Classification and taboo

1
Classification and taboo

• 17.03.2005

2
Readings

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1939. Taboo. Cambridge
  Cambridge University Press (Reprinted in Lessa
  and Vogt)
• Douglas, M. 1999. Leviticus as Literature.
  Oxford Oxford University Press, pp. v-viii,
  134-151. (Reprinted as Land Animals, Pure and
  Impure in Lambek)

3
Taboo

• Originates in Tongan language
• Appears in many Polynesian cultures
• Tabu, tapu or kapu
• first recorded use in English James Cook (1771)
• Ambivalent
• Multiple meanings
• unclean
• contagious
• sacred
• separation from profane things (noa)
• Forbidden
• a strong social prohibition

4
Taboo

• Taboos as functional
• Eg. post-partum sex taboos (Harris)
• Taboos as containers of history
• May remain in effect after the original reason
  behind them has expired
• reveal the history of societies
• Taboos as culture- and era-specific
• incest taboo as an exception?

5
Anthropological studies of taboo

• Earlier studies
• Characteristics (Frazer, Durkheim, RB), origin
  (Freud)
• Later studies
• In assocation with symbolic classification
  (Douglas, Leach)
• Frazer
• No distinction between sacred and impure in
  primitive religion
• Durkheim (
• sacred covers both the holy and the unclean
• Radcliffe-Brown
• ritual value
• positively manifested - sacralization
• negatively manifested - ritual avoidance

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Freud

• Totem and Taboo (1913)
• a work that no ethnologist can afford to
  neglect (Kroeber)
• Criticised by many
• Subtitled Some Points of Agreement Between the
  Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics
• parallels between taboos and phobias, obsessions
• parallels between totemic beliefs and neurosis
• preliterate people think and behave as
  neurotics
• Civilization and Its Discontents and the Future
  of an Illusion, 1929
• religion universal obsessional neurosis of
  humanity

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Freud

• Totemism
• most primitive form of religion
• explainable through Oedipus complex
• Earliest family - patriarchal
• violent, jealous father
• keeps all women for himself
• parricide
• brothers kill and eat the father
• guilt and remorse
• institution of various moral edicts and rites
• eg. incest taboo
• rites to commemorate the parricide
• Eg. animal sacrifices, the Christian Eucharist

8
Freud

• Taboo
• ambivalent term
• associated with things unclean as well as sacred
• a forbidden action for which there exists a
  strong inclination in the unconscious
• Eg. Incest

9
Westermarck on incest taboo

• The History of Human Marriage (1921)
• Westermarck effect
• no natural lust between the kin
• Eg. marriage arrangements
• China, Taiwan
• Israeli kibbutzes

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Lévi-Strauss on incest taboo

• The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)
• the incest taboo
• Nature culture
• encourages exogamy
• Exogamy/incest
• Developed as a single complex
• strengthens social solidarity and integration

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Cultural variations in incest taboo

• Trobriand Islanders
• Matrilinear
• marriage between a man and his mother's sister
• incestuous
• marriage between a man and his father's sister
• not incestuous
• 19th century Britain
• marriage with relatives by marriage - incestuous
• eg between widower and the deceased wife's
  sister
• Islam
• marriage between "milk siblings
• i.e. if breast-fed by the same woman during
  infancy

12
Durkheim Mauss

• Primitive Classification (1903)
• cornerstone of French structural anthropology
• Australian Aborigines, Zuni, Sioux, Chinese
  examples
• Eg. Zuni
• the division of space into seven regions
• north, south, west, east, nadir, zenith, and
  centre
• everything in the universe assigned to one of
  these
• classificatory systems
• originate in social organization
• i.e. social classification symbolic
  classification

13
Hertz

• a student of Durkheim and Mauss
• "The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand" (1909)
• Death and the Right Hand (1960, transl. by
  Needham)
• society
• Sacred side
• Profane side
• right vs left hand
• right hand
• rectitude, dexterity, juridical norm, life, male,
  sacred
• left hand
• ugly, bad, death, evil, female, profane

