Ritual Pollution Research Articles

Childbirth and Pollution: Exploring the politics of Prasava Raksha through food practices in Kerala

Women’s body has been the site of patriarchal control and the formation of gendered ideologies, often subjecting it to multiple cultural interventions, especially while experiencing pregnancy and childbirth. Childbirth is considered a state of ritual pollution for a woman that starts from the day of birth and lasts up to several weeks or months, depending on regional and religious contexts. Prasava Raksha is a traditional practice in Kerala where massages, herbal baths, and a specific diet are prescribed for the health and well-being of the mother and child. Prasava Raksha can be considered the culturally appropriated version of the practice of pollution, practised by women belonging to Hindu, Christian and Muslim religious sects in Kerala. The purpose of this qualitative ethnographic study is to investigate the cultural context of how women’s body has been subjected to patriarchal control, particularly during pregnancy and childbirth, with food at the centre of analysis. This article aims to explore the practice of Prasava Raksha, its process and dietary prescriptions, to identify and analyse the cultural politics behind this practice that normalises the patriarchal exploitation of reproductive women. The study uses in-depth semi-structured interviews of 12 women from Kerala who have experienced childbirth and practised Prasava Raksha during the postnatal period, in addition to the interviews of a Prasava Raksha helper and an OB-GYN.

Resisting Culinary Nationalism: Dalit Counter-Cuisines in the Life Narratives of Urmila Pawar and Baby Kamble

Culinary nationalism in India has given rise to a hegemony of vegetarianism, excluding numerous regional and ethnic cuisines in the process. A homogeneous culinary identity is attempted by othering specific communities like Christians and Muslims, lower caste Hindus, and tribal groups, disputing the legitimacy of their national belonging and, hence, their culinary traditions. The traditional gender roles of women in kitchen spaces, along with their higher vulnerability to food insecurity, make food a prominent motif in Dalit women’s writing. This paper analyses how Dalit culinary practices, as recounted in the life narratives of Urmila Pawar and Baby Kamble, contest and redefine culinary nationalism and subvert the notion of ritual pollution or purity. Pawar’s The Weave of My Life and Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke detail the everyday practices of Dalit women, particularly those concerning food, as resistance to ethno-religious nationalism. Using Michel de Certeau’s theorization of everyday life, the paper reads the everyday practices of Dalit women as tactics that resist the strategies of Hindu/cultural nationalism. By depicting a carnival of the silenced Dalit cuisines as counter-cuisines and documenting the recipes of the same, these literary works assert Dalit culinary identities and provide a site for contestation of right-wing culinary hegemony.

Sanitising India or Cementing Injustice? Scrutinising the Swachh Bharat Mission in India

Occupational competence and division of labour in India have historically been linked to social institutions of caste, class and gender. Labour related to sanitation and waste disposal has perpetually been assigned to the most backward caste groups. The reality of the caste system and the revulsion of upper caste groups from any physical contact with dirt and human waste, or with people dealing with waste and sewage, has had many implications for the state of sanitation and cleanliness in India. The national policy on sanitation and its flagship program the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), seems to ignore this caste reality and the conditions of people involved in waste and sanitation-related activities. SBM focuses on infrastructure building for ownership and access of toilets and not on dealing with sludge and sewage, conditions of sanitary workers and their rehabilitation. The technology used in the toilets being constructed, their sustainability, safety and retrofitting needs also requires critical assessment. Any policy for a sanitised India or Swachh Bharat will only be successful if it considers the notion of caste, of ritual pollution associated with human waste and dirt in India and removes the shackles of caste that have chained few marginal communities to such occupations, thereby making the enterprise of sanitation and cleaning in India truly egalitarian and democratic, in the sense of opportunities and participation.

Viewing Ancient Greek Tragedies in Light of Transformative Pollution: Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, Hippolytus

This article focuses on the Ancient Greek social structure practices, tracing the historical, social, and mythical traces of the idea of pollution, and explains how these ideas and practices took place in the three fifth century BC Athenian tragedies Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Hippolytus. The pollution motifs in the tragedies of three different periods by two different authors show differences in principle in the context of the transformativeness of pollution. While the Ancient Greek concept of pollution was also deconstructed in light of these differences, the definitions of pollution by Mary Douglas, René Girard, Robert Parker, and Andrej and Ivana Petrovic were read comparatively. To clarify the position of the concept in tragedies, the concepts of ritual pollution and social pollution are also disclosed. In conclusion of the study, it is suggested that the transformativeness of the concept of pollution in tragedies also can be a revolutionary movement.

