Purity and Danger

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 purity of the physical body” (153).

Douglas’s second point is to reject the idea—put forward by psychoanalytical thinkers—that primitive culture is the product of an infantile or neurotic type of individual personality. It is not the case that individuals’ bodily preoccupations create ritual. Rather, rituals “work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body” (159). The human body is a structure that symbolizes society and the world. Douglas also rejects the idea that primitive societies use magic to compensate for failure in external fields of endeavor. On the contrary, they use bodily magic and symbolism as a way to confront the tragic and painful reality of experience and to “affirm the physical fulness of reality” (148).