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Sacrifice and Purity: The Twisted Fortunes of Related Ritual Structures

Jonathan Klawans

in Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism

This chapter reviews theories of sacrifice and interpretations of purity, finding disparities in the ways in which they have been understood by scholarship in recent times. It argues that three ... More

This chapter reviews theories of sacrifice and interpretations of purity, finding disparities in the ways in which they have been understood by scholarship in recent times. It argues that three biases in particular have unduly affected the analysis of these rituals, with the result that sacrifice has been denied the symbolic understanding more typically applied to purity rites. These biases include Christian and Jewish supersessionism and a contemporary cultural ambivalence toward overt violent rituals. It employs methods inspired by Mary Douglas and argues against approach taken by René Girard.Less

Food, Anthropology, Text and History

Nathan MacDonald

in Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament

In the present methodological ferment in biblical studies it is necessary to articulate a methodological approach to the study of food in the Old Testament. The methodology outlined is fully ... More

In the present methodological ferment in biblical studies it is necessary to articulate a methodological approach to the study of food in the Old Testament. The methodology outlined is fully responsive to research on the anthropology of food, the literary form of the biblical text and historical-critical biblical scholarship. The necessity of all these aspects is demonstrated through an analysis of work on the Israelite dietary laws in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. For this classical interpretative puzzle Mary Douglas's work, Purity and Danger, has been a decisive turning point. Her analysis has stimulated many biblical scholars, but this has required her own views to be re-articulated in light of closer readings of the text and the work of historical-critical scholarship. The conversation not only shows the need for well informed use of anthropological research, literary analysis and historical-critical scholarship, but also the necessity of moving beyond tired debates between materialists and structuralists, or, in the usual terms of biblical scholarship, diachronic, and synchronic.Less

Mary Douglas

Timothy Larsen

in The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith

Mary Douglas (1921–2007) was raised a Roman Catholic and was a practising Catholic throughout her entire life. She did her doctoral work at the Univerisity of Oxford with fieldwork among the Lele in ... More

Mary Douglas (1921–2007) was raised a Roman Catholic and was a practising Catholic throughout her entire life. She did her doctoral work at the Univerisity of Oxford with fieldwork among the Lele in the Congo. As a leading anthropologist, Douglas sought to present her church in a more favourable light, especially by using grid-group analysis (later known as cultural theory) to reveal the validity and virtues of hierarchy. Her classic study, Purity and Danger, included an influential treatment of the food taboos in Leviticus. This early interest in the Hebrew scriptures flowered later in her career as she became increasing committed to biblical studies. While acknowledging herself to be an intellectual disciple of Durkheim, Douglas expounded the doctrine of the Incarnation as a way of refuting the assumption that Durkheim’s insights undercut the veracity of the Christian faith.Less

Mixed Menus: the Confusion of Food in Judges

Nathan MacDonald

in Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament

The use of food in the book of Judges is considered by utilizing Mary Douglas's theories of matter out of place. According to Douglas the Israelite dietary laws catalogued animals according to their ... More

The use of food in the book of Judges is considered by utilizing Mary Douglas's theories of matter out of place. According to Douglas the Israelite dietary laws catalogued animals according to their domains. Clean animals had certain characteristics appropriate to those domains. Animals lacking those characteristics are out of place and deemed unclean. In Deuteronomistic ideology sacrifice, food, warfare, and sexual intercourse occupy separate domains that should not be confused. The book of Joshua is exemplary in maintaining the boundaries between these domains. In Judges, however, these boundaries are frequently transgressed, particularly exhibited through the puns and macabre humour in the book. In this way the book conveys the dissolution of Israelite society prior to the establishment of the monarchy.Less

Satan Transformed: Comparative Religion

Dominic Janes

in Victorian Reformation: The Fight Over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840-1860

Chapter four focuses upon the significance of comparative religion on the readings of Catholicism in early 19th-century England. Intense contact with Hinduism in India, combined with classical ... More

Chapter four focuses upon the significance of comparative religion on the readings of Catholicism in early 19th-century England. Intense contact with Hinduism in India, combined with classical scholarship on paganism had led to notions of the interconnectedness of systems of worship. The basis of primitive religion was understood to lie in the fetishistic worship of base substances and objects combined with an obsession with fertility. This led to interpretations of the supposed ‘primitiveness’ of Catholicism as evidence of its sexual focus. Or, to put it another way, contemporary Catholicism, including that espoused by ritualists, was sexualised by critics. The pollution that this was understood to represent is then, in the chapter, considered in the light of anthropological understandings of taboo and danger. In this analysis the material culture of ritualism was, to use Mary Douglas’ phrase, matter out of place. Therefore, the search was on for ways in which to make use of this conceptual dirt.Less

