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


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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


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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.


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