14
Douglas

• Theoretical focus
• pollution and taboo symbols and classification
  systems
• Geographical focus
• Focus on the early Hebrew and the Lele of Zaire
• Various studies
• The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
• Purity and Danger An Analysis of Concepts of
  Pollution and Taboo (1966)
• Natural Symbols Explorations in Cosmology (1970)
• Implicit Meanings Essays in Anthropology (1975)
• In the Wilderness The Doctrine of Defilement in
  the Book of Numbers (1993)
• Leviticus as Literature (1999)

15
Douglas

• To understand pollution and taboos
• One should examine the ideas of dirt
• Dirt
• by-product of systematic ordering and
  classification of matter
• A wrong thing appearing
• in the wrong place
• at the wrong time

16
Douglas

• Lele
• Multiple animal taxonomies
• night animals vs day animals
• animals of the above vs animals of the below
• water animals and land animals.
• Inedible animals
• ambiguous according to some system of
  classification
• Eg. pangolin
• scaly, fishlike monster
• does not fear humans
• one offspring at a time
• Difficult to categorize

17
Douglas

• Jews
• various dietary rules the laws of Kashrut
• Leviticus (The Third Book of Moses)
• Deuteronomy (The Fifth Book of Moses)
• Unclean animals
• Various scavengers, carrion eaters, predatory
  animals
• Eg. pigs, bears, vultures, wolves, shellfish
• Generally
• eat substances that could be harmful to humans
• Cancarry diseases

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Hygiene hypothesis

• Kosher animals healthier than non-kosher animals
• eg. Pigs trichinosis
• eg. shellfish accumulate harmful parasites or
  toxins
• Bible
• provides principles of health and cleanliness
• David Meinz (Eating by the Book, 1999)
• "God may simply be telling us that it's better
  for us believers not to consume the meat of these
  trash collectors"
• but
• cows and sheep - edible but trichinosis
• horsemeat - inedible but no trichinosis
• etc

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Materialist explanation

• Marvin Harris
• Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches The Riddles of
  Culture (1978)
• Good to Eat Riddles of Food and Culture (1986)
• taboos
• Due to the ecologic and economic conditions
• Eg. taboo on the eating of cows in India
• More useful for agriculture than for food (in
  Indian context)
• Eg. Ban on eating pork
• Raising pigs
• Not practical for nomadic desert tribes

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Symbolic explanation

• eg. prohibition on combining milk with meat
• symbolizes separation between death and life
• death
• the flesh of a dead animal
• Life
• the milk required to sustain a newborn creature.

21
Douglas

• Dissatisfied with medical materialism
• religion and symbolism reduced to
• hygiene
• material benefits
• Dietary prohibitions / food taboos
• To be understood by reference to a system of
  classification

22
Douglas

• Genesis
• three earthly domains
• the dry land, called Earth (19-10)
• waters, called seas (110)
• a region above the earth in the open firmament
  of heaven, which is henceforth designated air
  (114).
• linked with a particular category of moving
  creatures
• Eating prohibitions
• This is the law of the beasts, and the fowl, and
  of every creature that moveth in the waters and
  of every creature that creepeth upon the earth,
  to make a difference between the unclean and the
  clean. (Lev. 11 46-7)

23
Douglas

• 1) Fish
• these shall ye eat of all that are in the
  waters whatever hath fins and scales and all
  that have not fins and scales shall be
  abomination unto you.

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Douglas

• 2) Birds
• Douglas ignores this category
• discrepancy between the terms in different
  versions of the Bible

25
Douglas

• 3) Beasts
• These are the beasts which ye shall eat among
  all the beasts that are on the earth whatsoever
  porteth the hoof, and is cloven footed, and
  cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye
  eat.
• whatsoever goeth upon his paws
• a prohibited category

26
Douglas

• 4) Creeping things
• These all shall be unclean to you among the
  creeping things that creep upon the earth the
  weasel and the mouse, the tortoise after his
  kind and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the
  lizard, and the snail and the mole. These are
  unclean to you among all that creep.
• most of the lizard family and small rodents

27
Douglas

• Normal/edible creatures
• inhabit one sphere only
• Have defining characteristics of their sphere
  only
• two-legged birds flying with wings in the air
• scaled fish swimming in the water with fins
• four-legged animals, hopping, jumping,walking on
  earth
• Tabooed/inedible creatures
• live between two spheres
• have defining features of members of another
  sphere
• (lack defining features altogether)
• classificatory anomalies are tabooed categories

