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Categories of pollution and impurity
Four major categories of what various religions and societies have regarded as polluting or inherently impure phenomena may be distinguished. Virtually any type of impure person, object, or state (as defined in various cultures) may be assigned to one of these four categories, or may be shown to have symbolic associations with one (or sometimes with several) of these four sets.
Physiological processes
The functions of the human body are, for the most part, universally considered polluting, although all functions are not considered polluting in all cultures. The intensity with which the various processes are abhorred also varies from culture to culture. The list of polluting organic processes and things includes menstruation, sexual intercourse, birth, illness, death, and all bodily excretions and exuviae (urine, feces, saliva, sweat, vomit, blood, menstrual blood, semen, nasal and oral mucous, and hair and nail cuttings). Associated with this category symbolically may be various persons, animals, natural objects, sense-related objects, and professions: women in general (because they menstruate), pregnant women, prostitutes, and widows (the latter because of their additional association with death); pigs, dogs, and other scavengers because they eat or associate with excrement and garbage; carrion-eating animals because of their association with death; leftover food, because it has come in contact with saliva via the fingers or utensils that have touched the mouth, or because it may visually resemble vomit or the undigested contents of the stomach; pungent vegetables or spices (such as garlic, onions, and leeks) and strong-smelling meats or fish because they cause foul breath odours; food in general because of its ultimate state as excrement; certain professions because their members are required to handle corpses or bodily exuviae; and things associated with lowness—the entire body below the navel, the feet, the hem of the garment, the floor or ground—because most bodily excretions derive from the lower part of the body.
Violence and associated processes
A second major category of polluting phenomena involves violence and all associated aspects. This entire category may be reduced to beliefs in the polluting nature of blood and death, but the extensive development of various ideas connected with violence pollution merit its being classified as a separate category. Violence pollution involves a wide variety of activities: murder, hunting, warfare, physical fights, quarrelling, cursing or speech that is considered foul, aggressive language, lying, and various aggressive human passions (e.g., greed, anger, and hatred). Various phenomena considered polluting in one culture or another may be placed in this category because of their symbolic associations with violence: Satan, demons, witches, predatory ghosts, and the practice of black magic; alcohol because it stimulates aggressive impulses; carnivorous, predatory, and aggressive animals; meat because of the act of slaughtering the animal; certain professions because their members manufacture weapons or kill or fight for a living.
Anomalies
The third major category includes strange, unusual, or unclassifiable phenomena: (1) certain events of nature (e.g., comets or lunar or solar eclipses); (2) unusual deaths (e.g., death by lightning); (3) unusual births (e.g., twins or other multiple births, breech deliveries, miscarriages, or stillbirths); (4) physical deformities, especially sexual deformities (e.g., monorchids [men possessed of only one testicle], hermaphrodites, or eunuchs); (5) speech defects and voices appropriate to the opposite sex; (6) unusual developmental sequences (e.g., children who cut their upper teeth before their lower); (7) anomalous animals or types of plants that have features of several species; (8) viscous substances that seem neither solid nor liquid; (9) persons in liminal (threshold or transitional) categories or states (e.g., persons undergoing initiation rites, strangers, or captives); (10) persons not considered fully in control of their faculties (e.g., children, drunken persons, the insane, or the mentally or physically handicapped, such as cretins); and (11) perversions of social relationships, especially sexual, that a culture generally considers to be normal (e.g., adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, births of children to unwed parents or as a result of adulterous relationships, or the breaking of vows of celibacy by monks or nuns). That pollution results from a confusion of classification rules may explain beliefs that certain objects must not be mixed lest pollution result. The Old Testament prohibition (also found in certain African groups) that meat and milk should not be mixed with one another or the prohibition in the Vedas (ancient Hindu scriptures) against carrying water and fire at the same time are examples of attempts to maintain classificatory purification rules (see dietary law).
