35 pages • 1 hour read
Purity and Danger
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Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “External Boundaries”
It is not the case that primitive rituals are simply social projections of individual neuroses. Rather, ritual is an “attempt to create and maintain a particular culture, a particular set of assumptions by which experience is controlled” (158). The object of ritual is not to withdraw from reality but to engage with it by enacting social relations in a symbolic form: “[M]y impression is that those rituals which most explicitly credit corrupt matter with power are making the greatest effort to affirm the physical fullness of reality” (148). Oftentimes, the physical body is used as a symbol of the society. Rituals “work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body” (159).
Chapter 7 Analysis
Douglas makes two major points in this chapter. The first is that structures, margins, and boundaries are potent images applicable to society and to rituals. The human body is the ultimate “bounded system” (142); it can symbolize the structure of society. Bodily orifices represent the body's margins or vulnerable points and are considered in primitive cultures to be the source of the body’s impurity. An example comes from the beleaguered ancient Israelites, who regarded all bodily fluids as polluting: “The threatened boundaries of their body politic would be well mirrored in their care for the integrity, unity and
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