The Purity Complex: Psychological Resonances and Social Order

The purity complex weaves together complex sociocultural and personal meanings. It helps anchor Bhaktapur's realm of extraordinary religious symbols in a reality sensed both as natural and compelling.

We have noted that certain features of the purity complex place it

in a larger field of "contaminations" where socially and experientially defined objects are compromised. The ideas of contagion, of flow, of transformation, of ineffectual bounding conditions that characterize or are implied by all contaminations contrast with conceptions of "uncontaminated" or unblurred or cleanly presented and represented bounded persons and objects, fixed order, and the kinds of meanings derived from the existence and relationships of such fixed persons and objects. The first set of conceptions is closer to reverie, dream, magic, child-like understandings; the second, to the more fixed and bounded categories of everyday logic, a logic in which social definition and categorization play a large part, the realm of ordinary events. Considerations of impurity are, so to speak, at one, but only one, boundary between order and disorder. The approach of that boundary results in psychological discomfort that serves to keep people within those social boundaries. On the other side is an altogether different kind of world. At the margins of Bhaktapur the untouchables serve to keep the clean citizens within the city. Yet, just beyond them is not the disgusting mess that the ordinary dharma and its associated benign moral deities threaten, but a world for whose ordering, uses, and relationships, impurity is no longer relevant.

There are various procedures for trying to keep oneself and others in the ordinary social and mental universe. Procedures for the management of purity are among them. The purity complex helps to ensure the definition of individuals as socially defined persons , and emphasizes the body as the sign and locus of that person. It makes use of the idea of the clean body as a sign of that individual's perceptible, sensible, acceptable adequacy to others, and thus that person's acceptability as a unit in the hierarchical system of human and divine relationships. Purity as a marker of personhood is associated for any individual with a complex of ideas and feelings about his or her social definition—reputation and face, embarrassment, and shame. The purity complex is related to only one segment of moral emotions and ideas. People who have become contaminated have committed no moral error, no papa , unless they became contaminated through some mistake on their part.^[24] They have no cause to feel guilt. Guilt and repentance, their social sources, their personal meanings, and the procedures for rectifying them, in spite of their occasional labeling as inner impurities, have significantly different relations to social and personal order.

The uses of the delineation of body surfaces through purity and purification to define persons within the hierarchical system, echo a

traditional system of sumptuary laws and other external markers of status. They are in contrast to systems of defining status and person by differences in inner essence, such as racism. Such efforts at fixing categories through surface delineation and marking take much of their significance from and contribute to local doctrines and experiences of a shifting, context-dependent selfhood.^[25]

The purity complex makes use not only of the imagery of the surface of the body but also of the flow of foods into it to be incorporated in it, and of exuviae—above all, feces—flowing out of it, to be separated and rejected. This imagery of flow is not related to the exterior surface of the body—the body as a sign of a person—but to its interior composition and to the acceptance, incorporation, excretion, and rejection of substances into and out of that interior. This imagery is not related to the static bounded category of the person as represented by that person's surface presentability, but rather to the dynamics of the construction of a socially defined individual in systematic relation to the larger hierarchically inclusive and exclusive social "bodies" to which he or she belongs. In this field of the purity complex, ideas and feelings associated with palatability, thirst, hunger, and thus desire on the one hand, are opposed to disgust on the other. Things that do not belong to one's extended body, particularly if they have been cast off by it, flowed through it—as so many of the substances that are passed down through the status system seem to do—risk being marked as repulsive. Palatable versus disgusting substances, desire versus disgust, add to the concerns about proper surface appearance (and thus conformity) a dynamic of flow, and encourage the maintenance of structure by countering the anarchic desires (and available cultural doctrines, which are potentially subversive to the social order) of being equal to all^[26] or else unrelated to all.

Interpretation of body symbolism and its cultural extensions is a particularly dangerous enterprise unless it is carefully related to its expression in particular peoples' personal discourse and experience—which we cannot do here. We can, however, offer a preliminary improvisation. The formula that determines the direction of flow, "palatable from equals and superiors, impalatable from inferiors," has a metaphorical implication that the body is in part constituted of substances flowing from above. Exuviae pollution is based on an opposition of inside and outside the body in which substances that are within body boundaries are unproblematic but once outside those boundaries become disgusting, that is, not to be reincorporated through eating. A corporate group

such as phuki or thar —extensions of the basic household group defined by sharing one cooking area—is a group most of whose food can be shared without concern about pollution. They are in that sense one body.^[27] However, the hierarchical cipa system adds further psychological resonance and social order to the more static group-defining shared commensality. It is during their infancy and childhood that people first encounter in the household cipa system the idea that all food is acceptable from all people higher in status. Feeding by others in the family begins, of course, in nursing, with its presumed experience of the infant's unbounded union with its mother whose milk and later feedings it shares, the two belonging in some sense to a single body. The model of the group within which cipa , "contaminated" by their substance, becomes sustaining food echoes not only the sustenance and support and dependence of such early experience with the mother but also, perhaps, a perception of one body within which all is acceptable, nothing disgusting.

