Purity and Danger

"It’s regarded as quite old-fashioned now and the author Mary Douglas, who died recently, somewhat recanted on many of the things that she said. But, for me and still for many of my students, it’s a book that really opened my eyes. It showed me that you could theorize about things that you had always taken for granted and thought didn’t need explaining. Douglas set out to defamiliarize our own culture. One of her favourite party pieces is she goes through all the dietary prohibitions in Leviticus. She said, look at these carefully and you will see there’s a logic to them. What’s being prohibited in terms of eating is very often those animals or foodstuffs which don’t fit into a set category. For example, pigs don’t fall into any particular category because of their feet. In order to make sense of society, cultures like to group things. When objects fall outside those groups they are either reviled or revered. The great thing for me is that I could take her theory back to the ancient world and use it in my studies. And the very first piece of work I had published was actually applying those kinds of ideas to the famous Vestal Virgins, priestesses of Rome who, I tried to argue (I’m not sure I believe this any more), were seen to be holy because they were made to fall between the different categories of gender. They were dressed partly as married women but they were made to be virgins. So, whether it was right or not it was reading Mary Douglas which made me think you could do something like that in the ancient world. It was really exciting. October 29, 2009. Updated: August 27, 2024 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"