Posts Tagged ‘Book Review’
Practicing Safer Text Tuesdays: Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas.
To steal a line from one of my prof’s writings, I’ve decided to recommend a book or so from time to time so that we can learn to ‘practice safer texts.’
Incidentally, I’m also going to steal one of his book recommendations:
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
By: Mary Douglas
One Amazon reviewer states:
All cultures have definite ideas about what is clean and what is dirty. Drawing from previous hallmark works on how cultures make classifications (Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, etc.), Douglas makes clear and concise arguments about the use of ritual in separating that which is considered pure from what’s considered unclean. The convincing argument she makes is that such rituals and clearly defined boundaries of purity reinforce a society’s common definitions, increasing its unity and therefore its ability to work together to succeed. Additionally, Douglas alludes to Malinowski’s anxiety-reduction theories of totems to theorize that clear definitions of right and wrong and of clean and unclean reduce the stress in a given society, helping everyone to know who they are and what is expected of them. In fact, she feels, a lack of such distinctions can be fatal to the integrity of a group. If everyone went on their own deciding what was good or bad, there would be chaos – the danger alluded to in the title.
A highlight of the book is the chapter titled “Abominations of Leviticus”, in which she interprets the Jewish divisions between kosher and graev (no pork, no mixing of milk and meat, etc) in a cultural context. Here she shows that the Levites divided “pure” animals (deer, cattle, sheep, goats, etc) from those considered “mixed” (pig, rabbit, woodchuck), or having an undesirable combination of traits rather than just being dirty in aspect, as is commonly believed.
In other words, y’all need to check it out.
