Binary Oppositions in Anthropology - summary

De Saussure's linguistic theory led Claude Levi-Strauss , an anthropologist-structuralist who worked during the 20th century, to identify the way in which culture functions similarly to language, and following Roman Jacobson saw the human brain as organized in the form of binary pairs of opposites. Levi-Strauss marked a series of such basic contrasts in which any culture can be understood in terms. Levi-Strauss, who studied the myths of different peoples, argued in his structural anthropology that the myth obeys binary laws of action and through them described a series of dichotomies, one of the main ones being the dichotomy between nature and culture. He saw the myth as a logical model designed to reconcile and deal with contradictions concerning fundamental questions of human existence, with the compromise between the two poles being achieved by an intermediary helping to deal with the threatening middle ground.

Victor Turner, a British anthropologist , studied the nature of rites of passage in different societies and argued for the existence of two types of social structures. The first is a state of the 'status system' which is the stable state of social order, and in contrast the liminal state in which the rites of passage are carried out - the 'communites'. The differences between the characteristics of these two situations are described by Turner through a series of binary oppositions, such as a stable structure versus characteristics of transition and movement, equality-inequality, lack of property-ownership, sacred-secular and more. Social life, both of individuals and of groups, moves between these two situations - two polarizing and inseparable poles. (see Turner on Liminality)

 

Mary Douglas, a British anthropologist and sociologist, is following Levy-Strauss in trying to understand the world under study through sorting and categorization. Douglas researched the laws of purity and impurity in primitive religions, and saw them as symbols that defined the boundaries of society. It linked the pure-unclean opposition to other basic social relationships, such as the relationship between order and disorder, existence-non-existence, form-lack of form, life and death.

see also;

Meaning of Binary Oppositions explained

Binary oppositions in linguistics

Binary Oppositions, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas – extended summary

Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo is a classic book by British anthropologist Mary Douglas, and is considered one of the most important works in anthropological literature in the 20th century.

For a short version see Purity and Danger - short summary

"Purity and Danger" deals with impurity and dirt from an anthropological point of view and includes an analysis of rituals, religiosity and lifestyles that challenge, according to Douglas, Western perceptions of pollution, while trying to show how these perceptions are understood from a cultural and historical context. At the heart of the book is Douglas' question: Why do cultures attach certain importance to certain things, while other things are considered so polluted that they are taboo? In an attempt to answer this question, Douglas traces the laws of impurity and purity of Zaire tribes while comparing them to Jewish laws of kashrut in the Book of Leviticus. Douglas' main argument in the book is that what counts as dirt in a given society is everything that is considered out of place (food is not dirty by nature, but food stains on clothes are considered dirt; dirt is not dirty unless it enters the house and so on.

One of the main ideas of “Purity and Danger” is " Secular Defilement", according to which modern hygiene practices are not structurally different from the "primitive" ones. In "Purity and Danger" Mary Douglas first proposed the idea that the kosher laws of the Jews were not primitive health regulations as is commonly thought or arbitrary rules expressing the Jews' commitment to God. Instead, Douglas argued that kosher rules reinforce symbolic boundaries of Jewish culture. Kashruth laws are in fact part of the system of diagnoses and symbols that Jewish society has created to distinguish between the underlying categories, such as purity-impurity, good-evil; The exceptions are the unclean. Prohibited foods according to Halacha (Jewish law) were those that did not fit into any defined category. For example, the place of pigs in the natural order is not unequivocal because they are hoofed but not live, so they "break" the sorting criterion. Douglas therefore concludes that impurity is an expression of anomaly and disorder, and one of the ways to deal with unusual phenomena that cause a person noticeable discomfort is through the removal of the anomalous object and its definition as unclean.

 

Douglas tries to clarify the differences between holy, unclean and defiled in different cultures and times in the world. To understand impurity she takes a structuralist approach, following in the footsteps of Emil Durkheim and Claude Levy-Strauss who have explored culture as a system that reflects the universal nature of human thinking. Douglas states that impurity is the result of transgressing the boundaries of order, going beyond the boundaries of sociocultural organization. Another distinction found in “Purity and Danger” is the connection between the personal dimension and the public-political dimension. According to her, rituals that express anxiety about the body's perforations - blood, pus, semen, etc. - stem from the desire to protect the political and social unity of a minority group. According to her, the Jews' concern for the integrity of the physical body reflects the threat they felt to their bodies.

 

According to Douglas, modern perception is not pollution-oriented (at most pollution is perceived as a matter of aesthetics, hygiene or ethics and the only problem it can create is discomfort). In contrast to tribal perceptions among tribes where there is no “differentiation” and everything is one percent in another, the infection is perceived as a sin.

