Pollution and purity (Anthropology)

Every human society subscribes to ideas of human purity and pollution in some form. Certain agents, activities, contracts, periods and substances are known to pollute, while others purify. Pollution, as opposed to purity, disturbs equilibrium, destroys or confuses desirable boundaries and states, and engenders destructive natural forces or conditions. Though also of much significance to modern temper (e.g. as in food, medicine and environment), purity, pollution and taboo are anthropologically well documented for widely different societies (e.g. the Dogon, the Western Pueblo Hopi, the Samoan, and the Bedouin). All major religions (e.g. Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam) also variously elaborate on matters of sin, taboo, pollution and purity.

The sacred and ‘magical uncleanness’

The early sociological studies of William Robertson Smith (1927 [1889]) distinguished states and rules of holiness (purity) from those of ‘magical’ uncleanness, pollution or taboo. With the social reflecting the desirable sacred, societies continually tried to separate and protect themselves from the dangerous profane by suitable rituals. James Frazer (1955 [1890]), who compiled wide-ranging supportive evidence on the magical powers of contagion in ‘primitive thinking’ observed that confusion between holiness and pollution often led to dangerous or anomalous consequences.

Next came the important work of Durkheim (1954 [1912]), the founder of modern sociology, who showed how the sacred reflected the sui generis social. His study examined diverse religious belief and ritual systems in ‘primitive societies’. Echoing Robertson Smith, Durkheim also saw a distinct social need in different societies to protect their fragile religious sacred from the surrounding (and threatening) profane, often by elaborate magical injunctions (the precursors of modern medicine). With tendencies in each to invade the other, the sacred and profane for Durkheim had to be carefully demarcated, separated and contained by suitable interdictions.


Pollution as danger to social order

But these early studies retained a significant ‘us’ versus ‘them’ cultural polarity. They evaluated other human cultures largely by applying European standards of cultural evolution and progress. Besides, there still was no scheme for clearly organizing and explaining the baffling diversity in rules and practices on purity, pollution and taboo in different cultures (Steiner 1956). The definition, organization and meanings of the religious pure and impure (vis-a-vis the sacred and profane) remained unclear under certain situations, particularly in conditions which fell outside the religious domains and were called either ‘non-sacred’, ‘non-profane’, or ‘secular’.

A distinct breakthrough on such issues came with Mary Douglas’s works (particularly 1966). Relying on the Durkheimian conceptions of social order and social cohesion, she examined the underlying structures and meanings guiding diverse cultural beliefs, rules and practices of purity and pollution. With examples from both simple and complex societies, she showed how purity stands for (and stresses a recognition of) clear boundaries and orders, while pollution invites unwanted ambiguity, confusion, and disorder. Societies related pollution to their moral values, with rites and practices aimed at reducing risk and danger to their people. And they devised ways of clearly demarcating, ordering and controlling sources of pollution, with the overall goal to protect their social and cosmological orders.

In this way, as she argued in Purity and Danger, pollution helped explain rules and practices found in ‘primitive worlds’ as well as complex civilizations. Her explanations concerned the sacred and the secular, the inner and the outer, and the physical and the symbolic. Also, notions of ‘dirt’, hygiene, uncleanness, and symbolic representations of the human body occupied the centre stage to explain how — and why — different peoples treat contaminated foods, bodily fluids, secretions, excretions, remainders, and refuse. Similarly, Douglas explicated how societies handle what the human in nature finds impure, abnormal, anomalous and frightening (e.g. earthquakes, floods, eclipses and disasters).

Ritual purity and pollution in South Asia

Several anthropological studies of Indian castes and religions contribute to our subject at this point. For, as Dumont remarked, ‘what can India teach us chiefly, if not precisely the meaning of pure and impure?’ (1980 [1966]: xxxix). Since India ranks its thousands of castes by placing the ritually purest Brahman at the top and the Untouchable at the bottom, its contributions are in some ways distinct and instructive. After World War II, especially with the advent of intensive fieldwork, a host of modern systematic accounts of castes and villages appeared from different parts of India, elaborating ‘lived rules’ and practices on purity and pollution.

However, Louis Dumont (1980 [1966]) soon succeeded with his striking ‘structural explanation’ of the Indian caste system, arguing that ritual purity/pollution is the fundamental binary opposition organizing the traditional Indian (mainly Hindu) hierarchy, society and power structure. Here the ritual status of the Brahman encompasses the ‘temporal authority’ of Ksha-triya rulers. This unique value configuration made, he insisted, India’s ideology traditional, holistic, and ahistorical, while the modern West emphasized history, individualism and secular power.

