect themselves from crude experiment by extending their perspective in much the same way. For a narrow focus on material health and happiness makes a religion vulnerable to disbelief. And so we can suppose that the very logic of promises discreditably unfulfilled may lead cult officials to meditate on wider, profounder themes, such as the mystery of evil and of death. If this is true we would expect the most materialistic-seeming cults to stage at some central point in the ritual cycle a cult of the paradox of the ultimate unity of life and death. At such a point pollution of death, treated in a positive creative role, can help to close the metaphysical gap."
"Animal and vegetable life cannot help but play their role in the order of the universe. They have little choice but to live as it is their nature to behave. Occasionally the odd species or individual gets out of line and humans react by avoidance of one kind or another. The very reaction to ambiguous behaviour expresses the expectation that all things shall normally conform to the principles which govern the world. But in their own experience as men, people know that their personal conformity is not so certain. Punishments, moral pressures, rules about not touching and not eating, a firm ritual framework, all these can do something to bring man into harmony with the rest of being. But so long as free consent is withheld, so long is the fulfilment imperfect. Here again we can discern primitive existentialists whose escape from the chain of necessity lies only in the exercise of choice. When someone embraces freely the symbols of death, or death itself, then it is consistent with everything that we have seen so far, that a great release of power for good should be expected to follow."
"Morality does not conflict with holiness, but holiness is more a matter of separating that which should be separated than of protecting the rights of husbands and brothers."
"The general regularities of nature are observed accurately and finely enough for the technical requirements of Azande culture. But when technical information has been exhausted, curiosity turns instead to focus on the involvement of a particular person with the universe. Why did it have to happen to him? What can he do to prevent misfortune? Is it anyone's fault? This applies, of course, to a theistic world view. As with witchcraft only certain questions are answered by reference to spirits. The regular procession of the seasons, the relation of cloud to rain and rain to harvest, of drought to epidemic and so on, is recognised. They are taken for granted as the back-drop against which more personal and pressing problems can be solved. The vital questions in any theistic world-view are the same as for the Azande: why did this farmer's crops fail and not his neighbour's? Why did this man get gored by a wild buffalo and not another of his hunting party? Why did this man's children or cows die? Why me? Why today? What can be done about it? These insistent demands for explanation are focussed on an individual's concern for himself and his community. We now know what Durkheim knew, and what Frazer, Tylor and Marett did not. These questions are not phrased primarily to satisfy man's curiosity about the seasons and the rest of the natural environment. They are phrased to satisfy a dominant social concern, the problem of how to organise together in society. They can only be answered, it is true, in terms of man's place in nature. But the metaphysic is a by-product, as it were, of the urgent practical concern."
"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. In these cases the articulate, conscious points in the social structure are armed with articulate, conscious powers to protect the system; the inarticulate, unstructured areas emanate unconscious powers which provoke others to demand that ambiguity be reduced. When such unhappy or angry interstitial persons are accused of witchcraft it is like a warning to bring their rebellious feelings into line with their correct situation. If this were found to hold good more generally, then witchcraft, defined as an alleged psychic force, could also be defined structurally. It would be the anti-social psychic power with which persons in relatively unstructured areas of society are credited, the accusation being a means of exerting control where practical forms of control are difficult. Witchcraft, then, is found in the non-structure. Witches are social equivalents of beetles and spiders who live in the cracks of the walls and wainscoting. They attract the fears and dislikes which other ambiguities and contradictions attract in other thought structures, and the kind of powers attributed to them symbolise their ambiguous, inarticulate status...A witch cannot control himself, it is his nature to be angry and harm emanates from him."
