Chapter Eleven
Purity and Impurity: On the Borders of the Sacred

Introduction

In our discussion of space, deities, Tantrism, and priests we have been concerned with elements of civic symbolic action in what we may as well call the "religious sphere" of Bhaktapur's life. In later chapters, adding time to these other elements, we will examine the city's integrated "symbolic enactments." The symbolic elements and enactments we are concerned with are for the most part, as we have asserted m chapter 1, "marked" in Bhaktapur as being extraordinary, somehow different from the banal, the "natural," the everyday. The dangerous and benign deities are creatures of that marked realm. In their proper homelands they inhabit mythic and transcendent space and time. Occasionally—and this is a major motif of many legends associated with annual festivals—they appear and wander in this world as ambiguous and uncanny violations of the ordinary, in historic encounters with kings and heroic citizens that have enduring significance for the city. In the ongoing civic actions in which the deities are encouraged to become immanent, and where they are repeatedly encountered by all of Bhaktapur's people, however, a separated arena is constructed for them, the arena of the "sacred." That arena's proper spaces are the temple or shrine, the purified, bounded, and isolated puja areas in houses, the ideal spaces of the city carved out through the positions and festival movements of the deities; its expert workers are the priests; its time is the calendrically determined eternally recurring times of festival

or that of rites of passage or of crisis-generated or prophylactic ad hoc worship; and its proper action is in ritual and the traditionally specified actions of the festivals.

But there is much activity at the margins of this sacred arena. There are things that must be done to prepare sacred objects and officiants and to prepare the worshipers themselves. Thus, icons of the deities must be properly made; sacred force or "life," as it is often phrased, must be put into them, the deity himself or herself must periodically be brought into them, ritually pure areas must be prepared for their worship, new temples must be consecrated, and so on.

We have differentiated "priestly" from "para-priestly" activities by differentiating the performance of a "religious" activity in itself from the necessary preparations for such an activity. Among the para-priests, so defined, we included the Naus, the members of the barber thar , one of whose traditional duties was to aid in what is sometimes (and we will argue misleadingly) called "ritual purification"—for the act of purification, in which for middle and upper thar s the Naus are of major importance, is not within the sacred realm but within the realm of the ordinary. The ordinary has its own symbolic construction, its "embedded symbolism," but that symbolism, in contrast to the marked realms, is naturalized as part of the locally constructed common sense everyday world.

In this chapter we will discuss purity, impurity, contamination, and purification as aspects of Bhaktapur's "natural" world in their relation to the expression, ordering, and motivation of that city's mesocosmic symbolic order. Essentially, their meaning and use among the Newars in Bhaktapur is no different from those in traditional Hindu societies elsewhere in space and time. Relative purity is related to hierarchical social ordering; some impurity is or is made to seem unalterable, and some may be rectified through purification, thereby supporting the order associated with purity and/or preparing individuals for ritual action. Various attempts have been made to define the central or "essential" import of purity, impurity, and purification in their South Asian elaborations, and the result is a tangle of interpretations. But we may use Bhaktapur's "climax community" and our particular approach to it to encounter some of these and to make some discriminations regarding the power, uses, and limitations of the "purity complex" in Bhaktapur's public and private worlds.

A Tangle of Interpretations

Bhaktapur has inherited in one form or another most of the concerns and ideas about purity set forth in the Hindu codes for proper behavior, the Dharmasastras^[*] . The subject is, on the surface at least, diverse. "Suddhi (purification) is a very comprehensive topic including within it purification after asauca (impurity on birth and death), purification of a person after contact with an impure object or on account of certain occurrences, purification of pots, wells, food, etc., after they are polluted" (Kane 1968-1977, vol. IV, p. 267). Because among these, birth and death pollution make their carriers unfit for most worship and were traditionally "the most important subject under suddhi . therefore the Suddhi-kaumudi defines suddhi as the state of being fit for or capable of performing the rites that are understood from the Veda" (vol. IV, p. 267). The Sastras also refer to the impurities accrued by contact with the lowest social classes (included along with a multitude of other pollutants) and differentiate the required actions and tempos of purification by hierarchical social status, thus taking account of a "caste-differentiating pollution."