Dumont’s studies prompted a wave of close examinations of Indian ideals, texts, terminologies, rules, and practices surrounding purity and pollution. Some yielded ‘taxonomies’ and ‘grammars’ of Hindu pollution, distinguishing, for instance, ‘timed pollution’ (e.g. at birth and death) from those ‘internal’ and ‘external’, which came from either a polluting action (e.g. killing) or an object (bodily secretions, excretions, refuse). But the focus of these studies slowly moved from functions of purity and impurity to those of wider social order and meanings. Not unlike Douglas, India also recognized connections between ritual purity and matters of hygiene and sanitation (Khare 1962).

The next development crystallized when McKim Marriott criticized Dumont’s dualist approach to caste ranking and developed his distinct ‘ethnosociology’ of India (1989). In a series of exercises, he controverted Dumont’s dualist view of India, showing that the Hindu world is constructed by multiple transactions of substances and their ‘markings’ rather than by the ideological opposition between purity and impurity. Marriott’s ‘transactional’ markers are ‘fluid’ rather than binary, stressing the ‘joining’ and ‘flow’ of constituent substances like blood, foods, humours, interactions, residues and dispositions along with the Hindu alchemy of intrinsic ‘heating’ and ‘cooling’ in persons, groups and physical surroundings.

The auspicious and the inauspicious

At the same time there appeared a number of studies critically examining the comparative ritual status (and changing positions) of renoun-cers, kings, and women within both classical and popular Hinduism. These considerably widened the cultural ground in which to place the issue of purity and pollution in Hindu India, and showed some clear limitations in Dumont’s binary approach to pure and impure. For example, there appeared the need to understand the crucial role of concurrently occurring notions of auspiciousness (subha or mangala) and inauspi-ciousness (asubha or amangla) in foods, gifts, events, rites, and gods (Khare 1976; Carman and Marglin 1985). Auspiciousness here was not just a synonym for purity, and inauspiciousness for impurity. Instead, the auspicious and the inauspicious signified meanings, ambiance, and goals which purity and impurity did not represent. Besides, they also criticized the caste hierarchical order. Unlike Dumont’s dependence on the binary pure/impure opposition, later investigators found the four categories working in tandem, by context and cultural purpose. The meanings and messages thus reached, explained more and better across the flow of time, events, persons, and contexts.

During the 1970s and 1980s anthropologists investigated more puzzles which purity, auspi-ciousness and defilement (under different combinations, and in different strengths) produced within Indian society. For instance, if there is an anomalous god Shiva (sometimes pure but inauspicious, and sometimes impure and auspicious), we also encounter degraded and inauspicious Brahmans, impure but auspicious low servicing castes (e.g. washerwomen or dhobin in the north), and the polluting and inauspicious (eclipse-causing) planets Rahu and Ketu. Similarly, those practices which produce anomalous relations across purity, rank, power, and inaus-piciousness have long remained a puzzle. For example, consider the issue of meat-eating Brahmans vis-a-vis ‘purer’ vegetarianism; the nature of divine ‘left-overs’ or ‘blessed foods’ (prasad); and the impurity or inauspiciousness-removing persons and gifts (Babb 1975; Parry 1980; Raheja 1988).

New directions

Further work on pollution and purity might concern the issues of modern society and its conflicts and antagonistic politics. For instance, in many colonial and postcolonial societies, a study of the politics of ‘subalterns’ increasingly opens the rules of purity and pollution to political interpretations of domination and control. Some subaltern historiographers and anthropologists have detected sacred and non-sacred power conflicts hidden behind the ‘traditional rules’ of caste and purity and pollution. Thus both the ‘elitist historiography’ as well as the ‘anthropology of order’ must be criticized for their blind spots. Others detect a distinct trace of the ‘colonial knowledge’ in ‘documenting’ and ‘representing’ many of those castes, rules and rituals with which anthropologists start their inquiry.

Mary Douglas and Wildavsky (1982), to date, however, show best how the politics of pollution, social risk and national borders interrelate in a modern society. They find ‘abuse of technology’ as a potent source of environmental ‘pollution’ in modern America, risking economic prosperity, stable political and power boundaries, and a rise in crime. But the risk perception in all forms of pollution, the authors argue, still remains culturally conceived and socially ordered, a vindication of anthropological insights. America thus tends to skew its risks from environmental pollution according to the way it conceives of its own cultural centre, borders and frontiers.

Next post:

Previous post: