Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger
‘Golden Bough is full of examples of belief in a responsive discerning impersonal universe’
Mary Douglas wrote:
CHAPTER 1: Ritual
[Frazer] assigned to human culture three stages of development. Magic was the first stage, religion the second, science the third. His argument proceeds by a kind of Hegelian dialectic since magic, classed as primitive science, was defeated by its own inadequacy and supplemented by religion in the form of a priestly and political fraud. From the thesis of magic emerged the antithesis, religion, and the synthesis, modern effective science, replaced both magic and religion. …
… On this basis he [Frazer] constructed the image of our early ancestors, their thinking dominated by magic. For them the universe was moved by impersonal, mechanistic principles. Fumbling for the right formula for controlling it, they stumbled on some sound principles, but just as often their confused state of mind led them to think that words and signs could be used as instruments. Magic resulted from early man’s inability to distinguish between his own subjective associations and external objective reality. Its origin was based on a mistake.
Thus the ceremonies which in many lands have been performed to hasten the departure of winter or stay the flight of summer are in a sense an attempt to create the world afresh, to ‘remould it nearer to the heart’s desire’… To suppose that a world thus circumscribed in space and time was created by the efforts or the fiat of a being like himself imposes no great strain on his credulity; and he may without much difficulty imagine that he himself can annually repeat the work of creation by his charms and incantations. (J.G. Frazer, The Spirits of the Corn and Wild, II, p. 109)
… [Frazer’s] work has gone very deep. It seems that once Frazer had said that the interesting question in comparative religion hinged on false beliefs in magical efficacy, British anthropologists’ heads remained dutifully bowed over this perplexing question … So we read through virtuoso displays of learning on the relation between magic and science whose theoretical importance remains obscure. …
CHAPTER 5: Primitive Worlds
Psychoanalysts since Freud, and metaphysicians since Cassirer are not backward in drawing general comparisons between our present civilisation and others very different. Nor can anthropologists do without such general distinctions.
The right basis for comparison is to insist on the unity of human experience and at the same time to insist on its variety, on the differences which make comparison worthwhile. The only way to do this is to recognise the nature of historical progress and the nature of primitive and of modern society.
Progress means differentiation. Thus primitive means undifferentiated; modern means differentiated. Advance in technology involves differentiation in every sphere, in techniques and materials, in productive and political roles. …
… I will try to present the characteristic areas of non-differentiation which define the primitive world view. I shall develop the impression that the primitive world view is subjective and personal, that different modes of existence are confused, that the limitations of man’s being are not known. This is the view of primitive culture which was accepted by Tylor and Frazer and which posed the problems of primitive mentality. I shall then try to show how this approach distorts the truth.
[MGH: That is the purpose of this chapter, an attempt to provide the conclusive critique of Frazer, but the difficulties are evident, not least because Douglas is certain that ‘primitive culture is unconscious of its own conditions’ — see below.]
First, this world view is man-centred in the sense that explanations of events are couched in notions of good and bad fortune, which are implicitly subjective notions ego-centred in reference. In such a universe the elemental forces are seen as linked so closely to individual human beings that we can hardly speak of an external, physical environment. Each individual carries within himself such close links with the universe that he is like the centre of a magnetic field of force. Events can be explained in terms of his being what he is and doing what he has done. In this world it makes good sense for Thurber’s fairy-tale king to complain that falling meteors are being hurled at himself, and for Jonah to come forward and confess that he is the cause of a storm.
The distinctive point here is not whether the working of the universe is thought to be governed by spiritual beings or by impersonal powers. That is hardly relevant. Even powers which are taken to be thoroughly impersonal are held to be reacting directly to the behaviour of individual humans.
A good example of belief in anthropocentric powers is the !Kung Bushmen belief in N!ow, a force thought to be responsible for meteorological conditions at least in the Nyae-Nyae area of Bechuanaland. N!ow is an impersonal, amoral force, definitely a thing and not a person. It is released when a hunter who has one kind of physical make-up kills an animal which has the corresponding element in its own make-up. The actual weather at any time is theoretically accounted for by the complex interaction of different hunters with different animals (Marshall). This hypothesis is attractive and one feels it must be intellectually satisfying since it is a view which is theoretically capable of being verified and yet no serious testing would ever be practical.
To illustrate further the man-centred universe I quote from what Tempels says of Luba philosophy. … I suspect that in its broad lines his view on Bantu ideas of vital force applies not merely to all the Bantu, but much more widely. It probably applies to the whole range of thought which I am seeking to contrast with modern differentiated thought in European and American cultures.
For the Luba, he says, the created universe is centred on man. The three laws of vital causality are:
that a human (living or dead) can directly reinforce or diminish the being (or force) of another human
that the vital force of a human can directly influence inferior force-beings (animal, vegetable or mineral)
that a rational being (spirit, dead or living human) can act indirectly on another by communicating his vital influence to an intermediary inferior force.
Of course there are very many different forms which the idea of a man-centred universe may take. Inevitably ideas of how men affect other men must reflect political realities. So ultimately we shall find that these beliefs in man-centred control of the environment vary according to the prevailing tendencies in the political system. But in general we can distinguish beliefs which hold that all men are equally involved with the universe from beliefs in the special cosmic powers of selected individuals. There are beliefs about destiny which are thought to apply universally to all men. In the culture of Homeric literature it was not certain outstanding individuals whose destiny was the concern of the gods, but all and each whose personal fate was spun on the knees of the gods and woven for good or ill with the fates of others. …
… Other ideas about the way in which the individual’s fortune is bound up with the cosmos may be more pliable. In many parts of West Africa today, the individual is held to have a complex personality whose component parts act like separate persons. One part of the personality speaks the life-course of the individual before he is born. After birth, if the individual strives for success in a sphere which has been spoken against, his efforts will always be in vain. A diviner can diagnose this spoken destiny as cause of his failures and can then exorcise his prenatal choice. The nature of his pre-destined failure which a man has to take account of varies from one West African society to another. Among the Tallensi in the Ghana hinterland the conscious personality is thought to be amiable and uncompetitive. His unconscious element which spoke his destiny before birth is liable to be diagnosed as over-aggressive and rivalrous, and so makes him a misfit in a system of controlled statuses. By contrast the Ijo of the Niger Delta, whose social organisation is fluid and competitive, take the conscious component of the self to be full of aggression, desire to compete and to excel. In this case it is the unconscious self which may be pre-destined to failure because it chose obscurity and peace. Divination can discover the discrepancy of aims within the person, and ritual can put it right.
These examples point to another lack of differentiation in the personal world view. We saw above that the physical environment is not clearly thought of in separate terms, but only with reference to the fortunes of human selves. Now we see that the self is not clearly separated as an agent. The extent and limits of its autonomy are not defined. So the universe is part of the self in a complementary sense, seen from the angle of the individual’s idea, not this time of nature, but of himself. …
… In all the cosmologies we have mentioned so far [i.e. examples of worlds in which all individuals are seen as personally linked with the cosmos], the lot of individual humans is thought to be affected by power inhering in themselves or in other humans. The cosmos is turned in, as it were, on man. Its transforming energy is threaded on to the lives of individuals so that nothing happens in the way of storms, sickness, blights or droughts except in virtue of these personal links. So the universe is man-centred in the sense that it must be interpreted by reference to humans.
But there is a quite other sense in which the primitive undifferentiated world view may be described as personal. Persons are essentially not things. They have wills and intelligence. With their wills they love, hate and respond emotionally. With their intelligence they interpret signs. But in the kind of universe I am contrasting with our own world view, things are not clearly distinct from persons. Certain kinds of behaviour characterise person-to-person relations. However impersonally the cosmic forces may be defined, if they seem to respond to a person-to-person style of address their quality of thing is not fully differentiated from their personality. They may not be persons but nor are they entirely things.
Here there is a trap to avoid. Some ways of talking about things might seem to the naïve observer to imply personality. Nothing can necessarily be inferred about beliefs from purely linguistic distinctions or confusions. … To avoid falling into linguistic pitfalls, I confine my interests to the kind of behaviour which is supposed to produce a response from allegedly impersonal forces.
It may not be at all relevant here that the Nyae-Nyae Bushmen attribute male and female character to clouds, any more than it is relevant that we use ‘she’ for cars and boats. But it may be relevant that the pygmies of the Ituri forest, when misfortune befalls, say that the forest is in a bad mood and go to the trouble of singing to it all night to cheer it up, and that they then expect their affairs to prosper.
So here is another way in which the primitive, undifferentiated universe is personal. It is expected to behave as if it was intelligent, responsive to signs, symbols, gestures, gifts, and as if it could discern between social relationships.
