Filthy Lucre

Victorian Ideas of Money

Bibliographic Data

ID5799709
AuthorsChristopher Herbert (0000-0002-6239-9120, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume44
Issue2
Pages185-213
Publication date2002-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueVictorian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0042-5222 • E-ISSN: 1527-2052
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/vic.2002.44.2.185
OpenAlexW1990411275
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited14

In 1878, youngJames Frazer published an article in Encyclopaedia Britannica on Taboo in which, through a study of prohibition systems in ancient and in societies in Polynesia and elsewhere, he argued that concepts of sacred, on one hand, and of filthy or polluted, on other, are originally one and same. opposition of sacred and accursed, clean and unclean, which plays so important a part in later history of religion, did in fact arise by differentiation from single root idea of taboo, which includes and reconciles them both and by reference to which alone their history and mutual relation are intelligible, says Frazer. Even in advanced societies, he adds provocatively, without elaborating, the [.. .] derive much of their force from an original system of (Taboo 16-17). The evolutionary superiority of modern Europeans over primitive savages lies precisely in our ability to make this distinction between worship of divine and revulsion from dirty, impure, contaminating: so runs nominal argument of The Golden Bough (1890), where Frazer expounds theory of taboo at length. But potentially heretical and sacrilegious character of his argument could not have failed to strike readers from a culture fixated, as Victorian culture was, upon extreme segregation of two categories alleged by Frazer to be ultimately equivalent. The theory declared that fundamental moral sentiments of Christian society contained at their core an almost unthinkable instability in relations of sacred and dangerously dirty. Frazer's anthropology thus implied that normative modern bipolar pattern of and religious thinking was produced and maintained by interposition of massive cultural machinery designed to force asunder, to define as opposites, categories

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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