ABSTRACT
Mary Douglas’s slim volume of 1966, Purity and Danger , provides the point of departure for this volume. Let me begin with a critic, for whom it was also a setting-out:
‘Purity’ is one of those traps for the scholarly that Wittgenstein warned us about, a typical philosophical problem about words. Sometimes the screen of my PC goes blank and a little box appears with the message: ‘You have done an illegal action,’ then appears an error number and a penalty. It is often like this when we use the word ‘purity’: we get into trouble when we seem to assign to it some specifi c existence. The screen goes blank, the penalty is confusion; one error [in Purity and Danger ] was to have picked out bits and pieces of the biblical laws on impurity, with no eye for the whole text. Another error was to have paid attention to the word ‘purity’, whereas all the attention in the Bible is on impurity. Another again was to focus on the puzzling concept, forgetting that it is always known in a series of actions for removing impurity. The remedy is to log off and start again, focusing on impurity.