Plastics in the Pandemic

Anti-plastic discourses have been gaining momentum in the last two decades, increasingly prompting plastic control policies and plastic avoidant behaviour. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has brought a profusion of single-use plastics and plastic packaging. What can this change tell us about shifts in subjective experiences of risk in an environment of hypervigilance? The case of India reveals that the pandemic has shifted attention among the middle class from the uncertain, future risks of plastic toxicity toward the more immediate risks brought by COVID-19. It also illuminates how plastics are implicated in the logics of ritual pollution that inform frameworks of secular hygiene. For middle-class consumers, plastics function as a boundary between the outer world of the Other and the inner world of the Self, and the use of plastic packaging becomes a token gesture that provides a sense of protection in the face of a heightened awareness of vulnerability.

Anxious Vigilance: Heresy and Ritual Pollution in John of Tella and Severus of Antioch

Abstract Anti-Chalcedonian Christians like John of Tella, Severus of Antioch, Philoxenos of Mabbug, and John Rufus were concerned about orthodox Christians mingling with heretics. This essay argues that John of Tella combined narratives of heresy with those of bodily purity and pollution, such as those related to menstruation, to frame heretics as dangerous to orthodox Christians not only in their beliefs that could lure an unsuspecting Christian to accept heretical views, but in their very bodies whose proximity brought the threat of contamination. John integrated expectations of bodily purity and doctrinal orthodoxy in ways that suggested that heresy could physically contaminate, while Severus tried to calm his congregants’ fears about the same. The spread of COVID- 19 and the global responses to it have heightened our awareness of the dynamics of fear and anxiety that can be produced by threats of physical contamination. The global pandemic in 2020 thus helps to clarify the power that the rhetoric of these sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian texts had to confront the spread of what John of Tella implied was the dangerous physical pollution of Christian heresy.

The Private Cosmology of Public Disgust

Alongside the public and private, the sacred can represent a third social-political dispensation, as Raymond Geuss notes. The modern liberal public/private divide represents a historical anomaly, with the sacred putatively consigned to the private realm. However, recent empirical research into disgust and its influences on moral psychology casts doubt on the extent to which such schemes have in fact removed phenomena connected with the sacred from the public realm. In this paper, I argue for the continuity between disgust and the idea of ritual pollution, demonstrating how an understanding of the moral psychology of the latter phenomenon helps account for certain aspects of our ostensibly secular public realm. Of these aspects, I focus primarily on racism, and specifically individuals’ avowals of disgust in response to racism in the contemporary USA and UK. I argue that the idea of ritual pollution shows that such a response indicates a number of potential drawbacks to the socio-moral scheme underpinning the disgust, which in turn have the potential to limit social efforts to eradicate racism. I conclude that such socio-moral disgust is itself morally questionable in important ways, in addition to having the aforementioned instrumental shortcomings.

Motherhood on display: The child welfare exhibition in colonial Calcutta, 1920

This article focuses on the Health and Child Welfare Exhibition held in colonial Calcutta in 1920. Despite a few scholarly references, however, there has been no detailed study till date. The vicereines of India launched child welfare exhibitions motivated by the transnational exhibitory baby health week propaganda initiative to curb infant mortality. These exhibitions were also locally organised and collaborative in nature with an urgent nationalist appeal. The study critically engages with select Exhibition lectures about so-called ‘clean’ midwifery and ‘scientific’ motherhood given by famous Bengali medical practitioners and other prominent professionals, predominantly men and a few women. These drew intimate sociobiological connections between the problems of ‘dirty’ midwifery, ritual pollution, improper confinement, insanitary childbirth, insufficient lactation and the excessive maternal and infant deaths in Calcutta. The central argument is that these public lectures primarily focused on the very making of the ‘ideal’ Indian nursing mother, often imagined as the traditional yet modern bhadramahila mother figure, for rejuvenating community and national health and vigour. Correspondingly, it highlights the transnational resonance of famous Frederic Truby King’s ‘mothercraft’ popularised as childcare by the clock. The paper is, therefore, guided by the twin purposes of filling the gap in our knowledge about child welfare exhibitions in colonial India and illuminating extant scholarship on the global infant welfare movement.

