ANTHROP 2R03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Mary Douglas, Empty Spaces
15 Nov 2013
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Document Summary
British social anthropologist: major theoretical contributions slide, rethinking slide, research on institutions how institutions think. Purity and danger overview (using pollution theory creating and dealing with taboos: based on the essentials of the social nature of perception nature is continuous and culture is discontinuous. Meaning, where nature would be a continuum, culture would break the continuum into named segments. E. g. nature as the colour spectrum, culture as separate colours like blue, green, yellow etc. Entire point of culture is to provide categories of perception. 3 worlds world 1 is the objective reality, world 3 is the social convention that pertains to the objective reality. World 3 explains world 1 slide each of the colours makes up a reality of world 1. They taboo them: abnormalize them weird and strange, have to be handled in a certain way. They are seen as polluting: culture is learned thru punishment or praise (socialization)
