Purity And Danger: Now New Perspectives

Description

Mary Douglas’s seminal work Purity and Danger (Routledge, 1966) continues to be indispensable reading for both students and scholars today. Marking the 50th anniversary of Douglas’s classic, the present volume sheds fresh light upon themes raised by Douglas by drawing on recent developments in the social sciences and humanities, as well as current empirical research. In presenting new perspectives on the topic of purity and impurity, the volume integrates work in anthropology and sociology with contemporary ideas from religious studies, cognitive science and the arts. Containing contributions from both established and emerging scholars, including protégées of Douglas herself, Purity and Danger Now is an essential volume for those working on purity and impurity across the full spectrum of the social sciences and humanities. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Contributor information......Page 8 Introduction......Page 14 PART I Anthropology......Page 34 1 Purity as danger: ‘ Purity and Danger revisited’ at fifty......Page 36 2 Purity and punning: political fundamentalism and semantic pollution......Page 47 3 Garbage at work: ethics, subjectivation and resistance in Mexico......Page 65 4 There’s power in the dirt: impurity, utopianism and radical politics......Page 82 PART II Psychology......Page 98 5 Disgust in the moral realm: do all roads lead to character?......Page 100 6 Disgust, disease and disorder: impurity as a mechanism for psychopathology......Page 116 7 Distinguishing disgust from fear: the vomit and faint defenses......Page 134 8 Clean-moral effects and clean-slate effects: Physical cleansing as an embodied procedure of psychological separation......Page 149 9 Cleanliness issues: from individual practices to collective visions......Page 175 PART III Humanities: religious studies and the arts......Page 192 10 Purity and the West: Christianity, secularism and the impurity of ritual......Page 194 11 Impurity without repression: Julia Kristeva and the biblical possibilities of a non-eliminationist construction of religious purity......Page 218 12 Was Kristeva right . . . about Qumran? Methodological implications of a theoretical coincidence......Page 234 13 Purity and disgust in Shakespeare’s problem plays......Page 251 14 Purity, painting and peeing out the window......Page 269 The mind beyond boundaries: Concluding remarks......Page 282 Index......Page 294