jdittrich · March 14, 2022 11:22
diff --git a/PollutionAndDanger.my b/PollutionAndDanger.my
 2 Dirt is disorder, disorder is subjective

 3 removing dirt is ordering the environment creatively

 4 people violating the moral code can cause harm; they are treated as infectious

 4 relations and pollution between people mirror that of society

 5 "For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience." "It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, about and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. In this sense I am not afraid of the charge of having made the social structure seem over-rigid."

 6 We receive order and modify it → structuration

 8 dirt can be avoided out of hygiene or out of convention; Rules of convention can be set aside out of practicality.

 10 The sacred its to be set apart

 11 Dirt is relative; the shit of (holy) cows is impure to god but purifies humans, even the holy among them

 14 "Advanced" religions see uncleanness as spiritual unworthiness.

 [Loads of discussions on what magic, hygiene is according the different writers]

 40 Medical Materialism (W. James) treats religious experience as something not religious (rationality, intoxication, dream; "they have a pork taboo, cause eating pork can cause…)

 41 Neither are purity and hygiene totally separate, nor are they the same

 49 Ways to reduce ambiguity: Label with another category that does not cause conflict; kill it; see it as affirming the rule; see it as danger; use it to enrich meaning (like in art)

 62 Blessing as source of good; withdrawal of it as source of bad; it unleashes the course

 63 Observing the rules (or not) has actual effects; it is not merely expressive

 67 Holy= complete

 69 Species that are unclean contradict the class of animals they are in or are not prototypical of their class → "Where can we put it?!"=> unclean

 75 With Christianity and the sermon of the mount sin went inwards: "…regarded as matter of will and not of external circumstances" → see shaping the body by sport, diet or by a corset? → See Foucault

 78 A ritual provides a frame for focus

 79 Signs as giving focus to action, not as self acting magic (A person knots a bundle of grass to express his wish to arrive in time; it is not seen as act on itself; but it helps to focus attention on getting home quickly)

 79 " So it is not enough to say that ritual helps us to experience more vividly what we would have experienced anyway. It is not merely like the visual aid which illustrates the verbal instructions for opening cans and cases. If it were just a kind of dramatic map or diagram of what is known it would
 always follow experience. But in fact ritual does not play this secondary role. It can come first in formulating experience. It can permit knowledge of what would otherwise not be known at all. " →recipe

 86 Money as Ritual: " Mauss wrote of primitive society repaying itself with the false coin of magic. The metaphor of money admirably sums up what we want to assert of ritual. Money provides a fixed, external, recognisable sign for what would be confused, contradictable operations; ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardises situations, and so helps to evaluate them. Money makes a link between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialised type of ritual.
 In comparing magic with false currency Mauss was wrong. Money can only perform its role of intensifying economic interaction if the public has faith in it. If faith in it is shaken, the currency is useless. So too with ritual;"
 → Graeber Debt.

 93 discussing "primitive": "our professional delicacy in avoiding the term ‘Primitive’ is the product of secret convictions of superiority."

 110f Magic and ritual do not stem from confusion of categories. It is not that people who believe in this are stupid, they are pretty similar to "us":
 "This is not a peculiarity of primitive culture. It is true of ‘us’ as much as of ‘them’, in so far as ‘we’ are not professional philosophers. As business man, farmer, housewife no one of us has time or inclination to work out a systematic metaphysics. Our view of the world is arrived at piecemeal, in response to particular practical problems."

 112 Azande know that things tend to just happen, but why do they happen to particular people and not to others? Because witchcraft!

 113 "metaphysics is a by-product … of the urgent practical concern"

 114 "Without forms filled in triplicate, without licenses and passports and radio-police cars they must somehow create a society and commit men and women to its norms" → Latour; Praxis-Theorie…

 "Powers and dangers"

 118 "mad" people are outside of society but they can bring powers in society that it can't have from within.

 119 "Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable."

 119 "The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status"

 123 Internal powers are gifts or curses *coming over* a person. External powers need do be created with spells or curses said.