Exploring Uncertainty

Esther Eidinow

in Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks

This chapter explores the history of the idea of risk and different ways of theorising this concept. It argues that the theory that ‘risks’ are socially constructed (an approach developed by the ... More

This chapter explores the history of the idea of risk and different ways of theorising this concept. It argues that the theory that ‘risks’ are socially constructed (an approach developed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas) can help modern scholars to understand the role played by oracles and curses in ancient Greek culture. The social construction of risks holds that different communities will select some dangers from others for particular attention as ‘risks’. These selections are connected to a community's worldview and its values and beliefs; in particular, conceptions of blame, accountability and responsibility.Less

A Feeling for Hierarchy

Mary Douglas

in Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals

This chapter discusses the influence of Mary Douglas' religious faith on her work and examines the role of hierarchy in her life. It describes hierarchy as the encompassing principle of order which ... More

This chapter discusses the influence of Mary Douglas' religious faith on her work and examines the role of hierarchy in her life. It describes hierarchy as the encompassing principle of order which systematizes any field of work, whether a library, a game, an alphabet, mathematics, and systematics of all kinds. It argues that hierarchy restricts competition and institutes authority. It is a positional system in which everyone has a place, every place has a prescribed trajectory of roles through time, in total the pattern of positions is coherent and the roles are coordinated. Born in 1921, Douglas first experienced hierarchy in a very modest form in her grandparents' home, and then in her convent schooling. She recognized hierarchy as a control on competition in the structure of checks and balances. Hierarchy is a pivotal issue for her understanding of social theory.Less

Who's Who on the Playing Field

in Culture and Management in the Americas

This chapter examines the collective attitudes that shape national character factors and the factors underlying cross-cultural management, focusing on the works of Shalom Schwartz, Geert Hofstede, ... More

This chapter examines the collective attitudes that shape national character factors and the factors underlying cross-cultural management, focusing on the works of Shalom Schwartz, Geert Hofstede, Mary Douglas, and Fons Trompenaars. It discusses Schwartz's list of seven values categories: harmony, egalitarianism, intellectual autonomy, affective autonomy, mastery, hierarchy, and conservatism (which he later termed embeddedness). It then looks at Hofstede's surveys aimed at eliciting personal values regarding work environments. Hofstede came up with five dimensions of culture: power distance, individualism and collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. In her 1978 work, Cultural Bias, Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, argued that people in most societies resort to four states of mind in order to comprehend the natural, the social, and the supernatural worlds: individualism, hierarchy, fatalism, and egalitarianism. She offered two dimensions rendering four cultural biases: the issue of belonging and the issue of rules of behavior. Trompenaars, for his part, claimed that each culture seeks to solve three basic dilemmas: relationships with others, the handling of time, and relationship with the environment.Less

Dead Bodies

Susan Zimmerman

in The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre

This chapter first explores the anthropological and psychoanalytical theories of the corpse, before considering early modern concepts of its signification. It also addresses the early modern ... More

This chapter first explores the anthropological and psychoanalytical theories of the corpse, before considering early modern concepts of its signification. It also addresses the early modern theatrical conventions in the context of Walter Benjamin's theory of the Trauerspiel. The psychoanalytical analysis of Julia Kristeva and the anthropological findings of Georges Bataille and Mary Douglas provide a compelling rationale for the identification of death with marginality, and of both with the female. The female body exerts a powerfully ambiguous attraction for the subject in which life-affirming desire is deeply inscribed with the unbecoming of death. For Benjamin, the Trauerspiel is a drama of sorrow or mourning (trauer), considered as both stage performance and game (spiel). The mystery at the core of the Trauerspiel is that of the corpse, primary signifier of the life implicit in disintegration. Lastly, an overview of the chapters included in this book is provided.Less

Conclusion: A Dirty Word

in The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

Regulation of error's ambiguity is tied to narratives of risk and promise, including a reliable history of language and thought, a coherent model of subject-formation, and a rigorous critical ... More