This is the view looking up the system; looking down however something changes. You have a "maternal" relation to all below you because you feed them, and they are dependent on you. However, as such dependence moves out of the household, and to successively lower depths of the status system, an implication of the system that is muted elsewhere in it becomes more and more clear. The flow of substance and sustenance throughout the system is not only sustaining, it is progressively degrading and polluting. The excretion metaphor now gains an ever-increasing strength over the feeding metaphor. We may speculate that another of the many vital functions served by the lowest thar s is to isolate the stigmatizing implications of the cipa system, and to deflect them from the relationships in the upper reaches of the system onto themselves.

The pollution that affects surfaces, and the pollution that may enter into the body by ingestion have each their own specific clusters of personal meanings and public uses.

The purification procedures that restore the purity compromised by birth and death pollution and (for upper-status people particularly) contact with low status people,^[28] and which prepare people to remove "everyday" pollution in preparation for religious acts, are all bya(n)kegus —that is, purification is directed to "dirty contaminants," and, among these, to dirty contaminants on the body surface.

The rectifications of surfaces relates people to one aspect of the social

order—that segment symbolized by the polarity of Brahman and untouchable, the specific segment ordered by the symbolic resources of the dharmic order. Purification relates people in the realm of the deities to the moral gods, the representatives of that civic order. The moral gods are themselves subject to impurity—purification prior to worship, and the purification and care of the images of the deities and of the "sacred" area in which puja s are held protect the definition of the moral gods as well as the worshipers.^[29] One important legend in Bhaktapur (chap. 15) tells how that city's major group of dangerous deities, the Nine Durgas, are impervious to the impurities of feces and pig flesh, which would pollute a god such as Visnu^[*] . Similarly, during worship the dangerous deities are offered foods (meat and alcoholic spirits) that if not "dirty," are nevertheless forbidden to Brahmans and would threaten their status.^[30]

In the case of the dangerous deities power overcomes the importance of purity. The dangerous deities escape from the constraints ordering the civic moral dharma ; that is why they are dangerous, and that is why they are useful. This transcendence is allied to creativity and fecundity (as the agricultural meanings of the dangerous deities witness), to the protection of the perimeters of the civic system, and to danger. Even within the hierarchical order of separated and ranked units of Bhaktapur's city system, however, purity is of differentiated importance. Although the entire system of thar s is arranged in a hierarchy of purity with the Brahman and Po(n) at its extreme ends, it is possible, as we have argued in chapter 10, to discern two vertical divisions of that hierarchy. One segment—characterized by the Brahman, the untouchables, and the set of priestly functionaries, is central to that system. Not only are their functions related to the manipulation and uses of purity and impurity, but in their lives and status they are the representation of the socially constructive effects of the purity complex. A Brahman who becomes impure would no longer effectively be a Brahman, and were an untouchable to become pure he would no longer be an untouchable. But a farmer is a farmer and a king is a king no matter what their state of purity. The other vertical segment of the status system deals with realities beyond the construction of the mesocosmic symbolic order. Sometimes their effectiveness requires, as was clear in the case of the king, going beyond that order and contradicting it. Not only the king, but also the craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and others are fitted into the system by a kind of unstable tinkering. Their hierarchical position, rationalized into the purity system, is based in part on other often more

obscure factors, deriving from history and power and class. In this perspective the king is closer to the farmer than to the Brahman, and the Brahman is closer to the untouchable than to the king.

Placing the purity complex in the realm of the sacred is misleading in various ways. On the one hand, there are essential components of the religious sphere, the realm of the dangerous deities and that of the ascetic, for example, where purity is not at issue, although its transcendence helps define that realm. On the other hand, where purity is related to religious conception and action (and to social order), it is in itself within the realm of the ordinary. It is precisely this seemingly natural aspect with its powerful intellectual and emotional implications which is made use of to anchor, motivate, and preserve the constructions built of it.

The idea of impurity as a natural substance, not a natural essence, is associated with complex ideas about the nature and management of that substance, how to avoid it, and how to get rid of it. Because it is not an essence, because the status implications of the purity complex are not biological and racist, the conditions of life of individuals at various social levels must be constantly arranged to ensure that they have the proper amounts of impurity. It is precisely this open interactive aspect between pollution and social structure that does more than rationalize and justify the social order; it motivates action in that order insofar as it must constantly struggle actively to maintain the congruences between the ways of life and the order-constructing states of pollution of its members.