The most obvious example of impersonal powers being thought responsive to symbolic communication is the belief in sorcery. The sorcerer is the magician who tries to transform the path of events by symbolic enactment. He may use gestures or plain words in spells or incantations. Now words are the proper mode of communication between persons. If there is an idea that words correctly said are essential to the efficacy of an action, then, although the thing spoken to cannot answer back, there is a belief in a limited kind of one-way verbal communication. And this belief obscures the clear thing-status of the thing being addressed. …
… [Frazer’s] The Golden Bough is full of examples of belief in an impersonal universe which, nevertheless, listens to speech and responds to it one way or another. So are modern field-workers’ reports. Stanner says: ‘Most of the choir and furniture of heaven and earth are regarded by the Aborigines as a vast sign system. Anyone who understandingly has moved in the Australian bush with aborigine associates becomes aware of the fact. He moves, not in a landscape but in a humanised realm saturated with significations’.
Finally there are the beliefs which imply that the impersonal universe has discernment. It may discern between fine nuances in social relations, such as whether the partners in sexual intercourse are related within prohibited degrees, or between less fine ones such as whether a murder has been committed on a fellow-tribesman or on a stranger, or whether a woman is married or not. Or it may discern secret emotions hidden in men’s breasts. There are many examples of implied discernment of social status. …
… So, impersonal elements in the universe are credited with discrimination which enables them to intervene in human affairs and uphold the moral code.
In this sense the universe is apparently able to make judgments on the moral value of human relations and to act accordingly. Malweza, among the Plateau Tonga in Northern Rhodesia, is a misfortune which afflicts those who commit certain specific offences against the moral code. Those offences are in general of a kind against which ordinary punitive sanctions cannot be applied. For example, homicide within the group of matrilineal kinsmen cannot be avenged because the group is organised to avenge the murder of its members by outsiders. Malweza punishes offences which are inaccessible to ordinary sanctions.
To sum up, a primitive world view looks out on a universe which is personal in several different senses. Physical forces are thought of as interwoven with the lives of persons. Things are not completely distinguished from persons and persons are not completely distinguished from their external environment. The universe responds to speech and mime. It discerns the social order and intervenes to uphold it.
I have done my best to draw from accounts of primitive cultures a list of beliefs which imply lack of differentiation. The materials I have used are based on modern fieldwork. Yet the general picture closely accords with that accepted by Tylor or Marett in their discussions of primitive animism. They are the kind of beliefs from which Frazer inferred that the primitive mind confused its subjective and objective experiences. They are the same beliefs which provoked Levy-Bruhl to reflect on the way that collective representations impose a selective principle on interpretation.
The whole discussion of these beliefs has been haunted by obscure psychological implications. If these beliefs are presented as the result of so many failures to discriminate correctly they evoke to a startling degree the fumbling efforts of children to master their environment. Whether we follow Klein or Piaget, the theme is the same; confusion of internal and external, of thing and person, self and environment, sign and instrument, speech and action. Such confusions may be necessary and universal stages in the passage of the individual from the chaotic, undifferentiated experience of infancy to intellectual and moral maturity.
So it is important to point out again, as has often been said before, that these connections between persons and events which characterise the primitive culture do not derive from failure to differentiate. They do not even necessarily express the thoughts of individuals. It is quite possible that individual members of such cultures hold very divergent views on cosmology. …
… It is misleading to think of ideas such as destiny, witchcraft, mana, magic as part of philosophies, or as systematically thought out at all. They are not just linked to institutions, as Evans-Pritchard put it, but they are institutions – every bit as much as Habeas Corpus or Hallow-e’en. They are all compounded part of belief and part of practice. They would not have been recorded in the ethnography if there were no practices attached to them. Like other institutions they are both resistant to change and sensitive to strong pressure. Individuals can change them by neglect or by taking an interest.