 236 Explicit Structures/ people in powerful positions/controlled power
 vague structure/ powerless/unconscious, uncontrollable
 ambiguous position → danger to (ordered) society

 132 Officials abusing their office → Illegitimate use of spiritual power → witchcraft → Uncontrollable

 133 Witchcraft, cursing, ancestors are not easy to abuse as they are partly forces on their own. Sorcery is open to abuse as it is more tool or (modern) medicine like

 134 If authority can be gained by sorcery, it is hard to distinguis between legit and illegit authority (capitalism?)

 135 Witchcraft and Sorcery are both biased towards failure (capitalism?)

 137 People around witches attribute bad things to them, letting bad powers grow. People around saints attribute good things happening to saints, letting their goodness grow. → Empiricism and self fulfillment, I guess.

 139 Luck and mana can find one and leave one again

 145 Westeners interpret rites as childish or or psychopathic (marginal positions!)

 151 Rules do not produce, they might mainly explain: " Trying to find a connection between the verbal form and the amusement derived from it he laboriously reduced joke interpretation to a few general rules. No comedian script-writer could use the rules for inventing jokes, but they help us to see some connections between laughter, the unconscious, and the structure of stories." → recipe?

 153 Body ←mirrors → society

 156f "Cooing is making it one’s own via societal pre-digestion → recipe

 "For food is produced by the combined efforts of several castes of varying degrees of purity: the blacksmith, carpenter, ropemaker, the peasant. Before being admitted to the body some clear symbolic break is needed to  express food’s separation from necessary but impure contacts."

 162 Moral rules are balanced against each other and have questions of which take precedence. Pollution, in contrast, applies or not.

 164 Pollution is called in if other sanctions do not work.

 (i) When a situation is morally ill-defined, a pollution belief can provide a rule for determining post hoc whether infraction has taken place, or not.
 (ii) When moral principles come into conflict, a pollution rule can reduce confusion by giving a simple focus for concern.
 (iii) When action that is held to be morally wrong does not provoke moral indignation, belief in the harmful consequences of a pollution can have the effect of aggravating the seriousness of the offense, and so of marshaling public opinion on the side of the right.
 (iv) When moral indignation is not reinforced by practical sanctions, pollution beliefs can provide a deterrent to wrongdoers

 169 Two ways to get rid of pollution: Confessional or non-confessional (Sacrifice, bath…)

 The system at war with itself

 If rules are very clear there can be "conflicts between men, but no conflicts or principles"

 181 Clash: Exogamic clan that also fights other clans.

 183 Find if pollution did happen via post-hoc evaluation: Is there a rash? other signs? (see also 139) (this does not contradict 162 as metaphysical an undiscovered pollution is still there)

 The system shattered and renewed

 200 "Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise. "

 200 "he final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction" → Tsing: Scale, Bowker/Star: Sorting…

 211 "The Lele are not fools. They recognize that life must come to an end. But if matters were to take their natural course they would expect everyone to live out his natural span and to sink slowly from senility to the grave. When this happens they rejoice, for such an old man or woman has triumphed over all the pitfalls that lay in the way and achieved completion. But this rarely happens. Most people, according to Lele are struck down by sorcery long before they reach their goal. " → which is somewhat similar to modern Western beliefs that death is preventable (though Westeners attribute it to natural forces acting upon preventable actions of people, which is more spiritual than the Lele thinking it is intentional sorcery!)

 215f

 One way of protecting ritual from skepticism is to suppose that an enemy, within or without the community, is continually undoing its good
 effect.…
 Another way of protecting the belief that religion can deliver prosperity here and now is to make ritual efficacy depend on difficult conditions.…the performer and audience should be in a proper state of mind, free of guilt, free of ill-will and so on.  [scientific experiment?]

 The third way is for the religious teaching to change its tack.

