The Logic of Taboo

Every culture has things it will not say, will not represent, will not think through to their conclusions. These prohibitions are not uniform across cultures or historical periods, but their existence seems to be. The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that taboos are not arbitrary prohibitions but responses to what she called "matter out of place" — things that violate the categories by which a culture organises its world. They are not dangerous in themselves; they are dangerous because of what their existence does to the ordering systems through which a culture makes sense.

This structural account of taboo does not mean that all taboos are equally defensible. Some prohibitions protect the vulnerable; others enforce harmful hierarchies. The analysis of what a taboo does — whose interests it serves, what categories it maintains — is a more useful tool than simple endorsement or rejection.

Contemporary culture has shifted some taboos and maintained others in ways that do not always follow obvious principles. Discussions of suicide, of mental illness, of many forms of sexual experience — these have been substantially destigmatised in the past half century, in ways that appear, on balance, to have been beneficial. Other prohibitions have been strengthened: around racial slurs, for instance, or representations of certain groups in certain contexts. Whether a given shift represents progress depends, in large part, on one's prior commitments.

What is perhaps most interesting about taboos is what they reveal about what a culture finds most threatening. The things we refuse to examine directly — the questions we will not formulate, the comparisons we will not make — define the boundaries of public thought. The philosopher who works near these boundaries is doing something that has always been considered provocative, and something that has also always been necessary.