Mary Douglas, née Tew, is an influential anthropologist who, after stints teaching throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, is currently a professor emerita at University College London. She was born in 1921 in San Remo, Italy, as her parents were returning from colonial service in Burma, but she was raised and educated in England. She studied anthropology at Oxford University under the famous E.E. Evans-Pritchard, doing her fieldwork among the Lele tribe in the Kasai region of Africa. She earned her Ph.D. from Oxford in 1951.
Douglas' most well-known book is the collection of essays entitled Purity and Danger, first published in 1966 and still in print today. In this book, she argues that a culture's taboos can tell us a great deal about its sense of its own identity. For instance, she analyzes the dietary restrictions listed in the Biblical book of Leviticus -- the laws that eventually gave rise to the system of kashrut, better known in English as kosher law. The rules in Leviticus forbid the consumption of pork and shellfish, as many people know, but rabbits, vultures, lions, camels, game meat, any kind of roadkill, and many other foods besides, are all forbidden as well.
Neither Fish Nor Fowl
Douglas puts very little stock in traditional anthropological explanations of these rules as a primitive way of maintaining hygiene. In my own experience, both Jews and goyim are quick to assert that the ancient Israelites judged pork to be treyf because pig flesh attracts more deadly bacteria than the flesh of other animals does. Even if this were true, it does not explain any of the other things on Leviticus' list, and it is quite useless as a way of understanding the development of Israelite religion, Judaism, or the Torah. Douglas prefers to read the text on its own terms, finding clues about the Israelite conception of law within the written laws themselves. One thing that is clear is that the laws say nothing about preserving one's health by eating beef rather than pork.
A structuralist at heart, Douglas believes that it is possible to find patterns in all legal and religious regulations -- even the ones that seem chaotic upon first glance. She performs a brilliant analysis of Leviticus, showing how each of the forbidden animals violates native mental categories like mammal, fish, fowl, and insect. For instance, the lobster lives in the water, like a fish does, but it moves around on legs, like an animal does. Since it does not neatly fit the taxonomies that the Israelites had constructed for understanding their world, they found something threatening about it, and therefore decided that it must be avoided.
Douglas performs similar analyses of other cultures, including the Lele whom she had studied in her fieldwork. The Lele have numerous taboos regarding an animal called the pangolin, a sort of scaled anteater that has similar boundary- and category-defying properties for this tribe as pigs and shellfish did for the ancient Israelites.
Dirt
Those readers who do not keep kosher may be boggled by the idea of treating certain foods as ritually impure. (I would ask such readers how often they eat, say, caterpillars, which can be very nutritious and which still somehow manage to be taboo in our supposedly taboo-free culture.) Douglas believes that there are reasons why some cultures have stronger dietary restrictions than others. In her view, the intensity of one's desire to keep oneself "pure" has a direct correspondence to the perceived social threats that come from outside forces like colonizing powers, intermarriage, and war. The Israelites were constantly under attack, both physically and culturally, and therefore the idea of maintaining purity became much more important to them than it is to most of us today. Arguably that is still the case for Jewish people in this century, who are very much a minority in almost every part of the world and who continue to be persecuted in ghastly ways.
Douglas has a lot to say about perceived threats to purity. She sees the body as a battleground on which we play out our concerns about identity. This is why so many people in so many cultures around the world are squicked by faeces, saliva, menstrual blood, urine, semen, nail clippings, and to a lesser extent blood and hair. Things that are part of a person and which have a stable identity are fine (hair looks nice on my friend's head) -- but once they begin to leave that identity behind, they become strange and threatening (if I find a wad of hair on my plate in a restaurant, I will likely freak out). If I no longer recognize something as having identity at all (the hair disintegrates into dust), then once again it becomes acceptable.
Different cultures are going to create different hierarchies of grossness; not every culture has exactly the same reactions to blood or semen. But Douglas believes that all these hierarchies can be decoded.
Reading List
- The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
- Purity and Danger (1966)
- Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusations (editor, 1970)
- Leviticus as Literature (1999)