Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger" offers a structuralist take
on how cleanness and uncleanness serve as symbolic functions to maintain
society's boundaries. The argument, following Emile Durkheim's notions about the
relation between clean and unclean, is (very briefly) as follows: being
"unclean" is being out of place. The notion of profanity or
defilement is in essence the notion of transgressing social boundaries (this
can be seen, for example, in how taboos relate to impurity). The culturally and historically dependant dichotomy
between pure and impure, clean and unclean, is to a great extent a means of
reinforcing norms, norms being themselves agents of establishing social
structures and hierarchies.
If we take Douglas's (revised in 2002) discussion on Jewish Kosher rules
as an example, we can hypothesize a social situation in which pig is the
cheapest meat customarily consumed by lower and poorer classes. The ruling
classes, aiming at reinforcing their privileged social position, maintain pig
to be profane, thus fashioning their abstention from pig into an instrument of increasing
their symbolic fortune. In other words, the pig refraining ruling classes set
society's structure and boundaries, defined by the distinction between pure and
impure, to fit their own Habitus and make it central to society while others are
marginalized.
In "Purity and Danger" Douglas argued that secular defilement
is not that much different from "primitive" ritualistic practices relating
to cleaning or "purifying". The social function of defilement can
also be seen in modern secular societies. Take for example the ongoing delegitimizing
of smoking or junk-food. Obesity is a health hazard, not a personal one but
rather a social one, for obesity is associated with being poor. Being poor also
makes you unaware and uniformed and the combination of both leads the way to McDonald's
or KFC. The upper classes, on the other hand, make sure to eat healthy and refrain
from junk food (like the Jews and Muslims do with pig). Thus a new
mini-religion is founded on the constructs of social hierarchy, the religion of
"healthiness" that decrees a set of codes and regulations about what
you can and cannot eat. These new boundaries between deep-fried bad and organic
good reinforce the existing social structure and hierarchy.
See also: Mary Douglas - Ritual Uncleanness
