5. Boundaries.

Bhaktapur's proliferation of discrete categories, domains, and levels in the construction of an intelligible symbolically ordered public world requires the construction and maintenance of var-

ious different kinds of boundaries. We have been much concerned with boundaries throughout this study. The maintenance and breaching of boundaries relates many different ideas—purity, contagion, the carefully encircled realm of sacred power, the power of gods and powerful men to cross boundaries, secrets, initiation, magic, and so on. What is peculiar about Bhaktapur is the sheer quantity of such boundaries, the richness of the conceptions, emotions and operations associated with them and their particualr problematics. For not only are there many of them, not only are they problematically anchored in the more fixed qualities of perceivable nature, not only are objects and events located in shifting classes and hierarchies, but there is, as we have discussed above, a traditional and frequently used emphasis on their openness under certain conditions and on their illusoriness to a higher knowledge. Bhaktapur as a symbolically constituted social order must always strive through action to keep these boundaries and the categories they bound from dissolving, to protect through constant vigilant action an order that is not otherwise guaranteed in seemingly hard reality or in codes of laws.