11. Symbols & Categories--Douglas

Welcome to Section 11 of Symbols & Society. 

I have to confess, when I was about 14 years old a bloke grabbed a big cockroach and chased me with it. I have to confess I shrieked! I had a pet mouse which I used to hold when I was a boy. But when I was older and living in my student hovel, a mouse ran across the floor near my feet. I jumped up and almost hopped up on a sofa. The same insect in one culture makes people scream in disgust; in another culture it's dinner. A mouse that is caged was fine for me; a mouse that is free to run inside and out made me squeam. Pork is a delicacy in many cultures, but in others it is filthy. Why?

Mary Douglas's "Abominations of Leviticus" argues that filth is culturally specific. Different cultures create unique symbolic orders. These symbolic orders divide up the world into different categories. No symbolic order is perfect; certain objects or things transgress or defy these orders. Such objects are liable to be thought of as disgusting and filthy. Before you get going, you might want to know a little about ruminants and their rumination.

Inside your hotel bathroom you find mold and a little plant sprouting.
Do you find this clean or filthy?

Ruminants = cows etc.

Ruminants include cows, goats, sheep, giraffes, & camels. I think of them as animals which chew on grass, vomit it up and eat it again.  They also produce milk.

Ruminants have 4 stomach compartments

What distinguishes ruminants is their 4 stomach compartments. The first of these 4 compartments is called the "rumen". This word can help you remember "ruminant"

Rumination

Ruminants chew some grass, swallow it, vomit (regurgitate) it, and then swallow it into another stomach. This process is called "rumination" or "chewing the cud". And now behold! The magnificence and excitement that is rumination:

I know you could probably watch that all day, but, once you have regained your composure, it's time to move on to another fascinating aspect of biology. My feet have a heel, arch, and toes. My cat has paws. A cow, by contrast, has a hoof (foot) which looks like it's made of two bits:

You can call this a "cloven hoof". Confident of this you are ready to move on and read Douglas.

Abominations of Leviticus

"The Abominations of Leviticus" is a famous chapter from Douglas's book; Purity and Danger.

After reading the chapter, please take a look at my presentation:

Please feel free to use my notes on this presentation.

Critical thinking

How can we situate Douglas's theory? Anthropologists sometimes call Douglas's approach in "The Abominations of Leviticus" 'soft' structuralism. Why 'soft'.

In one sense she's a structuralist. She argues that filth only makes sense in relation to an entire system of symbols.

But she differs from Levi-Strauss's 'hard' structuralism in that she doesn't make hard-and-fast binaries and strict rules that apply to all cultures. She also describes meanings with more nuance and attention to how local people understand symbols; this makes her closer to the interpretive style of symbolic anthropology.

Further study: The Abject and Filth

Kristeva's idea of the abject (something lying outside the symbolic order) can be usefully combined to Douglas's idea of filth.

Summary 

According to Douglas, our systems of ordering or classifying the world seem natural to us. In other cultures, different systems of ordering or classifying the world seem natural to them. This indicates that that the systems of ordering imposed upon the world. And they are imposed differently in different cultures. This has a morose implication; we can never access reality directly, only via culturally specific ways of ordering the world. Evidence of this emerges in the gaps. In all these different cultural systems, there are gaps or left-overs in-between categories. From these gaps, disgusting (and powerful) things emerge! The Section 11 take-home message? What doesn't fit into a culture's symbolic system counts as filth.