Taboo

Taboo officially derives from the Tongan word tabu but is also associated with the Polynesian word tapu and the Hawaiian kapu. The word first appeared in Western culture in the journal of Captain James Cook in 1777. While taboo literally means “off-limits” or “forbidden,” it was once associated mainly with the superstitions and magic practices of certain “primitive” peoples. Early anthropologists, such as Crawford H. Toy, suggest that some societies “have never got beyond believing that the earth is flat, and in such as these taboo still reigns. But the peoples of progress have thrown off taboo as they have thrown off a hundred like things” (1899, 155). Current anthropologists believe that, far from being limited to such people groups, taboos exist as societal prohibitions in all human cultures. Taboos most typically involve but are not limited to bodily practices and concerns, specifically in the areas of sex, food, and death—for example, incest, cannibalism, and the handling of corpses.

Renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud played the most influential role in the popular usage of the word taboo. In 1913 he published four essays, titled Totem and Taboo, in which he outlines a theory of evolutionary anthropology that posits that a culture evolves in tandem with the psychological development of a given society. Naturally, Freud's vision of taboo is informed by, and consistent with, his theories of psychoanalysis. Thus, he draws parallels between the psychological dilemmas of childhood and the cultural dilemmas of any society progressing toward “civilization.” Under this model, cultural taboos can be understood as similar to obsessional neuroses. Although Totem and Taboo, like most works of evolutionary anthropologists, has been largely discredited, it remains a crucial factor in understanding the historical development of the word taboo.

The elements of evolutionary anthropology pervasive in Totem and Taboo result from the influence of James George Frazer, evolutionary anthropologist and author of The Golden Bough. To Frazer, taboos exist under the cultural presence of magic or the fallacious belief in a mystical link between certain metaphysically associated objects and practices. In this case, the scientific study of “civilized” societies has explained away magic and, likewise, the taboos. Yet, as various sociologists and anthropologists have shown, taboos continue to exist in “civilized” Western cultures.

Anthropologists have increasingly shown that taboos have a fluidity that resists the categories evolutionary anthropologists once used to describe them. Most notably, Franz Steiner's critical study, Taboo (1956), presents all previously leading taboo theories as arbitrary and limiting to the true nature of taboo. Continuing along these lines, in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Polluting and Taboo (1966), an analysis of Hindu and Jewish dietary laws, Mary Douglas exposes the fluidity of seemingly universal taboos, such as those surrounding dirt and purity. Similarly, in “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse” (1964), Edmund Leach portrays the concept of taboo as involved in the modern dilemma of boundary fluidity, especially as it pertains to self-definition. This move toward understanding taboos as fluid elements [Page 1428]within the general fluidity of culture is consistent with the ideas of postmodernist scholars about the fragmentation of societies.

...