 218 [dealing with death by embracing a symbol of it] "Madness will come if they neglect the ritual of freely accepting the corruption of the body; sanity is assured if they perform the ritual."
	2 Dirt is disorder, disorder is subjective

	3 removing dirt is ordering the environment creatively

	4 people violating the moral code can cause harm; they are treated as infectious

	4 relations and pollution between people mirror that of society

	5 "For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience." "It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, about and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. In this sense I am not afraid of the charge of having made the social structure seem over-rigid."

	6 We receive order and modify it → structuration

	8 dirt can be avoided out of hygiene or out of convention; Rules of convention can be set aside out of practicality.

	10 The sacred its to be set apart

	11 Dirt is relative; the shit of (holy) cows is impure to god but purifies humans, even the holy among them

	14 "Advanced" religions see uncleanness as spiritual unworthiness.

	[Loads of discussions on what magic, hygiene is according the different writers]

	40 Medical Materialism (W. James) treats religious experience as something not religious (rationality, intoxication, dream; "they have a pork taboo, cause eating pork can cause…)

	41 Neither are purity and hygiene totally separate, nor are they the same

	49 Ways to reduce ambiguity: Label with another category that does not cause conflict; kill it; see it as affirming the rule; see it as danger; use it to enrich meaning (like in art)

	62 Blessing as source of good; withdrawal of it as source of bad; it unleashes the course

	63 Observing the rules (or not) has actual effects; it is not merely expressive

	67 Holy= complete

	69 Species that are unclean contradict the class of animals they are in or are not prototypical of their class → "Where can we put it?!"=> unclean

	75 With Christianity and the sermon of the mount sin went inwards: "…regarded as matter of will and not of external circumstances" → see shaping the body by sport, diet or by a corset? → See Foucault

	78 A ritual provides a frame for focus

	79 Signs as giving focus to action, not as self acting magic (A person knots a bundle of grass to express his wish to arrive in time; it is not seen as act on itself; but it helps to focus attention on getting home quickly)

	79 " So it is not enough to say that ritual helps us to experience more vividly what we would have experienced anyway. It is not merely like the visual aid which illustrates the verbal instructions for opening cans and cases. If it were just a kind of dramatic map or diagram of what is known it would
	always follow experience. But in fact ritual does not play this secondary role. It can come first in formulating experience. It can permit knowledge of what would otherwise not be known at all. " →recipe

	86 Money as Ritual: " Mauss wrote of primitive society repaying itself with the false coin of magic. The metaphor of money admirably sums up what we want to assert of ritual. Money provides a fixed, external, recognisable sign for what would be confused, contradictable operations; ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardises situations, and so helps to evaluate them. Money makes a link between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialised type of ritual.
	In comparing magic with false currency Mauss was wrong. Money can only perform its role of intensifying economic interaction if the public has faith in it. If faith in it is shaken, the currency is useless. So too with ritual;"
	→ Graeber Debt.

	93 discussing "primitive": "our professional delicacy in avoiding the term ‘Primitive’ is the product of secret convictions of superiority."

	110f Magic and ritual do not stem from confusion of categories. It is not that people who believe in this are stupid, they are pretty similar to "us":
	"This is not a peculiarity of primitive culture. It is true of ‘us’ as much as of ‘them’, in so far as ‘we’ are not professional philosophers. As business man, farmer, housewife no one of us has time or inclination to work out a systematic metaphysics. Our view of the world is arrived at piecemeal, in response to particular practical problems."

	112 Azande know that things tend to just happen, but why do they happen to particular people and not to others? Because witchcraft!

	113 "metaphysics is a by-product … of the urgent practical concern"

	114 "Without forms filled in triplicate, without licenses and passports and radio-police cars they must somehow create a society and commit men and women to its norms" → Latour; Praxis-Theorie…

	"Powers and dangers"

	118 "mad" people are outside of society but they can bring powers in society that it can't have from within.

	119 "Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable."

	119 "The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status"

	123 Internal powers are gifts or curses coming over a person. External powers need do be created with spells or curses said.

