1. Discuss the idea of Mary Douglas, including how the idea of clean versus dirty is paramount in her theoretical perspective. According to Mary Douglas, purity or clean versus dirty or impure represent the boundaries of a society, and is a manifestation of the society’s fears. Douglas examined the use of blood as a means of purification and as a source of contamination that must then be purified in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as in a variety of African groups. Douglas emphasizes the symbolic meaning of purification rituals, and how they are manifested through ritual and daily practice. In essence, Douglas argues that the concept of purity enforces a society’s structure. Douglas sees the practice of ritual sacrifice as being one example of purity determining the ‘boundaries’ of a community. For example, the Dinka tribe, a group mostly present in the South Sudan, have been known to slaughter a beast lengthwise and through the sexual organs in order to counteract an act of incest. If that beast were cut across the middle, it would signify a truce, and a variety of other circumstances leads to the use of trampling or suffocation (Summary of Chapter 7: “External Boundaries””). Ritual sacrifice was used to establish what is and what isn’t acceptable, and to maintain an equilibrium in the society, as in the case of sacrifice for incest. Similarly, ritual sacrifice is used to signify major shifts in the community, such as a truce with another group. Ritual sacrifice is used to codify a group’s values and limits. As ritual sacrifice is used to define the boundaries of the society, the concept of purity enforces the rules of the society on an individual level. An excellent example of this is the use of blood in the Bible. Blood can be either cleansing detergent, or a polluting contaminant. For example, the blood of a murder victim stains and taints the earth, as described in the Book of Numbers. For that earth to be purified, the murderer’s blood must be spilled (Hanson, 2007). This is another example of purity being used as a set of laws, essentially. The concept of the unclean or dirty is what, in part, maintains a society’s values and rules. As Douglas states in Purity and Danger, “Dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder… Dirt offends against order.
Hunt discusses the way in which Ancient Greece and Rome forced many people into slavery and created many treatises in order to organize society by decree of ideology. Society had to be structured in order to properly operate, as Diamond conveys the idea that ideologies must be present for the society to have structural integrity. Once again, in chapter 14, Diamond discusses the importance of ideology as groups structure in bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. As groups progress and evolve their ideologies, society advances and allows prosperity and welfare among the people. On the contrary, Hunt discusses the importance of custom and tradition within medieval societies. Many of these societies lacked the central authority that allowed for organization, so many systems were based off the mutual obligations and services of the people. This allowed for various ideologies to facilitate the advancement of society as their changes altered the changes of society. Thus, the medieval societies required much attentiveness to following ideology in order to operate on a sound
In Shintoism, purity is very important. Shintoism follows the belief that no human is perfect. They believe that all humans are born pure on the inside. Things that make humans impure are tsumi, which is pollution or sin. Shinto followers believe that the ones who cause impurity are evil spirits, and they are the ones who cause evil doings in the world.
In “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”, Horace Miner (1956) revisits the rituals of a North American group, the Nacirema, as first described by Professor Linton in the early 1900s. Miner depicts these people as quite vain; obsessive over money, appearance and health. While the economic status of a Nacirema individual is extremely important, nothing compares to the significance of the rituals of the body. These rituals tend to involve various steps that allow the Nacirema people to present themselves to the world in their fittest, most beautiful form. The majority of these rituals are performed by the individual in their own home, in extreme privacy. The body is viewed as a disgusting vessel, in need of constant upkeep to be presentable to others. The Nacirema home contains one or more ‘shrines’, devoted to transforming the body into the definition of health and beauty. The main purpose of the shrine is to hold charms and magical potions, bought from
The film Ongka’s Big Moka is about a Big Man named Ongka of the Kawelka tribe in Papua New Guinea. Being the Big Man of the tribe Ongka reasures his status by arranging a Moka ceremony. In this film we see the process of a Moka that takes up to 5 years of preparation. We follow Ongka’s struggles and successes of accumulating the number of pigs in preparation for the ceremony. The film allows us to understand the motives and functions of a Moka, provides topics that have been discussed in class, and relate this culture to a similar institution within the United States.
In Benedicts point of view, rituals are driven by the need to have higher status, also from an inherent need for competition and superiority. While in Rappaport’s point of view in the context of the Tsembaga, materials are far more important than status, especially because they live in an egalitarian society.
life rift between moral expectation, purity and the idyllic and the crass and corrupt truth of society.
