Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)

IF 0.9 2区社会学 Q2 ANTHROPOLOGY

Public Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-01 DOI:10.1215/08992363-8090159

Caitlin Zaloom

引用次数: 1

Abstract

Mary Douglas’s masterpiece Purity and Danger holds a troubled place in the social sciences and humanities. Both classic and cast out, the book’s analysis cannot be ignored. In fact, Douglas’s thesis, “Dirt is matter out of place,” can help explain the fate of the very book that made it famous. Purity and Danger presents a probing cultural analysis. Douglas argued that social systems should be understood by what they expel but also that the true power of dirt lies in the acts of cleansing. Cultural upheaval, decolonization, and war together appeared to render Douglas’s interest in social stability naive, however, and Purity and Danger languished following its publication in 1966. Today’s politics of purity, from white nationalism to rule by imprisonment, makes Purity and Danger more necessary than ever. The tension between the search for human universals and the social and historical particularism at its heart continues to haunt social inquiry today.

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玛丽·道格拉斯，《纯净与危险》（1966）

玛丽·道格拉斯的代表作《纯洁与危险》在社会科学和人文科学中占据着一个令人不安的位置。无论是经典的还是过时的，这本书的分析都不容忽视。事实上，道格拉斯的理论“土是错位的物质”可以帮助解释这本书的命运，正是这本书使它出名。《纯洁与危险》是一种探索性的文化分析。道格拉斯认为，社会制度应该通过它们所驱逐的东西来理解，但污垢的真正力量也在于它的净化作用。文化剧变、非殖民化和战争似乎使道格拉斯对社会稳定的兴趣变得幼稚，然而，《纯洁与危险》在1966年出版后就萎靡不振了。今天的纯粹政治，从白人民族主义到监禁统治，使得“纯粹与危险”比以往任何时候都更加必要。对人类共性的探索和其核心的社会和历史特殊主义之间的紧张关系，继续困扰着今天的社会探究。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Public Culture Multiple-

CiteScore

2.10

自引率

6.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. A four-time CELJ award winner, Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for over thirty years. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. Artists, activists, and scholars, both well-established and younger, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.