Those topics naturally associated with the concept of taboo such as incest, cannibalism, food, sex, pollution and death are discussed in detail with theoretical analyses by major scholars in the field, while there are also separate entries for the foremost writers on the subject, including Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach, Franz Steiner and Frederick Barth. This makes the encyclopedia useful for students and those with a specialist interest while at the same time introducing the general reader to the background and context of some familiar present-day taboos, such as table manners, dress and pornography. But not all entries are entirely serious in their aim: there is plenty to discover within these pages of an imaginative and fanciful nature, customs and prohibitions that betray a playfulness at work quite at odds with the gravity normally associated with taboo.
The word taboo derives from the Tongan tabu and is related to the more general Polynesian word, tapu, and the Hawaiian kapu. It became a familiar term in Europe after it was mentioned by Captain James Cook in his journal describing his third voyage around the world. He was introduced to the expression in 1777 in the Tonga, or Friendly, Islands. The literal meaning of the word is simply “marked off”, or “off-limits”, possibly a combination of ta (to mark) and pu (exceedingly). Unfortunately, the term was interpreted by early anthropologists such as William Robertson Smith and James Frazer as a form of superstition, or magic, and became a repository for all that remained inexplicable in preliterate cultures. It took later scholars like Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach to show how taboos are just as prevalent in the industrialised West. Far from being remnants of a distant time or place, a product of supposedly “primitive” thought, taboos are a crucial part of our, or indeed any, society, determining how people must and must not behave.
Perhaps because of the low esteem in which the evolutionary theories of earlier writers are held today, contemporary anthropologists have often shied away from using the term in the earlier sense, avoiding the conceptual complications of “sacred” versus “polluting”, preferring to focus on the context, reason and agents of specific avoidances. As a result no comprehensive encyclopedia or dictionary on taboos has been published in recent years and the last attempt at a general survey of the topic dates back to 1956. This means that there is no overview of either the many excellent monographs on prohibitions within individual cultures or of current theories on the importance of specific taboos.
The present book, therefore, is intended as a preliminary guide to taboos, examining some aspects of their meaning, use, and importance in religion, economics, politics and society. It draws on a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, folklore, psychology, art, literature, music and the natural sciences. The time-frame ranges from the origins of human culture, with evidence of animal remains found in ancient Chinese tombs, to ancient law codes from India, Iran and the Near East and proscriptions against pollution in Greece and Rome from the classical era, and extends to 20th-century society with the application by surrealist artists and film-makers of the controversial psychological insights into the subject made by Sigmund Freud. Because the aim of the encyclopedia is to be as diverse as possible, the use of taboos in traditional literature and folklore, such as the importance of the geis in medieval Irish texts, is also included.
Those topics naturally associated with the concept of taboo such as incest, cannibalism, food, sex, pollution and death are discussed in detail with theoretical analyses by major scholars in the field, while there are also separate entries for the foremost writers on the subject, including Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach, Franz Steiner and Frederick Barth. This makes the encyclopedia useful for students and those with a specialist interest while at the same time introducing the general reader to the background and context of some familiar present-day taboos, such as table manners, dress and pornography. But not all entries are entirely serious in their aim: there is plenty to discover within these pages of an imaginative and fanciful nature, customs and prohibitions that betray a playfulness at work quite at odds with the gravity normally associated with taboo.
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