Workshop on Douglas' Purity and Danger (pp. vii-58)
by Thad Curtz curtzt@elwha.evergreen.edu
This workshop explores some issues raised by Purity and Danger - first asking you to relate them to issues in your own experience, then moving on to begin exploring some possible ways of connecting her concerns to the issues we've been discussing.
The first short step in this workshop is supposed to be done individually. After you have the list it asks you to make, please form a group of four and find a place to work - in here, in the fine metal shop, or in the corridor. (We want to be able to move around and kibitz with these groups.) From Step 9 on, you'll need to join another group to form a group of eight or so... Please appoint one person to keep an eye on the time and move the discussion along if it gets bogged down; we'd like to have some time left at the end for general discussion and questions, so if things come up that you want to clarify or pursue further please write them down so you don't forget them. Please don't read through the whole workshop at the beginning; read all the instructions for one step, do it, then read the instructions for the next step, and so on.
Step One - (5 minutes of individual work) Please get out a piece of paper, close your eyes, and think about moments in your life when you experience some things as dirt. Spend a few minutes writing things down, then thinking, then writing things down, until you have a list of half a dozen moments.
Step Two - Find three other people to work with.
Step Three - (10 minutes) Have each person read his or her list to the group. Working as a group, think about some of these experiences and make two new lists as a group. One list should contain the different feelings that are involved in these various encounters with dirt; the second new list should contain the different behaviors or responses to dirt that are involved in these encounters. One way to do this might be to work through all the items on one personŐs list, and then consider whether there were any experiences on other people's lists that seemed different, and might involve other feelings or responses.
Step 4 - (7 minutes) Talk together for a few minutes about how you think dirty things are related to weird things. See if you can agree on any rules about how they are related.
Step 5 - A thought experiment (2 minutes) (At this point, the workshop moves on to exploring some of Douglas' ideas. First, one of her basic points in this section - the relativity of dirt.) On page 36, Douglas quotes what she calls an old definition - "Dirt is matter out of place." Here are a couple of examples of the sort of thing she has in mind.
Example 1 - Imagine that you have a small empty glass, like a juice glass. Swish your tongue around in your mouth until you've accumulated some saliva; then imagine spitting the saliva into the glass. Keep doing this until you have three-quarters of an inch or so of saliva in the glass. See it...? Now I'd like you to imagine drinking it.
Example 2 - You're sitting at your kitchen table with somebody, eating spaghetti and meatballs with tomato sauce. You're holding the fork in one hand, and resting the other hand on the table top. A little sauce gets on your lower lip, and you clean it off with your upper lip. Then a little sauce falls onto the back of your hand, and you raise it to your lips and clean it off. Then you're gesturing animatedly about something, and a little sauce falls off onto the palm of your hand (which has been resting on the table), and you raise it to your lips and clean it off. Then some falls onto the tabletop, and you pick it up on your finger and clean it off with your lips. Then some falls onto the same spot on the tabletop and you bend over and clean it off with your lips....
Somewhere in one or both of these examples, I hope there's at least one moment that many of you would experience as involving contact with something dirty... Please pick one or the other example to work on.
Step 6 (5 minutes) When (and exactly why) do you think that the matter in your example goes from being clean to being dirty?
Step 7 (5 minutes) On page 50, Douglas lists the four kinds of explanations Biblical scholars have given for the abominations in Leviticus - "hygiene, aesthetics, morals, and instinctive revulsion." (She claims that none of them offers an adequate explanation, of course.) Each person in your group should take one of these ideas, and use it to try to explain why it is that people are enjoined from contact with the dirt in the little scene you're discussing. (You may have to look around in the earlier pages of this chapter for an example of the kind of explanation you are supposed to invent to help you do this.)
Step 8 (10 minutes) Each person should present his or her explanation to the group, and the group should decide whether they think it's a persuasive one or not.
Step 9 - Now combine your group with another one.
Step 10 (20 minutes) Here's the second idea to explore - possible ambiguities of dirt and the sacred in our own culture. (Note that Douglas claims these don't occur in contemporary culture, I think.) For the first ten minutes of this section, four of the people from your new larger group should work together on describing and trying to understand how experiences involving dirt and sacredness are related in the realm of sexuality; the other four of you should work on describing and trying to understand how experiences involving dirt and sacredness are related in the realm of money. After ten minutes, get back together, tell each other what you have figured out, and talk about how these two realms are alike or different. (If your group is completely stuck on this question, get Thad to come give you some ideas about how to start...)
Step 10 (20 minutes) Here's the third idea to explore - the relations between religion, ritual, the sacred and other similar categories in Douglas' book and art. Late in the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold asserted that in the future art (particularly literature) would increasingly come to replace and fulfill the functions of traditional religion. To what extent do you think this happened or is happening? Please work together on a chart about your group's views on this question. Get somebody to record your ideas by taking a page and making a column for "Likenesses" on the left side; on the right side of the page make a column for "Differences." Fill in the chart by working through the following items.
1. In the "Likenesses" column, put any ways your group can think of in which being an artist is like being a priest or a monk. Put any differences you think are important in the other column.
2. In the "Likenesses" column, put any ways your group can think of in which making art is like a religious ritual. Put any differences you think are important in the other column.
3. In the "Likenesses" column, put any ways your group can think of in which a museum is like a sacred worship space. Put any differences you think are important in the other column.
4. In the "Likenesses" column, put any ways your group can think of in which the social or psychological functions of art for people who are interested in it are like those of religion for worshippers. Put any differences you think are important in the other column.
Step 11 (20 minutes) Here's the last question. If you don't have time for it today, please think about it for the next seminar...
Originally, the line between anthropologists and explorers was a wavering one - both went to distant places, encountered unfamiliar sights and languages and actions, and "represented" them to themselves and their fellow-countrymen. Greenblatt's book, Marvelous Possessions, is devoted to thinking about the dynamics of this sort of encounter. Here's a quote it might be useful to go back and study now, from p. 135, in the last chapter on "The Go-Between".
But the path that leads from wonder back out to the web of connections - connections that make descriptions, judgments and actions possible - branches in two sharply opposed directions. One path leads to the discursive strategies that we have analyzed in Herodotus or Mandeville: that is, to articulations of the hidden links between the radically opposed ways of being and hence to some form of acceptance of the other in the self and the self in the other. The movement is from radical alterity - you have nothing in common with the other - to a self-recognition that is also a mode of self-estrangement: you are the other and the other is you. The alternate path leads to the discursive strategies that we have analyzed in Columbus and now in Bernal Diaz: that is, to articulations of the radical differences that make renaming, transformation, and appropriation possible. The movement here must pass through identification to complete estrangement: for a moment you see yourself confounded with the other, but then you make the other become an alien object, a thing, that you can destroy or incorporate at will. (It is, I have argued throughout this book, the dream of possession that is the key to this latter path.)
Of course, there are different sorts of possession, intellectual as well as physical. (Some people might say Solomon appropriates Cornell and claims him as her territory...) Also, a person or a book can do varying things at varying moments. What can you say about the discursive machinery that Douglas is employing in her discussions? Are there places where it's like Columbus's, and if so, where? Places where it's like Mandeville's? Places where it's like the go-between's? What would you say about the discursive machinery this workshop has employed?