ABSTRACT
Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger is one of the most important books on dirt and pollution ever written. It bears this accolade because for forty years it has held formidable sway over the sociological imagination of unclean things. Its claim, that dirt and pollution are cultural categories rather than physical realities, has inspired some of the fi nest scholars to dig into the cultural articulation of uncleanness and persuaded some, as we shall see, that what is true for dirt is true also for waste. In fact, the claim that dirt is ‘matter out of place’ might be said to refl ect dimensions of midtwentieth century understandings of the discarded and degraded in much the same way that Dickens’s ‘dust’ refl ected mid-Victorian conceptions. As Rachel Carson and others had portrayed the toxic terrors of misplaced chemicals and industrial detritus, so Douglas’s book served as a lesson that all integrated, non-pathological cultures paid careful attention to the perils of pollution. When it was fi rst published in 1966, however, the book received something of an ambivalent reception. Some of the ambivalence arose from perceived misinterpretations in the text, especially in Chapter 3 ‘The Abominations of Leviticus’ — a situation that persuaded Douglas to include an apology and explanation in the preface to the Routledge Classics edition (Douglas, 2002: xiii-xvi). Some of the ambivalence arose because the book appeared ‘to be praising structure and control’ in the middle of an intellectual and alternative culture that emphasised freedom and love (Douglas, 2002: xvi-xvii). Perhaps some of the ambivalence arose merely because the book was very much a product of its time and as such vulnerable to the vagaries of the intellectual currents in which its thesis fl oated. Its intellectual heritage in functionalist anthropology, its debt to Durkheim and Mauss and its mission to step beyond Frazer’s legacy in the interpretation of primitive ceremonial set the book historically and intellectually in a very particular landscape.