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Douglas

• Criticism (Morris)
• Inconclusive evidence
• Most anomalous mammals and birds in the Bible
• Not anomalous according to the outlined
  classification
• Eg. Birds
• Most conform to morphological criteria of
  birdness
• But as scavengers or birds of prey
• invade human sphere
• transgress the nature-culture dichotomy.
• Eg. Beasts
• wolf, jackal, pig, hare, hyrax, badger
• not anomalous but still inedible

29
Douglas

• Deciphering meal (1975)
• three Hebrew categories of animals
• edible and fit for the altar (as sacrifices)
• edible in a profane way
• unclean and inedible
• Sacrificial animals
• not injured or diseased
• firstborn generally preferred
• meat from a sacrificial animal
• eaten only by persons who are ceremonially clean

30
Douglas

• Body
• has a symbolic dimension
• a model for any bounded system
• Pollution rules concerning body
• Focus on margins, orifices
• Symbolic of a general concern with the social
  order
• i.e. preoccupations with the boundaries of the
  body
• express danger to community boundaries

31
Leach

• Anthropological Aspects of Language Animal
  Categories and Verbal Abuse (1964)
• structuralist approach
• concerned with human communication
• interested
• not in what is said and done
• But in what is not said and not done
• Link between linguistic taboos and behavioural
  taboos
• eg. in the 17th c
• God vs devil dog

32
Leach

• Three broad categories of language of obscenity
• 1) dirty words
• usually referring to sex and excretion
• 2) blasphemy and profanity
• 3) animal abuse
• No sharp historical distinction
• by our lady bloody
• gods animal mother goddam damn

33
Leach

• Particulary interest in animal names
• you bitch / you swine
• vs you kangaroo or you polar bear
• close animals
• in English mostly monosyllabic
• Eg. dog, cat, bull, cow, ox

34
Leach

• three main categories of food
• 1) edible substances that
• recognized as food and consumed as part of the
  normal diet
• 2) edible substances that
• recognized as possible food
• but prohibited or eaten only under special
  (ritual) conditions
• consciously tabooed
• 3) edible substances that
• by culture and language not recognized as food at
  all

35
Leach

• General focus in anthropology
• the second category (food taboos)
• Eg. Brahmin prohibition against beef
• Eg.Jewish prohibiton against pork
• pork is food, but Jews must not eat it
• Leach
• the third category deserves equal attention
• Why some edible substances not recognized as
  food?
• Eg. dog is not food
• categorical objection in England

36
Leach

• man vs dog in England
• may be thought of as beings of the same kind?
• Horses?
• dogs may be fed horsemeat
• Swans?
• Generally not served
• Exception
• the royal family and St. Johns College in
  Cambridge

37
Leach

• Structuralist approach
• human thinking and cosmology are dualistic
• based on binary oppositions
• the mediating category
• has characteristics of both extremes
• ambiguous and hence a taboo
• MAN ANIMAL opposition
• PET taboo (name, inedible)

38
Leach

• Particularly loaded with taboos
• boundaries
• exudations of the human body
• Eg. including hair, nail clippings and mothers
  milk
• ambiguous because both of me but not me
• mediators between this and the other world
• Eg. deities, virgin mothers, spirits

39
Leach

• Taboo
• also related to the distance from the self
• Either too close or too far tabooed
• Sexual relationships
• Eating restrictions
• Distance from the ego
• self ? sister ? cousin ? neighbour ? acquaintant
  ? stranger
• self ? pet ? cattle ? prey ? zoo animal

40
Leach

• Leach theory of classification.
• Newborn
• perceives physical and social environment as a
  continuum.
• Growing up
• learns to apply a frame on the environment
• sees things and phenomena as separate from
  each other
• acquires a certain classification system
  (through socialization)

41
Leach

• initial continuum _____________________________
• socialization leads to fragmentation
• _____ _____ _____ _____ _____
• language
• not just classifies the world but also shapes our
  environment
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis!