Building Religions 14: Mary Douglas

In my last post, I wrote something that wasn't entirely true, namely that a society's categories are "arbitrary." That was not only inaccurate, but it gives the impression that people create systems without putting any thought into them, and that they only adhere to them out of some irrational attachment to tradition. It also does a disservice to the scholars who've put a great deal of work into explaining the internal logic of these systems. Consider this post to be an extended mea culpa.



Mary Douglas' book, Purity and Danger, is probably the best example out of the works of classic authors in religious studies to show what I mean. She has a section in that book about the Levitical dietary laws in which she argues that they shouldn't be interpreted as strictly hygienic, nor as inscrutable divine commands. Instead, they're about how to deal with categories: they start with basic ideas of what animals of different types should be, then compare existing animals with those ideas in order to split them up into clean and unclean categories. For land animals, the division is based on the characteristics of the animals that people already herded and ate: they walked, had split hooves, and chewed their cud. Animals that fit some, but not all, of those characteristics (rabbits, pigs, and my favourite, rock badgers) are the ones that are specifically named as unclean because their status would otherwise be ambiguous. The enemy here isn't any particular class of creature; it's ambiguity. Human beings don't deal well with things that don't fit their categories.

However a culture draws its boundaries and organizes its categories of thought, religion can act to police them. The lines don't have to be explicit, either. There can be a host of rules to deal with ambiguous categories, borderline cases of definition, without ever actually stating what the underlying assumptions are that gave rise to them. Douglas, for example, makes the case that other laws from Leviticus associate sanctity with wholeness, which explains the laws against people with physical defects offering sacrifices (Lev. 21:17-21), interbreeding animals, mixing crops in a field, or wearing clothes made from different fabrics (Lev. 19:19). The rationale behind some of these laws may remain obscure over time, while others -- gender roles and rules for sexual conduct, for example -- can be so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that they're assumed to be matters of simple morality.

That's the lecture part done with. Now comes the part where we figure out how to put ideas to work.

The first step is to think about where your culture draws its external boundaries. What's inside and what's outside? How do they distinguish the two, and how important is it to keep them separated? For cultures that are struggling to assert their own identity, boundaries can be vital to survival, so that's where you're more likely to find elaborate rules governing the interaction between insiders and outsiders. Do they do it spatially, marking off certain areas as theirs and forbidding anyone else from entering? Do they treat their bodies as territory, and dress differently or decorate themselves in specific ways? Do they protect their own language and customs, and ensure that no one else can learn them?

The second step is to consider internal boundaries. If there's a social hierarchy in place, how rigid is it, and what happens when someone steps outside of his or her proper place? How much room for variation is there within a single class in that hierarchy? Is individualism prized, tolerated, or looked down upon?

Finally, what happens to the marginal cases? Douglas suggests a few common strategies that you can adopt. One is to force something with an ambiguous status into one category or another, and purposefully ignore all of the traits that don't match its new status. Another is to declare it an abomination and either expel it completely from society or destroy it. Doing any of these things, she argues, reduces individual anxiety that arises from the clash of categories. Even if you just treat marginal phenomena as "dangerous," that class of dangerous things is at least one that's socially recognized and keeps you from having to think too much further about them.

While things that exist at the margins can be dangerous, they can also be granted a kind of power. Because they aren't part of either of the socially recognized worlds (insider or outsider), they're thought of as straddling other realms as well: the natural and supernatural. For locations and materials, this translates into sources of ritual power. For individuals, it becomes a reputation for magic, especially anti-social magic. If you're creating a world where magic is a real force (or believed to be one), it can easily be connected to the same marginal phenomena that your culture is struggling to control.

I'll expand on this idea more next week. It seems like a good place to introduce a discussion of monstrosity as well, and how a culture finds its own monsters.