"To sum up, beliefs which attribute spiritual power to individuals are never neutral or free of the dominant patterns of social structure. If some beliefs seem to attribute free-floating spiritual powers in a haphazard manner, closer inspection shows consistency. The only circumstances in which spiritual powers seem to flourish independently of the formal social system are when the system itself is exceptionally devoid of formal structure, when legitimate authority is always under challenge or when the rival segments of an acephalous political system resort to mediation. Then the main contenders for political power have to court for their side the holders of free-floating spiritual power. Thus it is beyond doubt that the social system is thought of as quick with creative and sustaining powers. Now is the time to identify pollution. Granted that all spiritual powers are part of the social system. They express it and provide institutions for manipulating it. This means that the power in the universe is ultimately hitched to society, since so many changes of fortune are set off by persons in one kind of social position or another. But there are other dangers to be reckoned with, which persons may set off knowingly or unknowingly, which are not part of the psyche and which are not to be bought or learned by initiation and training. These are pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself and which punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly denned. A polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone. Bringing pollution, unlike sorcery and witchcraft, is a capacity which men share with animals, for pollution is not always set off by humans. Pollution can be committed intentionally, but intention is irrelevant to its effect—it is more likely to happen inadvertently."
"Even more direct is the symbolism worked upon the human body. The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body."
"The Nuer examples suggest the following ways in which pollution beliefs can uphold the moral code:
(i) When a situation is morally ill-defined, a pollution belief can provide a rule for determining post hoc whether infraction has taken place, or not.
(ii) When moral principles come into conflict, a pollution rule can reduce confusion by giving a simple focus for concern.
(iii) When action that is held to be morally wrong does not provoke moral indignation, belief in the harmful consequences of a pollution can have the effect of aggravating the seriousness of the offence, and so of marshalling public opinion on the side of the right.
(iv) When moral indignation is not reinforced by practical sanctions, pollution beliefs can provide a deterrent to wrongdoers.
This last point can be expanded. In a small scale society the machinery of retribution is never likely to be very strong or very certain in its action. We find that pollution beliefs reinforce it in two distinct ways. Either the transgressor is himself held to be the victim of his own act, or some innocent victim takes the brunt of the danger. This we would expect to vary in a regular manner. In any social system there may be some strongly held moral norms whose breach cannot be punished. For example, when self-help is the only way of righting wrong, people are banded for protection into groups which pursue vengeance for their members. In such a system there can easily be no way of exacting vengeance when a murder has been committed within the group itself; deliberately to kill or even to outlaw a fellow-member would be to offend against the strongest principle of all. In such cases we commonly find that pollution danger is expected to fall on the head of the fratricide. This is a very different problem from the pollution whose dangers fall, not on the head of the transgressor but on the innocent. We saw that the innocent Nuer husband is the one whose life is risked when his wife commits adultery. There are many variations on this theme. Often it is the guilty wife, sometimes it is the injured husband, often it is his children whose lives are endangered. The adulterer himself is not often thought to risk danger, though the Ontong Javanese hold this belief (Hogbin, p. 153). In the case of the fratricide above, moral indignation is not lacking. The problem is a practical question of how to punish rather than one of how to arouse moral fervour against the crime. The danger replaces active human punishment. In the case of adultery pollution the belief that the innocent are in danger helps to brand the delinquent and to rouse moral fervour against him. So in this case pollution ideas strengthen the demand for active human punishment. It is outside the scope of this study to collect and compare a large number of examples. But here is a field which it would be interesting to tackle by documentary research. What are the precise circumstances in which adultery pollution is thought to endanger the injured husband, the unborn or the living children, or the delinquent or innocent wife? Whenever danger follows secret adultery in a social system in which someone has the right to claim damages if adultery is known, the pollution belief acts as a post hoc detector of the crime."