Social classifications: classes and castes
The belief that the lower castes pollute the upper castes has been explicit in India, where a true caste system has existed. These lower castes, to some extent, are considered polluting because they engage in professions that have been or are associated with the physiological processes or with violence. Many lower caste occupations (e.g., pottery making or basket weaving), however, do not have such associations, and thus the categorization of pollution attached to all lower castes cannot be so explained. Outside true caste systems, there are de facto systems of racial or ethnic hierarchy, in which certain races or ethnic groups are considered to be inherently lower than others. In most such systems, the notion that the lower groups pollute the higher is not stated explicitly in terms of pollution; the language of racial or ethnic prejudices in such systems, however, is often strongly reminiscent of pollution concepts—e.g., that the lower groups are “dirty,” have peculiar bodily odours, engage in sexual promiscuity or perversions, are “animals,” or are violent and dangerous. Relations between the dominant race or ethnic group and the subordinate one often resemble the relations between upper and lower castes in India. In such social systems, eating together and intermarriage generally are not condoned, and segregated neighbourhoods and public facilities to maintain minimal physical contact are encouraged by law or custom.
Theories of pollution and impurity
Though these four major categories indicate the great diversity of phenomena considered polluting cross-culturally, no one culture considers every item noted in these categories as polluting. Furthermore, within a single culture, not every item considered polluting is necessarily polluting to every member of the society, because the connotation of pollution often is dependent upon the occasion and on the status of a person. The pollution of death, for example, may be confined to those who have actual contact with the corpse, the immediate family of the deceased, certain categories of kinsmen, or all members of the village in which the death has occurred.
The rules dictating avoidance of certain groups or individuals because of the threat of pollution may be seen as means that a society has at its disposal for emphasizing its important social categories. Thus, in the case of death, if relatives on the father’s side but not on the mother’s side are considered polluted by the death, it may be theorized that this is one of the society’s ways of emphasizing the greater social significance of the patrilateral relatives in the kinship system. Sociologists and anthropologists, on the one hand, tend to stress such social implications of pollution rules. On the other hand, some psychologists, philosophers, and theologians are more interested in explaining what there is about polluting events and processes (e.g., death and menstruation) in themselves that would result in their being considered polluting in so many cultures.
Two general theories have been proposed in relation to these emphases or questions. The first theory derives primarily from psychoanalytic theories developed by Sigmund Freud in which the quest for sexual, excretory, and aggressive pleasures are viewed as instinctual drives in man that are repressed or greatly limited in the socialization of the individual. Hence, because many of the phenomena viewed as polluting cross-culturally are related to these concerns, pollution fears are interpreted as projections or symbolizations of these repressed instincts. The second theory that attempts to explain the specific content of pollution-belief systems (as opposed to the social effects of those beliefs) maintains that, in a very broad sense, things are considered polluting by virtue of their relationship to cultural classification. This theory holds that everything considered polluting in any culture either is anomalous in relation to basic cultural categories or is positioned at the extremities—i.e., the margins—of major conditions or situations of individual or social existence. Birth and death, for example, are at the margins of an individual’s life, and the lower castes are at the margin of society.
Both of these theories, however, contain certain problems that may be resolved by subsuming them under a more general theory. The theory derived from psychological considerations is regarded by many scholars as being too narrow in scope because it ignores many types of pollution data; the theory based upon cultural classification, because it is capable of such broad interpretation, loses its coherence as a theory. A more general view incorporates these two theories within a single more fundamental one based on denial. Thus, pollution fears might be interpreted as symbolizations of any material that is denied full expression—psychologically, culturally, or socially. The Freudian theory, emphasizing the psychoanalytic notion of repression of instinctual drives, thus becomes significant in interpreting the first two categories—physiological processes and aggression (i.e., violent emotional processes). The classification theory, which emphasizes cultural attempts to ignore or suppress phenomena that do not fit its cognitive-classification schemes, then becomes significant in interpreting the third category of polluting things—anomalies, unusual occurrences or types of persons, and “mixings.” To account for the fourth category, involving the fear of lower castes, classes, and ethnic groups as polluting, the sociopolitical notion of oppression may thus be introduced. All these concepts—repression, suppression, and oppression—are related to the notion of something or someone being forcibly prevented from expression; that is, of being under some sort of pressure. This idea suggests why polluting things are viewed as threatening and not simply as interesting peculiarities of the world, because things under pressure are volatile, liable to escape, or capable of erupting at any moment.
