This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture’s beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas’ foundational theory of pollution as "matter out of place," using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture’s cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology.
Though systems regulating purity and pollution are found in almost every culture and across historical time periods, and though the similarities among the purity systems of different cultures have been noticed, the field of comparative religion has failed to develop sophisticated theories about the concepts of purity and pollution. Currently, social-functionalist theories are dominant in the study of purity and pollution. While the social-functionalist theories have focused almost exclusively on the social dimensions of purity, my work has highlighted the necessity of also taking seriously the religious dimensions of purity. This dissertation represents my attempt to offer a much-needed theory of purity and pollution from the perspective of comparative religion. A comparative study of three ancient Mediterranean cultures--ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient Israel--shows the usefulness of my framework for understanding purity in general, as well as the purity ideas of individual cultures, more specifically. According to my theory, purity refers to, first, the requisite conditions or necessary qualities of each realm within a cosmological worldview, and second, the rules that regulate the interrelationship among the various realms that constitute the total cosmological worldview. Impurity is understood as the failure of a realm to satisfy its requisite condition and pollution is the negative effects of one realm on another in cases when their rules cannot tolerate each other. In the cosmologies of these three cultures, realms were based on two basic distinctions--divine vs. non-divine, and life vs. death. These two distinctions generated four major realms: the divine realm of life; the divine realm of death; the non-divine realm of life; and the non-divine realm of death. While the specific way that the distinctions play out in a culture is variable, my theory of purity and pollution still holds, which will be affirmed through applying my theory to the Japanese case in the last chapter.
This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture’s beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas’ foundational theory of pollution as "matter out of place," using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture’s cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology.
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