Anthropologists concerned with social structure and organization have selectively treated the complex of purity, impurity, and purification (which we may term the "purity complex") in its external relation to caste segmentation and hierarchy. Dumont, in an influential statement, argued that the opposition between "pure" and "impure" gives the caste system its "intellectual coherence." The opposition is the "single true principle" that underlies those features, which Bouglé's classic formulation (1908) proposed as the "essence" of caste, but which for Dumont are "analytic distinctions introduced by the observer" (Dumont 1980, 43). "It is by implicit reference to this opposition that the society of castes appears consistent and rational to those who live in it . The opposition underlies hierarchy, which is the superiority of the pure to the impure, underlies separation because the pure and the impure must be kept separate, and underlies the division of labor because pure and impure occupations must likewise be kept separate" (ibid., 43 [emphasis added]). Dumont's phrasing—"intellectual coherence," "consistant and rational" appearance, and the like—allows him to avoid giving any precise explanatory force to this intellectually satisfying opposition of pure and impure in the origin or, more relevant to our purposes, maintenance of caste.

Other writers, still centrally concerned on the one hand with Hinduism's exotic social order and on the other with an intellectualistic and cognitive approach to purity and impurity, emphasize the semantic or metaphorical force of purity and impurity: "Physiological pollutions become important as symbolic expressions of other undesirable contacts which would have repercussions on the structure of social or cosmological ideas" (Douglas 1968, 340). "Caste pollution," which is a special case, "is a symbolic system, based on the image of the body, whose primary concern is the ordering of a social hierarchy" (Douglas 1966, 125). For Douglas "pollution is the symbolic expression of an intellectual problem." She suggests that "we treat all pollution behavior as the reaction to any event likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications" (1968, 338 [emphasis added]). Purity keeps categories separated; in the Hindu case, hierarchically ordered categories. Impurity is the blurring and the threatened collapse of categories.

One problem for Douglas's formulation is that although the blurring of any category is by definition problematic for order, "pollution" in its restricted sense of "dirtiness," as suggested by "physiological pollutions," applies only to some cases of the confusion of "cherished classifications." The problems, metaphors, uses, and rectifications of some other categories of confusion are quite different. Veena Das, following Douglas in asserting that "the symbolism of impurity serves basically as a metaphor for liminality" (1977, 115), makes one necessary (and fundamental) distinction. "Liminality" in Hindu social organization is not only the blurred, unpleasant, and polluting mess of contaminated social differentiation; it also represents the "creative transcendence" of the given categories of the social system, as in the religious life of Hindu ascetics. Here liminality and the destruction of "cherished classifications" results in a "transcendence" in which the purity complex is no longer an issue.^[1]

Transcendence aside, "liminality," the state of being out of ordinary social categories, is not sufficient in itself to characterize (or explain) impurity. In certain liminal states, such as the early stages of rites of passages, individuals are in heightened states of purity, not in impurity. More problematically, as we have argued, only some kinds of confusion or collapse of categories are "polluting." If "pollution" is not to be endlessly extended in metaphor, many states of confusion, liminality, or mixture are neither pure, impure, nor "transcendent." The question of what kinds of confusion, of what kinds of "cherished classifications" is still open.

The escape from or blurring of social categories has another powerful metaphoric implication. "To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power" (Douglas 1966, 97).^[2] Bhaktapur uses the different implications of the delineation and blurring of categories—purity and safety, impurity and danger, membership in the ordinary system of social categories or transcendence of it—in a differentiated way, isolating various implications of categorization for complex differentiated meanings and uses. The purity complex has its meaningful position in this larger context.

Various positions have been taken about the relations of the purity complex to the religious and sacred spheres of South Asian and other societies. Here much depends on the definition of "religious" and "sacred," but we are again in a tangle of assumptions and pronouncements. Thus Dumont proclaims flatly that "in reality, even though the notion [impurity] may be found to contain hygienic associations, these cannot account for it, as it is a religious notion" (1980, 47 [emphasis added]). Srinivas (1952) similarly ascribes impurity to the realm of the "sacred," albeit the "bad sacred" in opposition to the "good sacred." Such statements reflect the attempts made by such earlier social theorists as William Robertson Smith ([1889] 1927) and James Frazer ([1890] 1955) to include ideas regarding pollution and ideas about the sacred together within some larger encompassing "supernatural" realm to which the two sets of ideas were thought to belong.^[3] The claim that pollution and purity—that is, the aspects of pollution and purity that were of interest to these theorists—are within a "religious" or a "sacred" or a "supernatural" sphere encourages the implication that their manipulation through purification is a ritual act. Thus Sherry Ortner writes in an article summarizing the literature on the sociocultural aspects of pollution beliefs and practices in various cultures, "Because lost purity can be re-established only by ritual and also because purity is often a precondition for the performance of rituals of many kinds, anthropologists refer to this general field of cultural phenomena as 'ritual purity' and 'ritual pollution'" (1974, 299 [emphasis added]). The procedures used to "reestablish lost purity" in Bhaktapur are conventional but hardly rituals. Furthermore, although purification procedures are in a general sense "preconditions for rituals" in that a person has to be pure to participate in some (but by no means all) religious action,^[4] in some cases purification is a direct and immediate preparation for important rituals, while in other cases the immediate

