35 pages • 1 hour read
Mary DouglasPurity and Danger
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Secular Defilement”
Failure to confront our own ideas about dirt has resulted in erroneous ideas about ancient purity rites. One is the idea that all such rites can be interpreted in terms of hygiene: “if we only knew all the circumstances we would find the rational basis of primitive ritual amply justified” (36). Another is the opposite view: that ancient rituals are merely symbolic and have nothing to do with modern ideas of hygiene.
Our ideas of uncleanness are founded in a knowledge of bacteria and germs that ancient societies lacked. By contrast, primitive societies’ ideas of purity were based on a classification of matter and confronting ambiguity in nature. The unclean was that which was anomalous or lay outside the given pattern. Dirt was considered to be out-of-place matter. We still hold this view more or less unconsciously today; for example, we consider muddy garden tools to be unclean only if they are indoors, or food to be potentially dirty if brought into the office. Impurity is fundamentally about order: “Before we think about ritual pollution we must go down in sack-cloth and ashes and scrupulously re-examine our own ideas about dirt” (43).
Chapter 2 Analysis
In this chapter, Douglas dismantles three common assumptions about her subject. The first is medical materialism, or the idea that ancient purity rituals actually have a rational, hygienic basis. For example, some writers have claimed that the Jewish and Muslim prohibition of pork reflects the dangers of eating pig in a hot Mediterranean climate. Douglas concedes that there may be a correspondence with practical realities in many cases, but she rejects it as a sufficient explanation for the rituals.
Then there is the opposite view, that primitive ritual has nothing in common with our modern ideas of cleanliness. Douglas rejects this too, since primitive rituals and our hygienic practices often resemble each other quite closely. For example, great care was taken in Brahmin India to avoid food contamination from the mouth. Douglas rejects the notion that modern people are rational and hygienic and primitive peoples are merely symbolic. On the contrary, “our ideas of dirt also express symbolic systems” (43).
Douglas concedes that for modern people, cleanliness is a matter of germs, the science of bacteriology; it has to do with hygiene and aesthetics, rather than religion. When we subtract the idea of hygiene from dirt, we are left with the definition of dirt as “matter out of place.” This idea is based on a “systematic ordering and classification of matter” (44), in which dirt is rejected as an anomaly. Douglas argues that this is how primitive societies view cleanliness, but it is also reflected in the way we view dirt, as in the example of the garden tools above. She argues further that primitive beliefs about cleanliness are more comprehensive, reflecting a coherent worldview, while for us they apply to “disjointed, separate areas of existence” (50).
