The politics of purity

When, actually, is dirt matter out of place

Bibliographic Data

ID4774761
AuthorsR Duschinsky (0000-0003-2023-5328, Northumbria University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume119
Issue1
Pages63-77
Publication date2013-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThesis Eleven (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0725513613511321
OpenAlexW2015344284
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited45

In Purity and Danger, Douglas theorizes purity and impurity in terms of the instantiation and disruption of a shared symbolic order. Purity/impurity discourses act, according to Purity and Danger, as a homeostatic system which ensures the preservation of this social whole, generally encoding that which threatens social equilibrium as impurity. There have been calls for new social theory on this 'under-theorized' topic. Presenting such further reflections, I argue that Douglas' account is less a full explanation than a regularity. Representations of purity are only secondarily symbols of the social order. Rather, purity/impurity discourses are only associated with 'matter out of place' when phenomena are assessed for their relative deviation from an imputed state of 'self-identity': qualitative homogeneity and correspondence with their essence. Purity and impurity do more than judge self-identity, however. They can play a fundamental role in its performative construction; they are well adapted for smuggling assumptions into our discourses regarding the essence of particular phenomena and forms of subjectivity, simplifying a complex world into a stark contrast between the dangerous and the innocent, the valuable and the valueless, the necessary and the contingent, the originary and the prosthetic, the real and the apparent, and the unitary and the fragmented

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Unitary state · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Social and Cultural Dynamics

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub