Mary Douglas (1921 to 2007) was a British social anthropologist whose book Purity and Danger (1966) showed that ideas of dirt, pollution and taboo are not leftovers of ‘primitive’ superstition but the way every culture protects its picture of how the world is ordered. Dirt, in the old phrase she made famous, is “matter out of place”, and whatever does not fit a culture’s categories feels dangerous, so it is avoided, forbidden or set apart as sacred. Therapeutic Shamanism finds this a useful way of seeing how a culture holds its stories in place, and why seeing through them can be so unsettling.
Who was Mary Douglas? #
Among the most influential social anthropologists of the twentieth century. She was born Margaret Mary Tew in Sanremo, Italy, in 1921, was brought up a Roman Catholic, and studied at St Anne’s College, Oxford. After working in the British Colonial Office she turned to anthropology, and trained at Oxford under the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard.
In 1949 she began fieldwork among the Lele of the Kasai, in what was then the Belgian Congo, a farming people who cultivated by hand in the forest and also hunted. Writing up the Lele and, in her words, “their fastidious food rules” took her the best part of ten years, and The Lele of the Kasai appeared in 1963.1 She spent about twenty-five years at University College London, where she became Professor of Social Anthropology and is credited with establishing anthropology as a discipline at UCL, followed by eleven years in the United States. Her other books include Natural Symbols (1970), The World of Goods (1979, with Baron Isherwood), Risk and Culture (1982, with Aaron Wildavsky) and Leviticus as Literature (1999). She was made a Dame in the New Year Honours of 2007 and died in London in May that year.2
What did Purity and Danger show? #
That our ideas of dirt and other peoples’ ideas of pollution are the same kind of thing. Victorian scholars had treated taboos as the irrational fears of ‘primitive’ minds, and modern people tend to think their own dirt-avoidance is simply about germs. Douglas set both aside. Take away hygiene and we are left with “the old definition of dirt as matter out of place”, which needs two things, an ordered set of relations and something that breaks that order. “Where there is dirt there is system.” Shoes, she pointed out, “are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table”.3
So pollution rules are a way of keeping a world in order. Taboo, she wrote, “protects the local consensus on how the world is organised”, and “Ambiguous things can seem very threatening.”4 Whatever blurs a culture’s categories, belonging to two classes at once or to none, is felt as dangerous, and the culture has a handful of ways of dealing with it: settling on one reading, getting rid of it, avoiding it, labelling it dangerous, or using it in ritual and poetry to make meaning richer.5 Our pollution behaviour, as she put it, condemns “any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.”6
She also showed that this works in every culture, her own included. The book’s larger aim was to dissolve the old divide between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ thinking. All human beings classify, and all cultures guard, and are unsettled by, whatever escapes their classes.
Why are thresholds and in-between states dangerous? #
Because they belong to no category. “Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable.” People passing from one state to another, such as an unborn child or a young person being initiated, are treated as both in danger and dangerous, and the rituals around them separate them from their old state, hold them apart for a time, and then bring them back in.7
This is the same in-between stage the folklorist Arnold van Gennep had described in rites of passage. The anthropologist Victor Turner, whom Douglas thanks in the book for his comments on her chapters, took up her point that “the unclear is the unclean” in his essay on the in-between, or liminal, period, and built from it his picture of the person who is ‘betwixt and between’.8 See Who was Victor Turner, and what are liminality and communitas? and Who was Arnold van Gennep, and what are the three stages of a rite of passage?
Can what does not fit also be powerful? #
Yes. Among the Lele, the pangolin, a scaly animal that climbs trees, suckles its young and bears them one at a time, fits none of their animal categories. Instead of being shunned, it was honoured in a cult, whose initiates ate it in a solemn ceremony and were then able to bring fertility to their people.9
Douglas saw such rites as inviting people to turn round and face the categories their whole culture is built on, and to see them for “the fictive, man-made, arbitrary creations that they are.” She compared the pangolin’s part to the mediators described in the historian of religion Mircea Eliade’s account of shamanism.10 See Who was Mircea Eliade, and what do critics say is wrong with his idea of shamanism?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, though Douglas never wrote about Therapeutic Shamanism. Every culture is held together by its stories. “They make up the norms, mores, folkways and taboos that create social cohesion and allow societies to operate successfully; they are the glue that holds societies together.”11 Douglas shows how that glue works at the level of ordinary life, in what goes where, what may touch what, and what feels clean or dirty, long before anyone argues about beliefs.
That matters for deprogrammingDeprogramming. The active work of shaking off Taker-culture conditioning; the companion of rewilding. More about this, the work of seeing which of the stories we were raised in are ‘wonky’. Many of a culture’s purity rules feel like plain common sense to the people inside it, and Douglas’s work shows how arbitrary and how changeable they can be. It also shows how purity can be used to hold power in place. When the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this arose with the city-states, they taught that “up is good, and down is bad”, that spirit is good and matter corrupt, and “that men are good and that women are dirty, unclean, inferior and not to be trusted”.12 Douglas’s own caste and gender examples show the same kind of purity rule being used to enforce rank. See What is deprogramming? and How has spirituality been used to justify domination?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In two ways. First, almost all of Douglas’s examples come from settled farming and herding peoples, and from the priestly law of ancient Israel: Hindu caste, the cattle-herding Nuer and Dinka of the Sudan, who also grew crops, and the Lele and Bemba farmers. Therapeutic Shamanism draws a clear line between hunter-gatherer cultures and agricultural ones, so her material says a lot about how farming and city cultures guard their categories, and much less about how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived.
Second, Douglas wrote as a social anthropologist, building on the work of the sociologist Émile Durkheim, and looked above all at what beliefs about spirits, pollution and danger do for a society’s order. Therapeutic Shamanism takes relationships with the other-than-human world, the Animal, Plant and Stone People and the spirits, as real relationships in their own right, not only as reflections of how a society is organised. Hunter-gatherer cultures took what they needed and left the rest, leaving “a share for the other creatures”, a respect that is about kinship, not classification.13 See What is animism?
Was she right about the forbidden animals of Leviticus? #
She came to think she was not. Her third chapter explained the Bible’s forbidden foods, such as the pig and the camel, as animals that did not fit their class, and it drew more attention, and more criticism, than anything else in the book, much of it on whether her theory could really explain the pig.
In a new preface written nearly forty years later, Douglas accepted the criticism. “I was way out of my depth when I wrote Chapter 3 of this book”. After years of studying the priestly books of the Bible, she now read the rules not as a horror of anomalous creatures but as part of a covenant in which God cares for the animals, and suggested, of the creatures Leviticus calls ‘abominable’, that “it is abominable to harm them.”14 She kept the central point that classifying is a human universal, whilst admitting that the book had been unclear and that readers had wrongly taken her to say that ambiguity always provokes strong discomfort.
