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.