35 pages • 1 hour read
Mary DouglasPurity and Danger
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Primitive Worlds”
For modern society, uncleanness is a matter of hygiene, aesthetics and etiquette. For ancient and primitive societies, it was a religious matter, with wide-ranging consequences. Especially in the English-speaking world, our discussion of this topic is often clouded by our avoidance of the word “primitive,” an avoidance that may express an underlying condescension. In fact, “primitive” is a useful term, in anthropology as in other fields. In dealing with other cultures, we ought to stress the unity of all human experience yet also its diversity: “The right basis for comparison is to insist on the unity of human experience and at the same time to insist on its variety, on the differences which make comparison worthwhile” (96).
Douglas criticizes Levy-Bruhl's ideas about the differences between “primitive mentality” and rational thought. For Douglas, the real distinguishing marks of the primitive worldview are, firstly, that it is man-centered (a view displayed in many myths and rituals of primitive peoples about fortune, fertility, and medicine); and secondly that it lacks the self-consciousness and striving for objectivity that characterize modern thinking. In order to perceive rightly the differences between primitive and modern culture, we must free our thought from “the shackles of its own subjective conditions” (98).
Chapter 5 Analysis
In order to understand purity beliefs, we must take our blinders off and see our own culture and society objectively, freed from the “subjective limitations of the mind” (98). Douglas defends the use of the word “primitive” in anthropology and offers her own interpretation of it. For her, the difference between primitive and modern society is that the former has an undifferentiated social organization, and the latter a differentiated social organization. Mankind has moved from an unselfconscious state toward ever-greater “complexification and self-awareness” (98). Douglas cites the Trickster myth of the Winnebago Indians as a metaphor for the increasing complexity and self-awareness that accrues as mankind passes from primitive to modern society.
What distinguishes the primitive worldview is not that it is pre-logical but pre-Copernican (100); that is, the primitive worldview is anthropocentric (man-centered), with elemental forces linked closely to the behavior of human beings. The fate of individual humans is affected by power “inhering in themselves or in other humans” (106). The universe is treated as a personal being, intelligent and responsive. As Douglas puts it, the world “revolves around the observer who is trying to interpret his experiences” (100).
This view of reality survives in the religious traditions of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others. Such believers are not to be thought of as primitive holdovers, as their beliefs have evolved and been rephrased over the centuries to meet the changing times.