If we remember that it is a practical interest in living and not an academic interest in metaphysics which has produced these beliefs, their whole significance alters. To ask an Azande whether the poison oracle is a person or a thing is to ask a kind of nonsensical question which he would never pause to ask himself. The fact that he addresses the poison oracle in words does not imply any confusion whatever in his mind between things and persons. It merely means that he is not striving for intellectual consistency and that in this field symbolic action seems appropriate. He can express the situation as he sees it by speech and mime, and these ritual elements have become incorporated into a technique which, to many intents and purposes is like programming a problem through a computer. …
… The general regularities of nature are observed accurately and finely enough for the technical requirements of Azande culture. But when technical information has been exhausted, curiosity turns instead to focus on the involvement of a particular person with the universe. Why did it have to happen to him? What can he do to prevent misfortune? Is it anyone’s fault? This applies, of course, to a theistic world view. As with witchcraft only certain questions are answered by reference to spirits. The regular procession of the seasons, the relation of cloud to rain and rain to harvest, of drought to epidemic and so on, is recognised. They are taken for granted as the back-drop against which more personal and pressing problems can be solved. The vital questions in any theistic world-view are the same as for the Azande: why did this farmer’s crops fail and not his neighbour’s? Why did this man get gored by a wild buffalo and not another of his hunting party? Why did this man’s children or cows die? Why me? Why today? What can be done about it?
These insistent demands for explanation are focussed on an individual’s concern for himself and his community. We now know what Durkheim knew, and what Frazer, Tylor and Marett did not. These questions are not phrased primarily to satisfy man’s curiosity about the seasons and the rest of the natural environment. They are phrased to satisfy a dominant social concern, the problem of how to organise together in society. They can only be answered, it is true, in terms of man’s place in nature. But the metaphysic is a by-product, as it were, of the urgent practical concern.
[MGH: This functional nature/politics distinction may be Douglas’s most important criticism of Frazer. However, Frazer also had an argument about the organizational purposes of the various practices, which Douglas does not explicitly address.]
The anthropologist who draws out the whole scheme of the cosmos which is implied in these practices does the primitive culture great violence if he seems to present the cosmology as a systematic philosophy subscribed to consciously by individuals. We can study our own cosmology – in a specialised department of astronomy. But primitive cosmologies cannot rightly be pinned out for display like exotic lepidoptera, without distortion to the nature of a primitive culture. In a primitive culture the technical problems have been more or less settled for generations past.
The live issue is how to organise other people and oneself in relation to them; how to control turbulent youth, how to soothe disgruntled neighbours, how to gain one’s rights, how to prevent usurpation of authority, or how to justify it. To serve these practical social ends all kinds of beliefs in the omniscience and omnipotence of the environment are called into play. If social life in a particular community has settled down into any sort of constant form, social problems tend to crop up in the same areas of tension or strife. And so, as part of the machinery for resolving them, these beliefs about automatic punishment, destiny, ghostly vengeance and witchcraft crystallise in the institutions.
So the primitive world view which I have defined above is rarely itself an object of contemplation and speculation in the primitive culture. It has evolved as the appanage of other social institutions.
To this extent it is produced indirectly, and to this extent the primitive culture must be taken to be unaware of itself, unconscious of its own conditions.
In the course of social evolution, institutions proliferate and specialise. The movement is a double one in which increased social control makes possible greater technical developments and the latter opens the way to increased social control again. Finally we find ourselves in the modern world where economic interdependence is carried to the highest pitch reached by mankind so far. One inevitable by-product of social differentiation is social awareness, self-consciousness about the processes of communal life. And with differentiation go special forms of social coercion, special monetary incentives to conform, special types of punitive sanctions, specialised police and overseers and progress men scanning our performance, and so on, a whole paraphernalia of social control which would never be conceivable in small-scale undifferentiated economic conditions. This is the experience of organic solidarity which makes it so hard for us to interpret the efforts of men in primitive society to overcome the weakness of their social organisation. Without forms filled in in triplicate, without licences and passports and radio-police cars they must somehow create a society and commit men and women to its norms. I hope I have now shown why Levy-Bruhl was mistaken in comparing one type of thought with another instead of comparing social institutions. …
… Finally we should revive the question of whether the word ‘primitive’ should be abandoned. I hope not. It has a defined and respected sense in art. It can be given a valid meaning for technology and possibly for economics. What is the objection to saying that a personal, anthropocentric, undifferentiated worldview characterises a primitive culture? The only source of objection could be from the notion that it has a pejorative sense in relation to religious beliefs which it does not carry in technology and art. There may be something in this for a certain section of the English-speaking world. … Continentals seem to have no such squeamishness. ‘Le primitif’ enjoys honour in the pages of Leenhard, Lévi-Strauss, Ricoeur and Eliade. The only conclusion that I can draw is that they are not secretly convinced of superiority, and are intensely appreciative of forms of culture other than their own.
The Source:
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge 1966
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.