1975/Douglas/viii

This book follows the second project. Its object is to find meanings. Its method is to universalise foreign and strange beliefs until what seemed at first to be inexplicable is eventually absorbed into our own enlarged experience. To examine the implicit is necessary to go below beliefs that can be made explicit and to watch how submerged ideas determine action. For example, the idea that dirt is dangerous is mostly implicit. Taboo, for example, has a place in a general idea about forbidden behaviour as the cause of illness. Sink it back into a wider set of ideas and you find a common theory that moral failure causes bodily afflictions. Anthropologists sometimes talk about 'the problem of belief', but beliefs only generate problems when there is disbelief. It is no easier to suspend the one or the other. Belief is a matter of how worlds are constructed, not a matter of personal idiosyncracy. Consider, for example, the conflict between African belief in the dangerousness of sorcerers, and English disbelief. How can people communicate at all when their worlds are built upon such grave discrepancies? 
The book has three parts. The first approaches the idea of the implicit by examining ideas which underprop action. The essays in the first section are about the Lele of the Kasai, a people in the Congo among whom I did my fieldwork training. Outsiders to the profession are often witty at the expense of anthropologists' fieldwork, as if it were a ritual requirement, an entry fee. They speak of it as a traditional ceremony of initiation which as taken this form fortuitously; strictly speaking it is unnecessary, anyone who wants to do anthropology without fieldwork will be none the worse. But whoever has the patience to read this first part and go on further will recognise how strongly the Lele themselves have shaped my professional judgment. A writer or traveller who has not been through it, may find it hard to imagine fieldwork as the source of creative understanding. But I think that this effect of prolonged and intense experience is common to most anthropologists. 
The second part lets the esoteric African case histories lead into discussing other anthropologists' interpretations. So this is where essays on the structuralist interpretation of myth and ritual belong. Familiar problems of interpretation get their universalising and systematising treatment. Laughter, for example: is ti the same thing from one period or place to another? Everyone thinks they know why they laugh and most can recognise a joke. But it is more difficult to say what makes a joke funny. Why do people insult each other and then laugh? Do animals laugh, or is laughter a uniquely human gift? To all these miscellaneous questions I find myself preparing the same general answer. The questions should not be asked as if individual are on-social beings who collectively shape each others' fears and laughter in standard ways. They act on beliefs that have collectively made. A theory of bodily behaviour is implicit here. The body turns out to be responding sensitively to the society, even the amount of movement that it can use, and the amount of signalling it is supposed to do is regulated. Therefore, if we want to understand symbols, we have to work out some way of comparing collective behaviour. 
The main preoccupation which shows in all the essays is communication. 
The practical problem of belief is how to be believed. Also how to give readable signals. If I do not believe in the power of sorcerers,why is it so difficult to convince the people who are desperately worried about them? Certain symbols calm the anxiety of the sick and even cure barrenness (but which ones?). The strictures of the second part make a jumping off point for the third. The thread that links them is the question of how to interpret claims that moral defects have spoilt the course of nature. The Lele thought that quarrelling spoilt the hunting. In both cases the hunting is being used to enforce claims against the neighbours. The collective production of the world has made an environment equipped with set punishments which it will invarialbly apply so long as everyone wants top believe in its responsiveness to moral failure. With this we are into the basic issue of belief, its relation to society. We have the choice of treating the politicising of nature as something that far-off exotic peoples do, something utterly remote from our own behaviour. Or we can use anthropology to universalise the insights and apply them to the study of risk and environmental protection. 
When in 1966 I chose the title Purity and Danger with a subtitle referring to theories of pollution I did not imagine that both purity and danger would be linked in a world-wide anxiety about pollution of water and air, and the environment. But by 1970, the topic of 'Environments at risk' ... had become prominent, and has been ever since. This is what there has to be a special anthropological branch of the theory of knowledge. Thinking about reason and knowledge as they appear within any one society is not so exacting as thinking about knowledge in general with libraries of discordant examples to take into account. 
Innatism is a theory of mind which set the psychologist on the search for universal categories hardwired in the human psyche. Various forms of innatism can be espoused without serious challenge when they surface om Western culture because the counter-evidence can be brushed aside. But anthropologists cannot support supposed universal phobias against snakes, or universal disgust at blood or dirt. I wrote Purity and Danger with the express intention of replacing psychologistic ideas about such universal tendencies. Disgust and fear are taught, they are put into the mind by culture and have to be understood in a cultural (not a psychologistic) theory of classification and anomaly.1
One of the most important things that anthropology can do is to qualify contemporary theorising about mind and emotion. And from here it can bring sustained criticism to the reading of ancient texts. For example, it has been assumed for two millennia that the animals which the bible forbids the people of Israel to eat are revolting, disgusting, abominable in one way or another. But over that long period no agreement has been reached about what it is about them that deserves such aversion. Over the last twelve years I have been studying the Book of Numbers 2 and the Book of Leviticus. I have come to the conclusion that the emphasis, as between forbidden and permitted animals, should be reversed. It is always assumed that the forbidden animals are more worthy of scholarly interest and much attention . . . .