"Similarly, when it is believed that a woman will miscarry if she has committed adultery while pregnant, and that her infant will die if she commits adultery while suckling it, someone may have a case for blood-compensation for every confessed adultery. If girls are normally married before puberty and are expected to go from pregnancy to delivery and from delivery to a three or four year suckling period, and then to new pregnancy again, the husband is theoretically insured against infidelity until her menopause. Furthermore, the behaviour of the wife herself is, in this way, very heavily sanctioned by risks for her children and for her own life in the hour of labour. All this makes good sense. Pollution beliefs here uphold marital relations. But we are still no nearer answering why it should be in some cases the husband who is the victim and in others the wife in child labour or the children, and in others again, as among the Bemba, the innocent party, whether the husband or the wife, who is automatically endangered. The answer must lie in a minute examination of the distribution of rights and duties in marriage and the various interests and advantages of each party. The varying incidence of danger allows moral judgment to point to different individuals: if the wife herself is endangered, even to the point of risking her life in child labour, indignation is summoned against her seducer. This suggests a society in which the wife is less likely to get a beating for her misconduct. If the husband's life is endangered then blame presumably falls on the wife or her lover. As a long shot (more for the sake of making some suggestion that can be tested than with much confidence in its soundness), could it be that the danger falls on the wife when, for some reason or other she cannot be openly chastised? Perhaps because the presense of her kinsfolk in the village protects her? Then we might expect that in the opposite case, when the danger falls on the husband, this gives him an added excuse for giving her a good beating, or at least summons the opinion of the community against her loose behaviour. Here I suggest that a society where marriage is stable and where wives are kept in control may be one in which the danger of adultery may fall on the aggrieved husband."
"So far we have discussed four ways in which pollution tends to support moral values. The fact that pollutions are easier to cancel than moral defects gives us another set of situations. Some pollutions are too grave for the offender to be allowed to survive. But most pollutions have a very simple remedy for undoing their effects. There are rites of reversing, untying, burying, washing, erasing, fumigating, and so on, which at a small cost of time and effort can satisfactorily expunge them. The cancelling of a moral offence depends on the state of mind of the offended party and on the sweetness of nursing revenge. The social consequences of some offences ripple out in all directions and can never be reversed. Rites of reconciliation which enact the burial of the wrong have the creative effect of all ritual. They can help to erase memory of the wrong and encourage the growth of right feeling. There must be an advantage for society at large in attempting to reduce moral offences to pollution offences which can be instantly scrubbed out by ritual."
"[Levy-Bruhl] noticed, as anthropologists have continued to notice ever since, the strenuous efforts that are made to bring the inward heart and mind into line with the public act. The contradiction between external behaviour and secret emotions is a frequent source of anxiety and of expected misfortune. This is a new contradiction which can arise from the act of purification itself. We should therefore recognise it as an autonomous pollution in its own right. Levy-Bruhl gives many examples of what he calls the bewitching effects of ill-will (p. 186). These pollutions, which lurk between the visible act and the invisible thought, are like witchcraft. They are dangers from the crevices of the structure, and like witchcraft their inherent power to harm does not depend either on external action or on any deliberate intention. They are dangerous in themselves."
"When male dominance is accepted as a central principle of social organization and applied without inhibition and with full rights of physical coercion, beliefs in sex pollution are not likely to be highly developed. On the other hand, when the principle of male dominance is applied to the ordering of social life but is contradicted by other principles such as that of female independence, or the inherent right of women as the weaker sex to be more protected from violence than men, then sex pollution is likely to flourish."
"If the principle of male domination is elaborated absolutely consistently, it need not necessarily contradict any other basic principles...But the principle runs into trouble if there is any other principel which protects women from physical control. For this gives women scope to play off one man against another, and so to confound the principle of male dominance. The whole society is especially likely to be founded on a contradiction if the system is one in which men define their status in terms of rights over women. If there is free competition between the men, this gives scope for a discontented woman to turn to her husband's or her guardian's rivals, gain new protectors and new allegiance, and so to dissolve into nothing the structure of rights and duties which had formerly been built around her. This sort of contradiction in the social system arises only if there is no de facto possibility of coercing women. For example, it does not appear if there is a centralised political system which throws the weight of its authority against women. Where the legal system can be exerted against women, they cannot make havoc of the system. But a centralised political system is not one in which male status is mainly phrased in terms of rights over women."
"Female pollution in a society of this type is largely related to the attempt to treat women simultaneously as persons and as the currency of male transactions. Males and females are set off as belonging to distinct, mutually hostile spheres. Sexual antagonism inevitably results and this is reflected int he idea that each sex constitutes a danger to the other. The particular dangers which female contact threatens to males express the contradiction of trying to use women as currency without reducing them to slavery."
