3: Making and defiling boundaries Flashcards
Structuralism
• An approach that focuses always on classification
• Different ‘cultures’ seen as different ‘systems of classification’. In different cultural contexts people classify in different ways.
- the emphasis is on how people classify in different ways and on the categories they use to do this
- How people classify. TO classify is to put things in to ‘boxes’ in their minds, how they draw boundaries between things they encounter in the world.
• Focus not on properties or essence of the elements that are classified but on their location in classification systems
- •Emphasis on how people perceive and create order – including social order –through classification
•Structuralist anthropology thus combines the approaches of social constructionism and cultural relativism
- All structuralists see the answer to ‘what is culture’ as ‘culture is a system of classification’
- The most important thing according to a structuralism approach is the classification system ITSELF.
- We need to impose order on things. Grid of perception. We share certain grids of perceptions, certain orders and systems of classifications (certain cultures) and then we can act on those conventions. Therefore society can exist and across time.
- Other people In other cultures may classify things different as they have a different grid of classification in their head
- Many practices of human beings, only make sense if you think of them in terms of classification. For example, we can only have standards about what is beautiful, if we also have a certain idea of what is ugly.
Structuralism compines both the approaches that run through this module.
1) they are cultural relativists. They start from the assumption that we can only ever understand cultural practices etc within a particular context. If we don’t take into account that system of classification, then we cant undersand what they are doing.
2) start with the view that the system of classification doesn’t have to be the way it is, its not given by God, its HUMAN MADE. There are different ways of classifying. They have to be human made otherwise all people would have exactly the same way of classifying if it was a necessary biological thing for example. Different cultures classify diffently.
Binary oppositions
► Key form of classification
► Influence of linguistics (search for hidden rules of ‘grammar’)
► e.g. raw/cooked, right/left, female/male, high/low, scared/profane, allowed/not-allowed, light/dark etc
► Consists of two categories only
► Stucturalist anthropologists tend to focus on binary oppositions because often they have a moral attachment to them e.g. left and right – UK, neutral, political. Dutch: ‘2 left hands’ = clumsy = negative. ‘Got out of bed on their left leg’ – Grumpy. There is a negative moral evaluation associated with left. French & English = right = correct.
► The moral evaluation (the good/bad) has nothing to do with the actual content e.g. nothing different between left and right hand the only thing that allows a moral evaluation/value judgement is where it sits in the system of classification. The binary classification can only be one or the other.
► HOWEVER, there can be things that are not classifiable…
Mary Douglas (1921-2007) 'Purity and Danger‘ (1966)
► …Definition of dirt as matter out of place. […] It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.’ (Douglas 1966: 44)
- ► e.g. Ice cream example ice cream on a cone = wonderful. Ice cream on a t-shirt = dirt. Where the ice cream is = system of classification. Not by the actual characteristics and ingredients of the ice cream.
Mary Douglas - ‘dirt is matter out of place’
- She tries to define dirt. She uses dirt as a way of entering classification.
- Her book is about systems of classification, via dirt. She asked what is ‘dirt’ then we cant try and define it according to the material substance of things e.g. dirt when there are certain minerals, dirt when its fluid. Accoss cultures, a global definition of dirt would never work if we focused on any of the material characteristics. Instead she says, we need a formal definition of dirt. This is the only one that will work, and that means we need to focus on classification.
- 1) Dirt is ‘disorder’. Not a thing itself.
- 2) Its in the eye of the beholder – for one person something can be dirt, and for another person not.
- 3) ‘dirt is matter out of place’ - What could be the right place? Different cultures have different ways of classifying, so, where something should fit, depends on the culture. Therefore dirt depends on the culture aswell. If something is not where it should be, then it is dirt. Depends on the location, not on the material characteristics of it.
- E.g. Ice cream. If you have ice cream on a cone, it is seen as desirable. When this ice cream gets on a t-shirt, its seen as ‘dirt’. The fact that its ‘dirt’ has nothing to do with what it actually is. Its to do with WHERE it is.
