“Holiness means keeping distinct the categories of creation,”
Douglas wrote (1966:53), and the social bases of symbolic classifications are central to her work. At the core of religious classifications are the concepts of pollution and purity.
Douglas’s interest in pollution and purity had two sources.
First, these concepts are discussed by early anthropologists of religion such as Tylor, Frazer, Robertson Smith, and Durkheim, as
well as by her own teachers, Evans-Pritchard and Franz Steiner
(Douglas 1966:vii, 10–28, 1968b). Second, and perhaps more important, the Lele were deeply concerned with pollution (Douglas
1966:vii, 1955). Buhonyi is the virtue of propriety expressed in
shyness, modesty, and shame. Buhonyi imbues all status relationships and personal functions. In contrast, all bodily dirt
(hama) is shameful, the material antithesis of buhonyi. The Lele
say that insulting a man is like rubbing excrement (tebe) in his
face (Douglas 1975:9–13). The avoidance of hama extends to
corpses, blood, excrement, maggots, used clothing, and sexual
intercourse. The Lele are horrified by milk drinking and egg eating, since milk and eggs are body products and thus hama.
By extension, Lele “rules of cleanliness largely amount to an
attempt to separate food from dirt” (Douglas 1975:13), and the
classification of edible and disgusting foods is referenced to the
contrast between buhonyi and hama. Carnivores, dirty feeders,
rats, snakes, and smelly animals like jackals are hama. Women
will eat most types of monkeys, except for one species that eats
the secretions of palm trees; since vegetable secretions, like animal excrement, are called tebe, that one species of monkey is also
hama (Douglas 1975:13–15).
Obviously, Lele symbolism is not about hygiene. It is a system of symbolic classifications that literally distinguish clean/
dirty, human/animal, male/female, village/forest, upstream/
downstream, and so on, classifications spanning both secular
and religious symbols.
What is true of the Lele is broadly true of other human societies, even though the symbols and systems are differently configured. As Douglas wrote,
Lord Chesterfield defined dirt as matter out of place. This implies only two conditions, a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Thus the idea of dirt implies a
structure of idea. For us dirt is a kind of compendium category
for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse classifications. The underlying feeling is that a system of
values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of
things has been violated. (1968b:338)
In an often reprinted chapter, Douglas examined the bestknown system of pollution in the West: the abominations of
Leviticus. These Old Testament dietary rules distinguish between what is edible and inedible:
These are the living things which you may eat among all the
beasts that are on the earth. Whatever parts the hoof and is
cloven-footed and chews the cud among the animals, you may
eat. Nevertheless among those that chew the cud or part the
hoof, you shall not eat these: The camel, because it chews the
cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. (Leviticus
11:2–4)
The biblical dietary laws define dozens of unclean animals.
Varyingly interpreted as designed to discipline the Jews in their
search for holiness or as a primitive avoidance of nonhygienic
foodstuffs, Douglas argued that the dietary laws are founded on
a model of God as One, Complete, and Whole. “To be holy is to
be whole, to be one: holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the
individual and of the kind” (Douglas 1966:64). Unclean animals
combine elements of different realms: the things that live in the
water but lack both fins and scales (eels, shellfish), the birds of the
air that live in the water (pelicans, gulls), and any land animal
that lacks both characteristics of the paragon of domestication—
the cow—chewing the cud and the cloven hoof. “By rules of
avoidance holiness was given a physical expression in every encounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal” (1966:57).
(Not surprisingly, Douglas’s interpretation of Old Testament food
taboos differs dramatically from one proposed by Marvin Harris
[1974; see chapter 15] who argued that the food taboos served an
adaptive purpose.)
In Purity and Danger, Douglas traced the convoluted lines of
magic, taboo, mana, and contamination and in the process provided a masterful commentary on anthropological approaches
to ritual and religion. But in the last half of Purity and Danger,
Douglas focused on the relationships between ritual and social
systems. For example, Douglas argued that there is a recurrent
parallel between the human body and the body politic; rituals
designed to protect the human body from outside contamination
are mirrored in ceremonies designed to protect the external
boundaries of society (1966:114–128). Other rituals concern relationships within society. Whether we discuss mana in Polynesia,
witchcraft among the Azande, or the curative power of the Royal
Touch, “beliefs which attribute spiritual power to individuals
are never neutral or free of the dominant patterns of social structure” (Douglas 1966:112). Douglas outlined a clear hypothesis:
Where the social system explicitly recognises positions of authority, those holding such positions are endowed with explicit
spiritual power, controlled, conscious, external and approved—
powers to bless or curse. Where the social system requires people to hold dangerously ambiguous roles, these persons are
credited with uncontrolled, unconscious, dangerous, disapproved powers—such as witchcraft and evil eye.
In other words, where the social system is well-articulated, I
look for articulate powers vested in the points of authority;
where the social system is ill-articulated, I look for inarticulate
powers vested in those who are a source of disorder. (1966:99)
Douglas’s interest in the links between symbolic classifications and social systems led to her most ambitious theoretical
contribution (Wuthnow et al. 1984:78), a cross-cultural inquiry
into group and grid.