"Although in some contexts they thought of women as desirable treasures, they spoke of them also as worthless, worse than dogs, unmannerly, ignorant, fickle, unreliable. Socially, women were indeed all of these things. They were not in the least interested in the men's world in which they and their daughters were swapped as pawns in men's games of prestige. They were cunning in exploiting the opportunities that came their way. If they connived, mother and daughter together could wreck any plants that they disliked. So ultimately men had to assert their vaunted dominance by charming, coaxing and flattering. There was a special wheedling tone of voice they used for women."
"Quarrelling was, like sexual intercourse, regarded as being destructive of the proper ritual condition of the village. It spoilt ritual and hunting. But quarrelling was always bad, while sexual intercourse was only bad on certain (rather frequent) occasions."
"We have traced this Delilah complex, the belief that women weaken or betray, in various extreme forms among the New Guinea Mae Enga and among the Lele of the Congo and the Yurok Indians of California. Where it occurs we find that men's anxieties about women's behaviour are justified and that the situation of male/female relations is so biased that women are cast as betrayers from the start."
"Notice that in this society the women are more anxious than the men about sexual pollution. If their children die (and the infant mortality is very high) they can be blamed for carelessness by the men."
"The teaching of Bemba girls in their puberty ceremonies helps us to relate these aspects of social structure and of women's ambitions to their fears of sex pollution. Dr. Richards records that the girls are strictly indoctrinated with the need to behave submissively to their husbands; interesting since they are reputed to be particularly overbearing and difficult to manage. The candidates are humiliated while their husbands' virility is extolled."
"If the Enga wife is a Delilah, he is Samson in the camp of the Philistines. If he feels humiliated he can he can bring the pillars of society tumbling down, for if all the husbands were to rise up and go the village would be ruined. No wonder that the women are anxious to flatter and cajole him. No wonder they would like to protect against the effects of adultery. The husband appears not to be dangerous or sinister, but shy, liable to be frightened off, needing to be convinced of his own masculinity and of the dangers thereof. He needs to be assured that his wife is looking after him, standing by to purify him, watching over the fire. He can do nothing without her, not even approach his own ancestral spirits. In her self-imposed anxieties about sex pollution the Bemba wife appears as the opposite number of the Mae Enga husband. Both find in the marriage situation anxieties concerning the structure of the wider society. If the Bemba woman did not want to stay at home and become an influential matron there, if she were prepared to follow her husband meekly to his village, she could relieve her anxiety about sexual pollution."
"In all the examples quoted of this kind of pollution, the basic problem is a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it. The Enga want to fight their enemy clans but yet to marry with their clans women. The Lele want to use women as the pawns of men, and yet will take sides with individual women against other men. The Bemba women want to be free and independent and to behave in ways which threaten to wreck their marriages, and yet they want their husbands to stay with them. In each case the dangerous situation which has to be handled with washings and avoidances has in common with the others that the norms of behaviour are contradictory. The left hand is fighting the right hand, as in the Trickster myth of the Winnebago."
"We can come to sympathise with St. Paul's extraordinary demand that in the new Christian society there should be neither male nor female. The cases we have considered may throw some light on the exaggerated importance attached to virginity in the early centuries of Christianity. The primitive church of the Acts in its treatment of women was setting a standard of freedom and equality which was against the traditional Jewish custom. The barrier of sex in the Middle East at that time was a barrier of oppression, as St. Paul's words imply: "Baptised into Christ, you have put on Christ: there can be neither Jew, nor Greek, nor bond nor free, there can be neither male nor female, for you are all one man in Christ Jesus." (Gal. 3. 28) In its effort to create a new society which would be free, unbounded and without coercion or contradiction, it was no doubt necessary to establish a new set of positive values. The idea that virginity had a special positive value was bound to fall on good soil in a small persecuted minority group. For we have seen that these social conditions lend themselves to beliefs which symbolise the body as an imperfect container which will only be perfect if it can be made impermeable. Further, the idea of the high value of virginity would be well-chosen for the project of changing the role of the sexes in marriage and in society at large (Wangermann). The idea of woman as the Old Eve, together with fears of sex pollution, belongs with a certain specific type of social organisation. If this social order has to be changed, the Second Eve, a virgin source of redemption crushing evil underfoot is a potent new symbol to present."