Regulation of error's ambiguity is tied to narratives of risk and promise, including a reliable history of language and thought, a coherent model of subject-formation, and a rigorous critical philosophy. The impure rhyme that seals the fate of both Penthesilea and Achilles in Heinrich von Kleist's tragedy implies a complex interaction between dirt, error, and the production of meaning. Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger, with its analysis of pollution and taboo, offers a structuralist answer to a paradox about uncleanliness: objects that are considered “dirty” or “unclean” by a culture are sometimes revered in the holiest of rituals. This chapter examines the neutralization of dirt and its conversion into symbolic power in Purity and Danger. It also explores how an indelible dirtiness persists in the texts of Herodotus and Kleist, and argues that a similar anxiety about hygiene and waste disposal occurs in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.Less

Introduction: Inner Purity and Pollution in Early Greek Religion

Andrej Petrovic and Ivana Petrovic

in Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion: Volume I: Early Greek Religion

After an outline of the gradual disintegration of the concept of ‘belief’ in the twentieth century, the Introduction sketches the renaissance of the interest in internal investment of a Greek ... More

After an outline of the gradual disintegration of the concept of ‘belief’ in the twentieth century, the Introduction sketches the renaissance of the interest in internal investment of a Greek worshipper, and provides a rationale for the Greek conceptualization of inner purity as incorporating many of the features that the modern term ‘belief’ does. It introduces the object of the inquiry and defines its scope, and proceeds to summarize the most influential theoretical articulations concerning ‘doctrines of purity’. The combination of Douglas’ and Valeri’s views is given as the methodological justification for the analysis of individual ancient discourses as subsystems. Following a historical overview and a critical discussion of scholarship, it addresses the taxonomy of Greek pollution beliefs and focuses on the distinction between physical and metaphysical pollution. It then turns to definition and articulations of inner purity, providing an overview of the key features of inner purity in the pre-Platonic sources.Less

Puripetal force in the charitable field

Jonathan Benthall

in Islamic Charities and Islamic Humanism in Troubled Times

This Chapter, published by Depends on timing. the journal Asian Ethnology, is a theoretical exercise, inspired by Mary Douglas’s classic anthropological text Purity and Danger, that sets out to ... More

This Chapter, published by Depends on timing. the journal Asian Ethnology, is a theoretical exercise, inspired by Mary Douglas’s classic anthropological text Purity and Danger, that sets out to clarify the wide range of relationships between religions and humanitarian traditions as ideological movements, taking Islam as an instance. It postulates that the concept of the “sacred” is a special case of boundary maintenance or “purism”. Metaphorically, “puripetal force” (a neologism) is defined as a tendency common to all ideological systems, a resistance to social entropy or anomie. An explanatory model is proposed that accommodates forms of concentrated purism such as (within Islam) Wahhabi-Salafism and (within humanitarianism) the legacy of Henry Dunant, founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Specific Islamic charities and welfare organizations interact differentially with both religious and humanitarian traditions. Meanwhile, US government policy towards charities sometimes seems dominated by an urge to peer into purity of motives. Finally, it is suggested that the model could equally be applied to Christian and other religious traditions, with the concluding thought that the common ground between the institutions of international humanitarianism and religious traditions is currently expanding.Less

Writing about Writers

Michael Jackson

in The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing

You have seen these scenes before—in photographs and in paintings.You have read of them in books by Thomas Mann, Henry James, and Joseph Brodsky.They are, in this sense, familiar.Yet nothing has ... More

You have seen these scenes before—in photographs and in paintings.You have read of them in books by Thomas Mann, Henry James, and Joseph Brodsky.They are, in this sense, familiar.Yet nothing has prepared you for the effect of seeing them yourself, experiencing them on your own skin, through your own senses: the pastel light smeared with pink where the sun is waning in the west, the campaniles and cupolas fading into the atmosphere as stone dissolves in deep water.Less

The Emergence of Persons Great and Small

Matthew Croasmun

in The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans

This chapter turns specifically to the question of personhood, offering an emergent ontology of human persons at both the biological and psychological levels. These “individuals” prove to be ... More

This chapter turns specifically to the question of personhood, offering an emergent ontology of human persons at both the biological and psychological levels. These “individuals” prove to be internally composite and externally open to further combination. The discussion then moves to consider these “external” combinations. In somatic terms, this involves discussion of biology’s history of determining the biological “individual,” and the discussion of “superorganisms” that blur the distinction between parts and wholes. Various theories of “group mind” are evaluated in order to consider the relevance of the presence of group cognition in identifying the emergence of “persons” at higher levels of complexity. The hypothesis is presented that Sin should be understood as a mythological person—a superorganism with a group mind—supervening on the transgressions of individual human persons and sinful social systems.Less