motivation is to free people from the general social restrictions of birth and death impurity, or to remove the contamination produced by contact with a member of a low thar . Such purification is necessary for the eventual later performance of rituals, but is not directed toward a particular one. Later ritual performances will, in fact, require, in addition, the specific purification that always proceeds such rituals.

What Is Polluted, And What Is Polluting?

The Sastras traditionally treated polluted human bodies and polluted inanimate objects separately.^[5] There were proper cleansing procedures of various types for purifying objects; the proper procedure depended on the object or material that was to be purified. Ashes, soil of various kinds and water were the main purifying materials. Various other materials (mustard-seed paste, ground-up fruit, cows' urine and dung, whitewash, etc.) were also used for cleaning certain polluted materials (Manu V, 110-126; Bühler 1969, 188-191). The materials and objects whose purification are discussed in the Sastras are the materials and objects of everyday life—worked metal, stone and clay, cloth of various kinds, foodstuffs, houses, land, vessels for holding food and liquids, spoons, cups and so on. These are the materials and objects that are the unavoidable context of life, which must be touched, which envelop the body, which are foods, or which hold the foods that must enter the body through the mouth. Their purification is prophylactic, at the service of a central concern—the protection of the condition of the individuals that these objects and materials surround and with whom they may come in contact. The cleaning procedures are technically specified. "A man who knows (the law) must purify conch-shells, horn, bone and ivory like linen cloth (i.e., with mustard-seed paste) or with a mixture of cow's urine and water." This is all technical, mechanical, and mundane, whatever its distal religious justification might be. These materials and objects are in that segment of a person's world that the concerned person can control; they are extensions of his or her self, his or her body, and can be purified like the body itself. The impurities that threaten from outside this easily controllable circle of possessions can be produced by animals, by events (above all, birth and death of family members), or by other persons (above all, by those of lower and low status). These agents of pollution cannot be purified by scrubbing with an appropriate cleansing agent. Sources of pollution must be avoided

if possible, but in those cases where avoidance fails or where they cannot be avoided, then procedures for purification of the self become essential.

For objects and materials impurity is something that adheres to them, like the physical "dirt" that is one of the sources of the idea, and can be scrubbed off or (in the case of liquids) removed by filtration. The nature of the impurity produced by birth and death is more problematic; we will return to this. But what about the person who is concerned about the problem of pollution? What becomes polluted? Where does his or her pollution exist?

According to Kane, many Sastras differentiated "body" impurity into "external" and "inner" kinds (1968-1977, vol. IV, p. 310). The "inner purity" refers to the "mental attitude." For some commentators the inner "mental attitude" was more significant than "external purity." Kane states: "The Padma emphasizes that it is the mental attitude that is the highest thing and illustrates it by saying that a woman embraces her son and her husband with different mental states" (ibid., 310). Manu's Laws include references to this mental or spiritual purity. "Among all modes of purification, purity in the acquisition of wealth is declared to be the best; for he is pure who gains wealth with clean hands, not he who purifies himself with earth and water." "The body is cleansed by water, the internal organ is purified by truthfulness, the individual soul by sacred learning and austerities, the intellect by knowledge" (Manu V, 106, 109; Bühler 1969, 187f.).

The reference to "inner impurity" seems to be a "philosophical" extension. The major traditional emphasis, and the present emphasis in Bhaktapur is on the "external impurity." In relation to the organization of a community such as Bhaktapur, a primary emphasis on internal purity and impurity would, in fact, have a revolutionary implication. Like Bhakti religion, it represents the possibility of a detachment from and transcendence of the network of the interrelational controls of the civic dharma, a kind of movement to a direct, individual, "Protestant," encounter with an altered view of the divine, an escape from the control of the Brahmanical mesocosm.^[6] A Newar Brahman, queried, for example, as to what is affected when an individual is impure (asuddha ) replies that it is the mha , the physical body. The atma , the soul, he says, cannot be affected, it is always pure. Asked about the manas , the "mind," he says that mind is not affected directly ,when a person is asuddha —although it is affected indirectly insofar as a person is concerned about his state.