"In the course of any imposing of order, whether in the mind or in the external world, the attitude to rejected bits and pieces goes through two stages. First they are recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage they have some identity, they can be seen to be unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from, hair or food or wrappings. This is the stage at which they are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. But a long process of pulverizing, dissolving and rotting awaits any physical things that have been recognised as dirt. In the end, all identity is gone. The origin of the various bits and pieces is lost and they have entered into the mass of common rubbish. It is unpleasant to poke about in the refuse to try to recover anything, for this revives identity. So long as identity is absent, rubbish is not dangerous. It does not even create ambiguous perceptions since it clearly belongs in a defined place, a rubbish heap of one kind or another"
"In this final stage of total disintegration, dirt is utterly undifferentiated. Thus a cycle has been completed. Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order. So it started from a state of non-differentiation; all through the process of differentiating its role was to threaten the distinctions made; finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character. Formlessness is therefore an apt symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay."
"In the same book Eliade goes on to assimilate with water two other symbols of renewal which we can, without labouring the point, equally associate with dust and corruption. One is symbolism of darkness and the other orgiastic celebration of the New Year (pp. 398-9)."
"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....Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise."
"Where sexual purity is concerned it is obvious that if it is to imply no contact between the sexes it is not only a denial of sex, but must be literally barren. It also leads to contradiction. To wish all women to be chaste at all times goes contrary to other wishes and if followed consistently leads to inconveniences of the kind to which Mae Enga men submit. High-born girls of 17th century Spain found themselves in a dilemma in which dishonour stood on either horn. St. Theresa of Avila was brought up in a society in which the seduction of a girl had to be avenged by her brother or father. So if she received a lover she risked dishonour and the lives of men. But her personal honour required her to be generous and not to withhold herself from her lover, as it was unthinkable to shun lovers altogether. There are many other examples of how the quest for purity creates problems and some curious solutions."
"To switch the metaphor, a garden is not a tapestry; if all the weeds are removed, the soil is impoverished. Somehow the gardener must preserve fertility by returning what he has taken out. The special kind of treatment which some religions accord to anomalies and abominations to make them powerful for good is like turning weeds and lawn cuttings into compost. This is the general outline for an answer to why pollutions are often used in renewal rites. Whenever a strict pattern of purity is imposed on our lives it is either highly uncomfortable or it leads into contradiction if closely followed, or it 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."
"This splendid passage invites us to compare dirt-affirming with dirt-rejecting philosophies."
"Beyond that, what other rules would objective scholarship need, to distinguish different kinds of religion according to these general criteria? The answer is that the task is utterly beyond the scope of objective scholarship. This is not for the technical reason that the field work is missing. Indeed, the scantier the field research the more practicable the comparative project appears. The reason lies in the nature of the material itself. All live religions are many things. The forma! ritual of public occasions teaches one set of doctrine. There is no reason to suppose that its message is necessarily consistent with those taught in private rituals, or that all public rituals are consistent with one another, nor all private rituals. There is no guarantee that the ritual is homogeneous, and if it is not, only the subjective intuition of the observer can say whether the total effect is optimistic or pessimistic. He may follow some rules for arriving at his conclusion; he may decide to add up each side of a balance sheet of evil-rejecting and evil-affirming rites, scoring each one equally. Or he may weight the score according to the importance of the rites. But whatever rule he follows he is bound to be arbitrary. And even then he has only come to the end of the formal ritual. There are other beliefs which may not be ritualised at all, and which may altogether obscure the message of the rites. People do not necessarily listen to their preachers. Their real guiding beliefs may be cheerfully optimistic and dirt-rejecting while they appear to subscribe to a nobly pessimistic religion."
