ABSTRACT
Mary Douglas argues that all social groups have ideas about dirtiness and defilement, but we are socially conditioned to see certain things as dirt. All dirt is matter out of place, but not all matter out of place is dirt. One theme Mary Douglas powerfully expresses in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo is that although virtually all social groups have ideas about dirtiness and defilement, there is no such thing as absolute dirt. A second key theme in Purity and Danger is Douglas"s attempt to overturn the lofty view, espoused by James Frazer in The Golden Bough and shared by many Victorians and Edwardians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that secular post-Enlightenment societies* sat atop an ineluctable ladder of human development, a place reached by societies that had passed through infatuations with magic and religion.