The body and its "physical impurities" is also an important reference in the traditional explanation of the sequence of rites of passage, samskara s, which entail, among much else, the progressive transformation of individuals to higher and purer states throughout their life. "Manu says, 'By performing the Samskaras [those dealing with] conception, birth-rites, tonsure, and Upanayana [full initiation into his caste group for a male], seminal and uterine impurities are washed away, . . . Yajna-valkya also endorses the same view. Some kind of impurity was attached to the physical side of procreation and lying in the womb. Therefore, it was thought necessary to remove that impurity from the body by performing various Samskaras" (Pandey 1969, 29f.).

Bodily pollution is usually thought of as "external," in part because of its contrast with "internal mental pollution," and also because of the emphasis on the surfaces of bodies and of objects to which impurity adheres and that can be purified by washing, scrubbing, and so forth. But bodily pollution itself can be "external" or "internal." The implications of external or surface and internal bodily pollution for any given individual differ. The external surface pollution has to do with an individual's presentation of self, his or her social meaning, as mediated by the elaborate uses the city makes of pollution as a condition for proper relations and social position. The internal aspect of pollution relates in part to the meanings of one's status and the threats to it, but here something else is added; namely, the meanings of the oral incorporation, the ingestion of pollution. These meanings, associated with feelings of abhorrence and disgust, not only help motivate adherence to the public system of relations ordered by purity but also add important aspects of "intellectual coherence" to it.

Pollution, Ingestion, And Disgust

In an attempt to differentiate the meaning of pollution to Hindus from other kinds of "dangerous contact" as conceived elsewhere, Louis Dumont argues for an "essential difference between the Indian and the tribal case. Elsewhere, the dangerous contact acts directly on the person involved, affecting his health for example, whereas with the Hindus it is a matter of impurity, that is, of fall in social status or risk of such a fall. This is quite different, although traces of the other conception can be found in India" (1980, 49). This assertion, tacitly based on and restricted to surface pollution, is misleading in its claim that impurity "does not act directly on the person involved." It is also misleading

insofar as it treats the implications of Hindu impurity of interest to Dumont, the risk of fall in status, as the predominant personal motivation for behavior in relation to purity and impurity. Although Hindu pollution may differ from "tribal" forms (such as the Polynesian fear of contact with a superior's mana , which is dangerous to one's physical state but not "polluting" in the Hindu sense) it acts very powerfully and directly on the "person involved," and does so in ways independent of and prior to the risk to status.

Pollution takes its meaning from the kind of contamination involved, a distinction blurred by structuralist attempts to put all contaminations in the same class. There is a difference in the personal meanings of swallowing, say, ground glass and swallowing feces, or contemplating food "contaminated" by one or the other. Both are "contaminating"; both are "matter out of place" (Mary Douglas's definition of "dirt"). However, glass is dangerous and is a "clean contaminant," while feces are disgusting and a "dirty contaminant." Similarly, someone whose body, self, or mind is disturbed by the adherence or entrance of such "contaminants" as a spirit, or disease, or "sin" is affected by something that we may designate by the oxymoron "clean contaminant."^[7] Clean contaminations in Bhaktapur have explanations, induce emotional responses, and call for techniques of rectification, all of which differ from those associated with pollution in its usual sense. The usual designation for someone who is polluted through "dirty contaminants" and who needs one of the sorts of purification used in such cases is that he or she is "not pure ," asudha (Sanskrit asuddha ). This term rarely is used for the other, the "clean contaminations," except occasionally in a rare metaphorical extension. The emphasis on being touched by "dirt," and above all by ingesting it, is precisely what gives the socially elaborated pollution beliefs their compelling special personal force, a force that is both emotional and conceptual.

According to some Newar Brahmans from the point of view of traditional law, the dharma , it is permissible for a high-caste person to accept water from wandering ascetics. It is, they say, nevertheless, a disgusting prospect. Private feelings and dharmic revelations usually converge, however; the case of the ascetic is an interesting and illuminating exception.

The impurity that may derive from birth and death, and from contaminated things, animals, or other people, and which then can affect one's body (and, secondarily and in varying ways, one's status) in an

unpleasant way, is conceived and dealt with as if it were a transferable substance of some kind, which can adhere to the body or some intermediate object, which can be often conducted through or flow through some intermediary object, and which can be removed through physical cleansing procedures. Pigs, nondomesticated carrion and feces-eating dogs, feces, clothes that have been in contact with a sick or dead body, and food that has been in contact with the saliva of others, are salient examples of sources of pollution that are both dharmically impure and sensed as repulsive. Other ideas about pollution, such as birth and death pollution, whose polluting substance is puzzling to contemporary informants, are intellectually associated (with more or less conviction) with ideas and feelings aroused by such directly disgusting and repulsive substances.