- Her book looks at how different cultures define ‘order’. She does it from the other way around how do different cultures define impurity.. things that are dirty. And how do they police it. How do they maintain those boundaries between dirty/clean, pure/impure. Pollution.
- Focuses in this book in the way people classify through societies through encounters with animals and the natural world.
Mary Douglas vs. ‘cultural materialism’ (e.g. Marvin Harris)
- something she disagrees with
- she explains cultural materialism – for Marvin Harris and the cultural materialists, there is actually a biological reason for certain food taboos. For example they would say, in India, amongst Hindus, it makes sense not to eat beef, because there are actually more productive ways to use those cows then to eat them.
- Douglas says that is not true. She rejects these explanations. There may be some truth in some materialist explanations, they don’t get to the bottom of things. These environmental logicals that underlie these cultural rules, are actually side effects. They may be good to a certain degree, but only as a result of something more important.
- She argues that all dietary rules are ultimately about ORDER. About the moral value that people attach to order. They are human made cultural rules, in order to create a moral order. These rules on the OT were not ancient ways to talk about hygiene and nutrition, but they should be seen as part of a symbolic system. The culture of the Israelites.
- In that system she says that holiness was the highest goal. This was associated with completeness, things being full and things being ordered. This was the ideal.
- All of these rules were directed to this holiness. Everything had to be in the right place.
- She’s interested in how people create order, and do this by creating certain classifications, which are shared in culture, by imposing those systems of classification on the world around you.
Anomalies
- Transgressive phenomena that do not fit neatly in the classificatory system. They transgress the boundaries. They sit a little bit on one box and little bit in another box.
- Every culture worthy of a name, has provision for phenomena that are not easily classified. They have certain cultural rules to deal with this phenomena.
► Leviticus: ban on eating animals that are anomalous in the classification of natural things laid out in Genesis.
► Lele: pangolin - anomalous for lele culture because it has scales but can climb trees, it can climb trees, gives birth to only one.
► Doesn’t fit into an exact category but fits a bit into a few different categories.
► When there are special rituals, then the pangolin is actually used as part of the food that is consumed.
► Her argument: Anomalies are not always necessarily BANNED. But they are always given a ‘status’, they are significant. This may mean you cant eat them, can eat them, only eat them on Monday morning. They have a heightened significance because they are anomalous in that particular culture
People tend to confuse dirt and anomaly:
► Dirt is something that is in the wrong place. Dirt is in the wrong box. Its matte out of place. An anomaly is something that doesn’t quite fit in to a box, it fits a little bit into a few. Its transgressive.
Seular defilement
Douglas’ text considers the way in which ideas of order and defilement vary between cultures, and the way in which certain kinds of things, animals or persons can come to be classified as ‘matter out of place’.
Douglas’s main argument is that explanation of ritual or religious practice, or cult, by simple ‘medical materialism’ is a simplification. By medical materialism, Douglas means an interpretation of ritual practice based purely on the consequences to health of not partaking in that particular practice. Further study of the reasons behind such practices reveals that it may be to do with other factors such as aesthetics (e.g. the domestic habits of pigs) rather than any disease avoidance behaviour. The opposite, that primitive ritual has little to do with hygiene or cleanliness she argues is also equally untrue. The division between our practice of washing and disinfecting having only a passing similarity to ritual purification is artificial – they can bear a strong resemblance. She uses the example of Havik Brahmin culture, where they associate physical contact with someone of ‘impurity’ to actually cause religious impurity. To regain purity, they bathe.
For Douglas, unclear identity, for example dirt out of place, threatens the order of society. Some societies use this in a creative way to restore order in their systems through ritual practice, and Douglas describes this as the ‘creative use of dirt’. Douglas provides examples from her work – in some cultures on the one hand incest is taboo, but ritual incest is part of the way they make their king sacred. She introduces the idea of ‘dangerous dirt’ – this is where the ‘dirt’ still has some identity, and is not broken down into something unrecognisable. Things that are ambiguous, i.e. not one thing or another, may need the creation of a ritual to place them in the order of society, i.e. the ritual consumption of species that do not neatly fall into distinct categories.
READ AQC TASK!