To be “clean” or “pure” was the most important to those of the 18th century.
This tribe brings nothing but death and destruction to the island. Moreover, the newly formed group of warriors even develop a dance that they perform over the carcass of the dead pig. They become so involved in this dance that that warriors kill one of their own kind. By chance, Simon runs from the forest towards the group that is already shouting “‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’” (152).
The codification of deviance can vary widely between different cultures, a norm in one culture can be considered deviant in another. For example, the notion of cannibalism has been proved by anthropologists to be a spiritually divine form of ritualistic sacrifice in the ancient Aztec culture of Mexico. Yet in Western culture murder and the consumption of human flesh is considered highly revolting, dealt with by harsher consequences by law than most other deviant crimes. These differences are due to the way each individual society develops their own moral codes. These codes are often defined by cultural ideologies, adversity to other cultures and ritualistic practises which have become accepted, as well established patterns in the development of culture. Lloyd, M 2007 implies this by saying 'we are born into a pre existing (social) order the comes ready made with a large stock of norms and rules we must learn if we are to participate as c...
As species we are all born human, yet the journey we take on the passage of life defines us as individuals. Our lives are an array of moments of secular and spiritual change. Regardless of their importance, in both contexts, these occurrences represent a transition from one stage of life to another. People formalized these important moments of physical or social change by ritualization, or also known as ‘rite of passage’. The rites of passage play an important role in society. They are an efficient tool in restoring and maintaining balance within the social environment. At the same time, through rituals, they lead the initiate to social transformation. Rites of passage characteristically give assurance of mastery of the new roles and often include instruction in the new roles.
The relationship between religious ritual and social power is very complex in its nature. In each society examined thus far religious ritual is intertwined into almost every aspect of life from social taboos to rites in hunting, marriage and an innumerable amount of other cultural aspects. Religious ritual is so interwoven into the fabric of society that separating ritual from the act is often times impossible. In researching this topic I have become aware of two forms of connection that must be addressed to fully cover the idea governing the connection of these principles.
In this book, ritual cleansing is seen from various perspectives. Existing chronicle records show that ritual cleansing has been honed for about 3,000 years, in all likelihood much more (Bell-Fialkoff 281). In spite of the fact that it has changed fundamentally after some time, purifying has dependably been coordinated at bunches that were viewed as hazardous. These bunches must be dispensed with. Present day purifying stems from the religious narrow mindedness of the Middle Ages. In addition the " Islam, Manichaeism, and Zoroastrianism," (Bell-Fialkoff 281) whom set up a group of genuine devotees, were groups that required immaculateness. They saw the world isolated into the Realm of Light and the Realm of Light that of Darkness, and their endless battle was a deciding element in the human issues. Ritual cleansing in the middle ages had a different outlook for people, such that they started wars, battles, and had different beliefs that did not sit well with others. Their world view was focused a lot more on wars where many lives were lost because of religious issues that brought along ritual
Roy Rappaport (1999) showcases the idea that ritual is a fundamental aspect of human society. A community requires trust, and rituals are a necessary function of society, which creates that trust. For example willingly enduring a painful initiation as part of a ritual creates a sense of trust. In this essay I will discuss the theoretical works of Durkheim, Rossano and Douglas to attest to rituals preserving social order. While the works of Gluckman and Turner provide an interesting insight into reintegration through ritual, and Geertz provides an alternative view to the idea that rituals preserve and reiterate social order.
The reaction essay is based upon Horace Miner’s article “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” published in Wiley-Blackwell’s, in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association, journal American Anthropologist. The essay will consist of two sections: an article summary and a reaction discussion.
Anthropologists define the term culture in a variety of ways, but there are certain shared features of the definition that virtually all anthropologists agree on. Culture is a shared, socially transmitted knowledge and behavior. The key features of this definition of culture are as follows. 1) Culture is shared among the members of that particular society or group. Thus, people share a common cultural identity, meaning that they recognize themselves and their culture's traditions as distinct from other people and other traditions. 2) Culture is socially transmitted from others while growing up in a certain environment, group, or society. The transmission of cultural knowledge to the next generation by means of social learning is referred to as enculturation or socialization. 3) Culture profoundly affects the knowledge, actions, and feelings of the people in that particular society or group. This concept is often referred to as cultural knowledge that leads to behavior that is meaningful to others and adaptive to the natural and social environment of that particular culture.