The "elementary" experience of dirtiness is vividly conveyed in traditional writings on pollution and its removal. "Food which has been pecked at by birds, smelt at by cows, touched with the foot, sneezed on, or defiled by hair or insects, becomes pure by scattering earth over it." "As long as the foul smell does not leave an object defiled by impure substances, and the stain caused by them does not disappear, so long must earth and water be applied in cleansing inanimate things" (Manu V, 125, 126; Bühler 1969, 190f.). Much of classical and contemporary discussions of pollution centers around foodstuff, and the possibility of ingesting polluted substances in contaminated food or drink. Here the powerful emotion of disgust in its core sense of "strong distaste for food or drink, nausea, loathing," becomes centrally salient.

The status-regulating aspects of purity and pollution are clearly related to eating, to food, and thus to the possibility of ingestion of pollution. To be touched by a polluting person while eating requires a higher degree of purification (for an upper-status person) than simply being touched, and prohibitions about contact with inferiors are connected with an elaborate doctrine about the various kinds of food (which have different vulnerabilities and resistances to pollution) that may or may not be accepted from them. Thus, foods, particularly boiled rice, are central markers of hierarchy, of social exclusion, and inclusion. If a high-status person is polluted through contacts with a low-status person or a contaminated object, purification must be accomplished before the ingestion of any further food. Even without special contamination, the failure to wash before a meal (on the assumption that one has inevitably incurred some kind of impurity) is a papa or "sin." An insistence that they must now wash before eating is one of the relatively few abrupt

changes required of boys who have undergone their Kaeta Puja , their movement into full ritual membership in their thar s.

The idea of disgusting substances that would be repellent to the body if ingested has an inverse, palatability, which implies and depends on the absence or the overcoming of disgust. Bhaktapur's entire status system—that of both the city and the family hierarchy (chaps. 5 and 6)—is, typically of South Asia, conceptualized and acted out in the rules and practices related to cipa , food that has been touched by someone else. It is considered proper to take cipa from superiors, but if taken from someone of lower status, the idea of ingestion of dirt becomes salient. Ideally this ingestion of cipa signals the acceptance of a protected incorporation and dependency in the organic system of hierarchy. The inferior takes of the substance of superiors as a baby takes its mother's milk. However, the ideologically suppressed contaminating and status-depressing implications of the acceptance and ingestion of the superior's substance, represented by vulnerable food such as boiled rice touched by him in the act of eating is perfectly clear to the lowest thar s, at least, who are frequently aware of such usually covert aspects of the hierarchical system. As an untouchable Po(n) put it, "Cipa is dirtier than feces. . . . When we hear that the sahu [merchants] have a feast we Po(n) , we poor people who have nothing to eat, go to the houses of our own patrons, and take their cipa , the food that has come out of their mouths, their leftover food. They collect the leftover food after they have eaten and give it to us. While they ate they mixed everything by hand, and when they chew the food they drop some of the food from their mouth. They mix and gather that kind of food for us, and we have to eat it. It may even have been on the floor. Their thrown away things are our meal, in which we get dust and hair, and everything. The main point is that we eat dirty food."

The Po(n) is expressing an implication of the flow of cipa down the system, which is usually muted. But he is consciously or unconsciously satirizing the conception that is associated with the prohibitions about the flow of foodstuffs, of cipa , in the reverse, the upward direction. What he describes as the disgusting characteristics of the food he takes from his superiors is, albeit here in broad overtness, what everyone fears—including, by the way, the Po(n) himself in relation to his inferiors, the Cyamakhala:—may characterize vulnerable food touched by inferiors.

The lowest thar s stand for pollution, and are its concrete manifestation. The pollution of low jati s is sometimes described in the literature

