Purity and danger : an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo

Nick.embrey

Lost her at the reconstitution of the categories of "primitive" and "modern" around the notion of differentiation. Her argument here is that modern cultures differentiate between the objective and the subjective, while primitive cultures experience all as subjective/objective. Even bracketing how unPC and misleading this temporal thematization is, I think it's still a mistake. An example: she thinks of the Homeric texts as embodying the undifferentiated and primitive mind, where things, all things, even emotions and personal actions, seem to occur from without. But let's remember that this is also the mode of the "modern" mind sometimes. Quoting Levi-Strauss, "I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance."