Purity and Danger

For me, the power of both history and anthropology as disciplines of knowledge is their shared capacity for taking a thing you thought you knew and showing you that you didn’t actually know anything about it at all—in fact, you didn’t even know what questions to ask about it. I would be seriously remiss in a list like this if I did not mention the book that first fascinated me, as a historian, with the anthropologist’s way of posing questions. In this towering classic of British social anthropology, Professor Douglas forces us completely to rethink something we actually never think… show more.

Without lapsing into the structuralism of the Lévi-Strauss variety, Douglas demonstrates the power of classification systems. Things or creatures that straddle categories, she argues, are experienced as polluting and deeply dangerous, yet they can exert a powerful force in rituals. When she did fieldwork among the Lele people of the former Belgian Congo, she discovered that they abominated the pangolin, a scaly anteater, in everyday life but used it to positive effect in religious rites. She interprets food taboos among ancient Hebrews as part of a classification system that maintained the separate identity of Jews, and she found similar attitudes… show more.