as being a "kind of inherited defilement" (e.g., Kolenda 1978, 65), often thought to be the result of some ancestral member's sinful behavior in the legendary past. This produces a kind of permanent pollution in contrast to the temporary pollution acquired, for example, following the death of a phuki member or the contamination due to encounters with an impure person or object. Yet, whatever karmic theory—made use of in Bhaktapur for certain important but delimited purposes—may argue, in most discussions of the lowest levels both by members of higher thar s and by members of the unclean thar s themselves, their lower status is explained not in terms of their history or karmic state, but of their various ongoing pollution-accumulating behaviors.^[8] Pollution-accumulating activities—such as by the Po(n) and Jugi in relation to death, by the Po(n) in relation to human and animal feces, by the Nae butcher in relation to killing animals for meat, by the Nau barber in cleaning bodies, and so on—not only keep higher thar s clean (and as such are "para-priestly" services) but also ensure, in conjunction with other regulations that once controlled their living places, dress, their possible accumulation of capital, their access to other kinds of work and so on, that their dirtiness, disgusting qualities, and pollution will be continually maintained and thus real in the natural world , as that world is understood in Bhaktapur. "Inherited substance," an idea that suggests racial theories of status insofar as the resulting social position is thought to be based on some permanent inherited substance, is misleading insofar as it does not take into account the overwhelming importance of continuing action in generating and maintaining the impurity of the unclean thar s. The continued performance of degrading action is ensured by the vigilance and application of sanctions by the middle and upper thar s.

Bodies and Corporate Bodies and Their Exuviae

Erudite Hindus in Bhaktapur, like other such Hindus elsewhere, frequently use the classically rooted metaphor of a human body and its component organs and members for the interrelated, interdependent, and hierarchically arranged elements of the social system. Another, more covert and less idyllic model of the body may be discerned, one that has both social and private symbolic force. The cipa system, with its unidirectional flow, suggests this. In this model one belongs to the group whose food can be unproblematically shared. In some cases these

are groups of relative equals, but as a member of the larger city social hierarchy, one can share the food of all above oneself, and belongs to an upper segment of the hierarchy, while one is at the lowest position within the segment. The food of the upper segment, so to speak, flows into, and succors the individual. One accepts not only succorance, but in respecting these upper groups, accepts their authority. One is a member of such a group in an intimate way, a way having some metaphorical resonance with the idea of palatability of food and the sense of one's own body boundaries.

Vulnerable food from people below an individual is forbidden, and becomes more and more clearly disgusting as the social distance increases and the bottom of the system is approached. The separation between an individual and these lower-status people is not mutual, however. They accept the upper-status person's cipa , or leavings—and are theoretically sustained by them (if covertly degraded)—but he or she would not take theirs. There is a valve in the system, sustenance, and—when things are working properly—pollution only flow downward.

If the incorporation of food into the body represents and enacts solidarity with the upper segment to which one belongs, the casting off of exuviae from the body represents not only a social opposition but a rejection of aspects of one's own self represented in the meanings given to the lower segments of the status system. Exuviae are "caste-off" bodily materials that are unproblematic while they are parts of the body but that are thought and felt to be more or less polluting and disgusting (as well as dangerous objects for the performance of "contagious magic" in some cultures) once they separate from the body. Newar Brahmans provide lists of polluting exuviae (including materials such as "dirt" on the teeth and the umbilicus, which seem closely related to the idea of exuviae) for which they use the Sanskrit word "mala, " "dirt, bodily excretion." These include spittle, nasal mucus, feces, urine, dirt on the teeth, ear wax, dirt in the umbilicus, and in some contexts finger and toe nails and hair. Nails may be considered polluting where they separate from the underlying skin at the ends of the fingers. A similar list in Manu (V, 135; Bühler 1969, 193) of the "twelve impurities of the body" does not include hair or finger nails, materials that can, in fact, be considered peripheral but integral parts of the body, and which are important loci of major purification procedures in the course of which they are trimmed.^[9] Hair and fingernails are detachable, rather than detached, and are not offensive in their attached

state (unless they harbor dirt and are allowed to grow beyond a certain length, as in the case of ascetics).

Exuviae are not problematic or disgusting while they are parts of one's own body. They become problematic when they appear at the surface, characteristically at the exit of bodily orifices. Cleanliness consists of separating such materials from the surface, and once separated, they are alien and usually become disgusting; that is, there is a deeply felt disinclination to bring them into new contact with the body, and above all to ingest them.

What Is Polluted and Polluting in Birth and Death?

