They gave me a ticket once. For putting the wrong kind of container in one of my recycling bags. I must say, I did not think this conducive to encouraging recycling among the public. Easier to throw the recyclables all in a concealing black garbage bag with the rest of the trash than to be caught recycling wrongly in the required clear bags.
(I still recycle. But I get help. And look at the very in-depth explanatory poster frequently.)
" The anthropologist Mary Douglas is famous for writing about dirt as a shifting category for everything that is out of place: shoes on the floor aren’t dirty, but shoes on the dinner table are; it isn’t dirty to have cooking utensils in the kitchen, but it is to have them in your bedsheets. She sees what counts as dirt as a gateway to the bigger systems that judgments like this are caught up in, and a way to figure out how commonsense judgments become that way.
RN: Well, her argum
ent is partly that you can understand the entire cosmos of a culture by looking at its definitions of dirty and clean, and acceptable versus unacceptable, the profane and the sacred. You can start with something as humble as dirt and read it out to an entire worldview.As a scholar, you can start anywhere. And that’s the beauty and the challenge, the frustration and the terror and the lifetime obsession of a scholarly bent. I start with this set of questions because I just can’t figure it out.
The goal of a scholar is to reveal things that otherwise might never be seen or studied or considered or understood or debated. But that’s an infinite list! It’s also in many ways the job of an artist, to show us things about ourselves. The scholarship of anthropology sometimes gets trapped in its own lofty language…. If I can help illuminate some facet of us as a species that makes culture, as a species that tells stories, as a species that plays in ways that connect us to each other, then I’ve done my job. My entry point is through things we decide are no longer worth keeping. ... "
The world recognizes that sacred-profane is a division we humans see and name. The world thinks this is subjective, that we make it up. And so many societies have made up so many rules about this. About what is holy and what is not.
Interesting. Because there is a real holy and not.
And it is not subjective. HE is not subjective.
This makes me want to go back and read all of God's words on holiness in the Pentateuch again.
And to ask questions about what is considered holy and what is considered profane, and why,
in the cultures I encounter.
photo from artist Nicole Fournier, here.