"This cult has obviously very many different kinds of significance. Here I limit myself to commenting on two aspects: One is the way it achieves a union of opposites which is a source of power for good: the other is the seemingly voluntary submission of the animal to its own death."
"A strong millenial tendency is implicit in the way of thinking of any people whose metaphysics push evil out of the world of reality."
"Most religions promise by their rites to make some changes in external events. Whatever promises they make, death must somehow be recognised as inevitable. It is usual to expect that the greatest metaphysical development goes with the most pessimism and contempt of the good things of this life. If religions such as Buddhism teach that individual life is a little thing and that its pleasures are transient and unsatisfying, then they are in a strong philosophical position for contemplating death in the context of the cosmic purpose of an all-pervading Existence. By and large primitive religions and the ordinary layman's acceptance of more elaborate religious philosophies coincide: they are less concerned with philosophy and more interested in the material benefits which ritual and moral conformity can bring. But it follows that those religions which have most emphasised the instrumental effects of their ritual are most vulnerable to disbelief. If the faithful have come to think of rites as means to health and prosperity, like so many magic lamps to be worked by rubbing, there comes a day when the whole ritual apparatus must seem an empty mockery. Somewhere the beliefs must be safeguarded against disappointment or they may not hold assent. One way of protecting ritual from scepticism is to suppose that an enemy, within or without the community, is continually undoing its good effect. On these lines responsibility may be given to amoral demons or to witches and sorcerers. But this is only a feeble protection for it affirms that the faithful are right in treating ritual as an instrument of their desires, but confesses the weakness of the ritual for achieving its purpose. Thus religions which explain evil by reference to demonology or sorcery are failing to offer a way of comprehending the whole of existence. They come close to an optimistic, healthy-minded, pluralistic view of the universe...Another way of protecting the belief that religion can deliver prosperity here and now is to make ritual efficacy depend on difficult conditions. On the one hand the rite may be very complicated and difficult to perform: if the least detail gets into the wrong order, the whole thing is invalid. This is a narrowly instrumental approach, magical in the most pejorative sense. On the other hand the success of the rite may depend on the moral conditions being correct: the performer and audience should be in a proper state of mind, free of guilt, free of ill-will and so on. A moral requirement for the efficacy of ritual can bind the believers to the highest purposes of their religion...The third way is for the religious teaching to change its tack. In most everyday contexts it tells the faithful that their fields will prosper and their families flourish if they obey the moral code and perform the proper ritual services. Then, in another context, all this pious effort is disparaged, contempt is thrown on right behaviour, materialistic objectives are suddenly despised. We cannot say that they suddenly become religions of non-attachment, promising only disillusionment in this life. But they travel some way along this path."
"I am tempted to suppose that very many primitive religions which offer material success with one hand, with the other protect themselves from crude experiment by extending their perspective in much the same way. For a narrow focus on material health and happiness makes a religion vulnerable to disbelief. And so we can suppose that the very logic of promises discreditably unfulfilled may lead cult officials to meditate on wider, profounder themes, such as the mystery of evil and of death. If this is true we would expect the most materialistic-seeming cults to stage at some central point in the ritual cycle a cult of the paradox of the ultimate unity of life and death. At such a point pollution of death, treated in a positive creative role, can help to close the metaphysical gap."
"Animal and vegetable life cannot help but play their role in the order of the universe. They have little choice but to live as it is their nature to behave. Occasionally the odd species or individual gets out of line and humans react by avoidance of one kind or another. The very reaction to ambiguous behaviour expresses the expectation that all things shall normally conform to the principles which govern the world. But in their own experience as men, people know that their personal conformity is not so certain. Punishments, moral pressures, rules about not touching and not eating, a firm ritual framework, all these can do something to bring man into harmony with the rest of being. But so long as free consent is withheld, so long is the fulfilment imperfect. Here again we can discern primitive existentialists whose escape from the chain of necessity lies only in the exercise of choice. When someone embraces freely the symbols of death, or death itself, then it is consistent with everything that we have seen so far, that a great release of power for good should be expected to follow."