The emphasis on dirt and cleanliness, on disgust and palatability, and on the boundaries of bodies—an emphasis that is central to hierarchy and solidarity and to procedures for removing pollution—is problematic in discussion of an important class of acquired pollutions, asauca , impurity caused by birth or death and in some thar s by menarche^[10] to the household and to the patrilineal extended family, the phuki .^[11] A Newar Brahman attempting to explain why family members become impure after births and deaths says (of death) "After a death and during the period of mourning the condition of the body is not right. People feel heavy and sad." It is, he says, this bodily condition which must be remedied by purification.^[12] As to birth pollution (which starts for the phuki members at the moment that the umbilical cord is cut and the infant has been separated from the mother), he says, "who knows who it [the infant] is, or where it comes from." Dirt and disgust is not the central issue here, and the reason for pollution is not intuitively obvious and requires philosophical speculation. As Kane writes in his review of birth and death pollution in the Dharmasastras^[*] , "A question arises why birth and death should cause impurity to the members of the family or to relatives. Only a few [of the texts] have anything [to say] on this question. Harita says: 'The family incurs death impurity because by death the family feels overwhelmed (or frustrated), while when a new life appears the family increases (and there is gratification of joy)"' (Kane 1968-1977, vol. IV, p. 269f.). This echoes the uncertainty of the Newar Brahman's explanation, and its seeking for a naturalistic, physical, mechanical, and nonmoral explanation. Kane writes, as we have quoted, that the Mitaksara^[*] defines "asauca ," birth and death pollution, "as an emergent attribute attaching to a person, which is got

rid of by lapse of time or a bath and the like . . ." (ibid., 268.) The "pollution" is dealt with in part as if it were dirty pollution, but it is only amalgamated to dirt by a kind of vague metaphorical extension.^[13]

The Management of Pollution in Bhaktapur: Avoidance, Surrogation, and Cleaning

The large complex of ideas and feelings, of public doctrines and personal responses, of contradictions and rationalizations associated with the purity complex are very diffusely embodied in action in various aspects of the city's life. The area in which they are, perhaps, most focused, represented, and standardized in public action in Bhaktapur is that of purification and the management of pollution in general.

Pollution is managed by various combinations of avoidance, of absorption by surrogates, and of cleaning procedures. Food taboos, rules regarding what is unclean, and the status-structuring rules about what kinds of social contacts are permissible and impermissible in various contexts to people of various social statuses are made clear in traditional texts and in Bhaktapur's ongoing social dharma . A clear set of proscriptions for avoidance and for ways of life facilitating that avoidance become elaborated on the basis of these clearly defined and more or less avoidable class of contaminants.

Surrogate Absorption of Contaminants—Both Dirty and Clean

We have discussed the idea of the surrogate accumulation of pollution as a service to others as a priestly function in chapter 10. Surrogation has two distinct aspects. First, there is the performance of an essential act—the purification of a house after death, the execution of a criminal, the moving of feces from latrines out of the city—which would be uncongenial or status-threatening in one way or another to the higher-status people who use their status to avoid and delegate the action. However, lower-status people not only are delegated status-depressing actions, which then maintain their own lowered statuses, but in some services are clearly doing something else; they absorb into themselves a contaminant, freeing others from it. The idea of helpful surrogate absorption is widespread in Bhaktapur. What is absorbed is often a dangerous but not necessarily impure (in the sense of dirty) substance.

Thus animals placed "under" the house (on the cheli ) in Bhaktapur are said (according to Vogt [1977, 94]) to help protect the inhabitants of a house by contracting diseases that otherwise would affect the human inhabitants of the house. A piece of iron is sometimes used to draw dangerous spirits to it—for example, from the body of a bride who is to be newly introduced into a household. The special uses of the lowest thar s to absorb and draw to themselves the portentous dangers signaled by an eclipse or those inherent in the clothes and funeral objects of the dead involves the accumulation of more than "impurity." When the untouchable Po(n) begs, as he is traditionally required to do, for gifts from others following an eclipse, and, as he does on some other occasions of astrological trouble, he takes on not their status-threatening dirty impurity but their health or economically threatening astrologically produced "bad luck." In this and the other examples of the surrogate absorption of a dangerous substance, there is the implication of a limited quantity which can be moved from one locus to another.^[14] The idea of flow of quantitatively limited powerful substances is found in the idea of sakti in Bhaktapur's religion of the dangerous deities. Thus when Siva's power or sakti flows into his Goddess consort, he is emptied of it, and left as a corpse.

The idea of pollution—in the sense of dirty pollution—as a substance that flows, that has quantitative aspects, that can often be avoided, and that can be deflected and absorbed into others is thus a subcase of a larger category. The inverse idea of partaking of the substance of superiors through eating the prasada of deities and the cipa of superiors is in this larger group. So is the complex of ideas and feelings centering on dangerous and unpleasant substances other than dirty, status-affecting pollutants. Many of the ideas, feelings, and experiential resonances connected with this nondirty dangerous class are associated with another set of moral issues—danger, punishment, evil, sin, guilt, and fear—rather than those centrally germane to the purity complex. These nondirty transferable substances are also closely related to the world of power and magic, which in a sense lies under and at the edges of the ordinary world expressed and stabilized through purity.