Here you can find summaries of the first two chapters of Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger:

Chapter 1: Ritual Uncleanness

chapter 2: Secular Defilement 

"Purity and Danger" was inspired by the work of Emile Durkheim such as Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the Sacred and the Profane or "The Genesis of the Notion of the Totemic Principle or Mana" and was itself inspiration for works such as "Powers of Horror" by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. 

Great short summary of Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo" explores the cultural notion of dirt and its symbolic meanings. She follows Emile Durkheim in defining dirt as that which is out of its place (ketchup in fine in the bottle or on the plate, but not on my shirt). What Douglas does is to tie this distinction to the distinction between the scared and the profane (a long held interest of structuralist anthropology). Uncleanliness, she holds, is a cultural matter determined by actual and  symbolic power structures. 

"Purity and Danger" is an inquiry into different notions of dirt in different cultures, demonstrating the contingent and socially determined nature of what's clean and what's not. For example, Douglas studies the Jewish Kosher laws, arguing that they separate the easy categorized and thus understood from the threatening undetermined (Douglas later retracted this understanding of Jewish laws, see Douglas's "Purity and Danger" and Power Structures).

 

Douglas further argues (especially in chapter 2 of the book) is that, unlike previous notions in anthropology, the distinction between the scared and the profane did not disappear in modern times but rather manifested itself in other 'secular' terms of clean and unclean and our perception of what constitutes contamination. Douglas also holds that these notions bear an analogous form of the specific social order of a group. What makes for "dirt" is that which is considered anomalous and transgressive of normal bounds. This makes the symbolyic meanings of contamination socially dependant and thus relative.  

Here you can find summaries of the first two chapters of Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger:

Chapter 1: Ritual Uncleanness

chapter 2: Secular Defilement 

"Purity and Danger" was inspired by the work of Emile Durkheim such as Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the Sacred and the Profane or "The Genesis of the Notion of the Totemic Principle or Mana" and was itself inspiration for works such as "Powers of Horror" by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. 

This was a short summary of Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas. see here for and extended summary. 

Suggested reading:

Douglas's "Purity and Danger" and Power Structures

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

Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas: extended summary

Suggested reading:

  

Mary Douglas – secular defilement –summary and review

 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.  

see also: Mary Douglas -  Ritual Uncleanness

Purity and Danger

Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas: extended summary

Suggested reading:

  

Mary Douglas – Ritual Uncleanness –summary and review

In chapter 1 of her famous "Purity and Danger", titled "Ritual Uncleanness", structuralist anthropologist Mary Douglas bases her distinction between the clean and sacred and the unclean and unsacred, while refuting dominant attitudes in 19^th century British anthropology. Douglas argues with the "evolution of culture" paradigm represented by thinkers such as James Frazer and Robertson Smith.

Frazer defined three evolutionary stages in the human cultural development: magic, religion and science. This classification established a hierarchy of cultures based on their position in this evolutionary course. Primitive (or "savage") cultures, according to Frazer, are characterized by faith in magic while modern culture in one of science with religion positioned in the middle.      

According to Douglas, the evolution of culture approach is an example of how western anthropologists established a condescending approach towards other cultures, expressing their euro centrism and allowing for distinctions between cultures.

Like Douglas, Frazer, Smith, Emile Durkheim and other anthropologists established the relationship between sanctity and profanity as central element in religious life, but 19^th century thinkers saw it as the touchstone for differentiating primitive and advanced cultures. They argued that primitive religions did not separate sanctity from profanity while more advanced beliefs, like Christianity, did. Douglas mentions two characteristics of the primitive religion according to Frazer:  1. Primitive religion is instrumental and mechanical because it perceives rituals (magic) as supposed to bring about a predicted outcome and influence the course of events. The other feature of primitive religions according to Frazer is the lack of moral principles.  

Douglas heavily criticizes these notions and accuses Frazer of being condescending and theoretically invalid. For Douglas, even if religious and cultural features are different from one culture to another, the substantial manner in which people think is not that different. Douglas further argues that the differentiation between sanctity and profanity, cleanness and uncleanness, is exemplary of all cultures, including "primitive" ones. In addition, Douglas claims against Frazer that magic is not a lesser form of faith for like more "advanced" religions it is a symbolic action through which people organize their word-view, values and actions.

A heavy influence by Emile Durkheim can be found in Douglas's account of the relation between cleanness and uncleanness. Durkheim, in his discussion of the "Totemic Principle" saw religion as a symbolic manifestation of society itself. But while Durkheim differentiated magic from religion Mary Douglas sees magic as the same in the respect of is social ordering function.  

see also: Mary Douglas - Secular Defilement 

Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas: extended summary

Emile Durkheim - Elementary Forms of Religious Life

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