Recognizing Secular Defilement: Douglas, Durkheim and Housework

Abstract

Mary Douglas is generally regarded as a faithful disciple of Durkheim. Yet her classic work Purity and Danger is best understood as premised upon a fundamental disagreement with Durkheim, who she accused of conflating purity with 'the sacred' and impurity with 'the profane'. Key to this disagreement was the theoretical status of the 'busy scrubbings' of everyday housework. This disagreement has had a substantial legacy since, in turning her attention to purity and impurity in their specificity, Douglas bequeathed anthropology and sociology a theory of purity and impurity that has remained an important, perhaps even dominant, paradigm. This paradigm has been identified as an exemplar of synchronic analysis. Yet this paradigm itself is the product of a specific historical and intellectual context, little recognised today. Attending to this context holds opens possibilities, which have otherwise tended to be neglected, for theorising purity and impurity in their specificity.

The Paradox of Sacred and Profane Shared Space

“…These scholars went a step further by determining there are purities and impurities in both sacred and domain categories which is a topic for another time. Key for this paper is the recognition the sacred and profane should not be detached from daily life and may indeed be present in the same space (31). The patriarchs and their descendants did not associate sacredness or holiness with any kind of inherent quality of a place, but rather sacredness existed by the presence of Yahweh.…”

A Wine Flight of Gendered Sociology: Vignettes of (Apparent) Trivialities

“…Second, Douglas was fundamentally influenced by the classical sociology of Émile Durkheim, to the extent that she has been considered a 'faithful disciple' of Durkheim (Fardon, 1987). By extending Durkheim's ideas of social classification systems beyond the sacred/profane dichotomy, towards secular forms of purity and impurity (Duschinsky, 2014), Douglas's work opens further vistas for the type of wine analysis I am conducting here.…”