Purification

The third aspect of the management of pollution is its removal once it has accumulated. Here the major emphasis is not on the management of the flow or ingestion of some sort of substance but on mechanical pro-

cedures for the removal of dirt from surfaces and, in more extensive personal purifying procedures, the trimming of hair and/or nails. These procedures are extensions of the ordinary cleaning of foodstuffs, cooking utensils, living and dining quarters, clothes, and the body. For inanimate objects, water collected to ensure its purity, ashes, mixtures of cow dung and soil, and so on may be used following traditional prescriptions.^[15] Such ordinary cleaning and scrubbing becomes loosely formalized into sets of procedures of various potency. The proper procedures are generally understood by ordinary people for most occasions, with the occasional advice of a Brahman. They depend on status, the kind of pollution undergone, and the goal of the purification (e.g., primarily for the removal of a pollution to restore ordinary purity, or for the removal of ordinary purity to prepare for a ritual, or the removal of asauca impurity). Thus such purifications must be done in particular ways, and their neglect, like the neglect of any aspect of the dharma of ordinary life, is a moral violation, a papa .^[16]

Formalized procedures for purification of the body are called bya(n)kegu —alternatively written be(n)kegu —meaning literally "to cause to become untied" and thus to become loosened or freed. The term is not used for the purification of objects nor of ritual equipment or areas, where the ordinary Newari term for "to clean or to arrange neatly," "sapha yagu ," is used. "Bya(n)kegu " is generally divided into two kinds, which Brahmans sometimes distinguish as "ordinary" (sadharan ) or "special, important" (visesya^[*] ). For the latter group of bya(n)kegu , the unequivocally clean thar s, that is, those above level XIII, require the services of a man (nau ) and woman (nauni ) from the Nau, or "barber" thar .^[17]

In the usual course of events the main motivation for a major purification is after death in the phuki in all thar s, and after birth within the phuki for high-status groups—low-status groups performing only an ordinary bya(n)kegu . Major purification was traditionally required by the highest status thar s in preparation for all major puja s and for all rites of passage for family members, but in recent decades minor bya(n)kegu procedures have been used for most of these. In addition, Brahmans and devout upper-status Chathariyas purified themselves with major purifications following contaminating contacts with low thar s. For lower-status thar s such purifications were perfunctory.

For an ordinary or minor bya(n)kegu there are three common procedures used in Bhaktapur. One is bathing in or at the edge of the river with river water, in the course of which a person first washes his or her

feet, and then hands, then rinses the mouth and spits out the water, then washes the face, and finally washes the whole body or submerges it into the water. Another procedure is to use khau , mustard seed from which the oil has first been pressed. Khau can be used with nonriver water taken from wells or taps. Water is first used to clean sequentially the feet, hands, mouth, and face. Then khau is rubbed on the feet, the hands, the face, and then the rest of the body. Finally the body is rinsed with water again. A third procedure is to take tulsica , the earth (ca ) from around a basil plant (Ocimum sanctum ), tulsi ,^[18] and use it in the same way as khau is used.

In a major bya(n)kegu extra procedures are added to the basic washing and scrubbing activities that characterize all purifications from dirty pollution. For such procedures a nau and a nauni come to the house of the person or (as is usually the case) persons who are to undergo the purification. Occasionally people may go to the workplace or house of the nau . In a client's house the purification procedure is done on the cwata or mata(n) floor. In the case of a man, "new water," na:na ,^[19] is used to wet his head, which is then shaved.^[20] The nauni pares his toe and finger nails, and colors the tips of his toes with a red pigment, ala :. For women there is no hair cutting; the major bya(n)kegu consists only of having their nails pared by the nauni , and the ends of their toes painted with ala :, which is applied more extensively than for men. Unmarried women may have a wider area of the tops of their feet adjacent to their toes painted, a procedure that is interpreted as cosmetic as well as purificatory. The cut-off hair and nails are supposed to be thrown into the river,^[21] but they are often disposed of as ordinary waste. Following these pocedures by the nau and the nauni , the person must wash in the river or clean himself or herself with khua or tulsica in the manner of an ordinary bya(n)kegu .^[22] The entire procedure—the services of the nau and nauni , followed by the prescribed washing and cleaning—constitutes the major bya(n)kegu . These simple procedures are sufficient to remove dirty pollution.^[23]

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.