Introduction

Sidney Mintz

in Jews and Their Foodways

This introductory chapter describes the Jewish custom of eating. According to food anthropologist Mary Douglas, ancient Hebrews employed food taboos to create effective distinctions between who was ... More

This introductory chapter describes the Jewish custom of eating. According to food anthropologist Mary Douglas, ancient Hebrews employed food taboos to create effective distinctions between who was and who was not a member of the tribe; hence, non-Jews had to agree to Jewish definitions of ritually acceptable food to eat with them. However, in the course of time, some Jews who were displaced to other countries were obliged to change their food habits in response to the different food in these countries. They were also forced to make a living that might mean frequent interaction with non-Jews. This book addresses Jewish social circumstances of cooking and eating as well as ethnic identities of the Jews, whether in Israel or in contemporary Jewish communities elsewhere.Less

Theorizing the Taboo

Max D. Price

in Evolution of a Taboo: Pigs and People in the Ancient Near East

Taboos are types of avoidance behavior surrounded by a high degree of social energy and sewn into the cultural fabric through their appeal to a cosmological moral order. Taboos exist on the cultural ... More

Taboos are types of avoidance behavior surrounded by a high degree of social energy and sewn into the cultural fabric through their appeal to a cosmological moral order. Taboos exist on the cultural level, but often, as in the case of the pig taboo, are reproduced through the emotion of disgust. Many have sought to explain the origins of the pig taboo. While their theories hold some kernel of wisdom about the pig taboo in Judaism and Islam, they are ultimately unsatisfactory because they fail to account for its evolution. A theory of the taboo must account for the conditions that prepare the ground for it to develop, its early history, and its evolution over the long term.Less

Heroic Bodies in Judges

Brian R. Doak

in Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

Chapter 3 reads the images of heroic bodies in the book of Judges on a number of levels, organized around an argument by the anthropologist Mary Douglas: “the social body constrains the way the ... More

Chapter 3 reads the images of heroic bodies in the book of Judges on a number of levels, organized around an argument by the anthropologist Mary Douglas: “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived.” The two bodies cannot help but be connected, and the “forms it adopts in movement and repose express social pressures in manifold ways.” The ambiguous and severed bodies in Judges serve not merely as entertainment but rather as communicators of social disorder and political strife. Specific analysis focuses on the mutilation of Adoni-Bezek, the bodily confrontation between Ehud and Eglon, Jael’s killing of Sisera, Samson’s hair, and the dismemberment of an unnamed woman.Less

Introducing Purity Discourses

Moshe Blidstein

in Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature

This chapter sets out the aims of the book: to understand what Christians meant when they talked about purity, purification, and defilement, whether of body or of soul. It indicates the theoretical ... More

This chapter sets out the aims of the book: to understand what Christians meant when they talked about purity, purification, and defilement, whether of body or of soul. It indicates the theoretical underpinnings of the book in anthropological and psychological studies, from structural-symbolic theories such as that of Mary Douglas to contemporary theories on disgust and emotion. It comments on the distinctions, and connections, between purity discourses and purity rituals, and suggests paradigms of “battle” and “truce” as an alternative to “moral” and “ritual” purity. Finally, it outlines the chapters of the book and its main arguments.Less

“A Little Smackerel of Something”: Food and the Künstlerroman in the Winnie-the-Pooh Books

Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

in Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature

The narratives of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner serve collectively as a Künstlerroman—a narrative about an artist’s growth—and Pooh’s development as poet is structured ... More

The narratives of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner serve collectively as a Künstlerroman—a narrative about an artist’s growth—and Pooh’s development as poet is structured around three nodes: food, sociability, and creativity. Pooh’s obsession with food, especially honey, is not mere oral greed: his desire for food in company is frequently linked to his practice and performance of poetry. Using anthropologist Mary Douglas’s analysis of meal structure, which encodes social relationships and creates social boundaries through food meanings within individual meals, this chapter examines how the metonymic triad of food, social connections, and creativity structure the social relations among the animals. Meals and food provide the occasions for this triad to operate: both formal meals (the banquet in Winnie-the-Pooh) and lighter meals (such as “elevenses” and teas). The meals and food provide occasions within the pastoral setting of the Hundred Acre Woods for Pooh to develop his poetic art, from spontaneous hums to his heroic epic about Piglet.Less