Chapter 2 of Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger", titled "Secular Defilement" opens with a review of
researchers', doctors and religious thinkers to account for "primitive"
rituals and religious practices in terms of medical materialism, that is, as
being a way of preserving public health. Douglas accepts the approach of
medical materialism as long as it does not rule out other explanations, and she
expands this notion to a general fear of all people of all cultures from
violating ritualistic principles and the punish this might bring.
Douglas negated the distinction between "primitive" rituals
and modern hygiene codes. She argues that symbolic system of defilement can be
rather similar and the only difference is the way in which it is manifested in
different cultures.
When reexamining the hygiene and defilement concepts of modern secular
culture Douglas argues that what separates "primitive" defilement
from secular defilement is that the secular avoids filth as a result of his
knowledge in bacteriology and pathogens. However, Douglas holds that these principles
still follow a perception of defilement as something which is not in its right
place".
Douglas argues that there is an analogy between the concept of
defilement and social order. What culture ascribes as defilement, profanity or impurity
is something which is perceived as an anomaly and a break from the orderly boundaries
of social and cultural order.
Douglas understands defilement as something which is culturally dependant
and thus she rules out previous takes on the matter from a cultural evolution
and hierarchy standpoint. A critique of Mary Douglas's notion of secular
defilement might claim that her approach is too conservative, rigid and structuralist. Douglas's approach might be considered conservative in light of
her relating to the social order as a self-evident and natural phenomenon as
not as the result of social power relations that use the detentions of pure and
impure, clean and unclean, to establish social hierarchies. Her rigid distinction
between purity and defilement also does not allow for in-the-middle hybrid or liminal
states. Another problem with Douglas's ideas in "Secular Defilement"
is that she perceives culture as static and unchanging, and her theory isn't
very productive when discussing social changes over time.