	236 Explicit Structures/ people in powerful positions/controlled power
	vague structure/ powerless/unconscious, uncontrollable
	ambiguous position → danger to (ordered) society

	132 Officials abusing their office → Illegitimate use of spiritual power → witchcraft → Uncontrollable

	133 Witchcraft, cursing, ancestors are not easy to abuse as they are partly forces on their own. Sorcery is open to abuse as it is more tool or (modern) medicine like

	134 If authority can be gained by sorcery, it is hard to distinguis between legit and illegit authority (capitalism?)

	135 Witchcraft and Sorcery are both biased towards failure (capitalism?)

	137 People around witches attribute bad things to them, letting bad powers grow. People around saints attribute good things happening to saints, letting their goodness grow. → Empiricism and self fulfillment, I guess.

	139 Luck and mana can find one and leave one again

	145 Westeners interpret rites as childish or or psychopathic (marginal positions!)

	151 Rules do not produce, they might mainly explain: " Trying to find a connection between the verbal form and the amusement derived from it he laboriously reduced joke interpretation to a few general rules. No comedian script-writer could use the rules for inventing jokes, but they help us to see some connections between laughter, the unconscious, and the structure of stories." → recipe?

	153 Body ←mirrors → society

	156f "Cooing is making it one’s own via societal pre-digestion → recipe

	"For food is produced by the combined efforts of several castes of varying degrees of purity: the blacksmith, carpenter, ropemaker, the peasant. Before being admitted to the body some clear symbolic break is needed to express food’s separation from necessary but impure contacts."

	162 Moral rules are balanced against each other and have questions of which take precedence. Pollution, in contrast, applies or not.

	164 Pollution is called in if other sanctions do not work.

	(i) When a situation is morally ill-defined, a pollution belief can provide a rule for determining post hoc whether infraction has taken place, or not.
	(ii) When moral principles come into conflict, a pollution rule can reduce confusion by giving a simple focus for concern.
	(iii) When action that is held to be morally wrong does not provoke moral indignation, belief in the harmful consequences of a pollution can have the effect of aggravating the seriousness of the offense, and so of marshaling public opinion on the side of the right.
	(iv) When moral indignation is not reinforced by practical sanctions, pollution beliefs can provide a deterrent to wrongdoers

	169 Two ways to get rid of pollution: Confessional or non-confessional (Sacrifice, bath…)

	The system at war with itself

	If rules are very clear there can be "conflicts between men, but no conflicts or principles"

	181 Clash: Exogamic clan that also fights other clans.

	183 Find if pollution did happen via post-hoc evaluation: Is there a rash? other signs? (see also 139) (this does not contradict 162 as metaphysical an undiscovered pollution is still there)

	The system shattered and renewed

	200 "Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise. "

	200 "he final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction" → Tsing: Scale, Bowker/Star: Sorting…

	211 "The Lele are not fools. They recognize that life must come to an end. But if matters were to take their natural course they would expect everyone to live out his natural span and to sink slowly from senility to the grave. When this happens they rejoice, for such an old man or woman has triumphed over all the pitfalls that lay in the way and achieved completion. But this rarely happens. Most people, according to Lele are struck down by sorcery long before they reach their goal. " → which is somewhat similar to modern Western beliefs that death is preventable (though Westeners attribute it to natural forces acting upon preventable actions of people, which is more spiritual than the Lele thinking it is intentional sorcery!)

	215f

	One way of protecting ritual from skepticism is to suppose that an enemy, within or without the community, is continually undoing its good
	effect.…
	Another way of protecting the belief that religion can deliver prosperity here and now is to make ritual efficacy depend on difficult conditions.…the performer and audience should be in a proper state of mind, free of guilt, free of ill-will and so on. [scientific experiment?]

	The third way is for the religious teaching to change its tack.

	218 [dealing with death by embracing a symbol of it] "Madness will come if they neglect the ritual of freely accepting the corruption of the body; sanity is assured if they perform the ritual."