Development, Sanitation and Personal Hygiene in India

The fact that many Indian rural dwellings lack toilets and that, therefore, a significant proportion of India’s rural population is forced to defecate in the open has, by facilitating the spread of bacterial infections, profound consequences for public health. Compounding this is the fact that open defecation means that people carry limited amounts of water with them and so, by default, post-defecation handwashing is cursory. This paper, using data from the Indian Human Development Survey, examines the demand for toilets in India and the quality of post-defecation personal hygiene. Income, education, and ancillary facilities in the dwelling—like kitchens, and proper roofs and floors—were the strongest influences on demand. However, ceteris paribus households in more developed villages were more likely to have a toilet than those in less developed villages. This suggests that, over and above specific factors, households’ toilet demand also depended on their social environment In setting out these results, the paper rejects the idea, put forward in several academic papers, that the problem of open defecation in India exists because considerations caste and ritual pollution lead rural Indians to prefer open defecation to toilet use.

Homosexuality, the Holiness Code, and Ritual Pollution: A Case of Mistaken Identity

The Holiness Code in Leviticus contains a well-known list of illicit sexual practices. Two infamous Levitical verses (18.22 and 20.13) have been widely interpreted as forbidding and calling for punishment for carnal relations between two adult males and have even influenced modern legislation regarding homosexuality and marriage equality in many countries. It is the suggestion of the author that the verses do not in fact refer to homosexual acts at all, but instead should be interpreted as forbidding and calling for punishment of the act of two males sharing simultaneously the bed of a single woman, which in the context of the Holiness Code and its other statutes aims at prohibiting the creation of offspring whose patronage is unclear and form is abominable, which in turn would lead to the ritual pollution of the Promised Land.

Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order by Timothy D. Amos

Reviewed by: Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order by Timothy D. Amos Constantine Vaporis Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order. By Timothy D. Amos. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020. 220 pages. Hardcover, £120.00. Timothy D. Amos has been working for almost two decades on questions of marginal status, caste, and untouchability in Japanese society, publishing numerous articles and a book on the burakumin in modern Japan.1 In the volume under review here, he builds on that work and on the work of Gerald Groemer as well as that of Japanese scholars, such as Harada Tomohiko and Tsukada Takashi, to offer us a study of caste in early modern Japan. The focus is on eastern Japan, the location of the outcaste order that was the largest in the country during the early modern period and that was controlled by the institutional leader known as Danzaemon (an office title also rendered by the Tokugawa shogunate as etagashira, "chief of eta"). While asserting that his book "cannot claim to be comparative in any straightforward sense" (p. 3), Amos makes useful comparative observations that elucidate the nature of Danzaemon rule based on the work of scholars of India and other regions of the globe. [End Page 352] The book's main argument is that the order under Danzaemon "was a caste-like configuration rooted in the idea and practice of mibun [status] established in the 17th century as a result of early modern Tokugawa rulers' decisions to engage in a state-building project rooted in military logic that built on the back of pre-existing social and political structures which included manorial, kinship, and historic regional social arrangements" (p. 4). One of the things the study confirms is that despite the Tokugawa period often appearing to be so richly documented, there are serious limitations on reconstructing the seventeenth-century past. Given a documentary evidentiary base that is concentrated on issues related to governance, Amos's investigation perforce focuses on the main duties expected of outcastes, that is to say executing criminals, policing the unregistered population, and procuring and supplying leather. By examining the historical evolution of these duties and the privileges that came with their performance, he argues that "early modern outcastes clearly experienced Japan as a kind of caste society" (p. 5). Chapter 1 introduces some of the main issues involved in Amos's treatment of the status system as a form of caste. It outlines those characteristics of the outcaste order under Danzaemon that reveal similarities between caste forms in subcontinental Asia and Japan. In Japan, the "Edo Outcaste Order" (Amos borrows Groemer's term here) was composed "of social outcastes to whom a significant amount of stigma was attached," which could be "ratcheted up" at certain times (pp. 21–22). Amos argues that the element of hierarchy, though often missing or understated in discussions of status in Japan, "was an embedded feature" of the Tokugawa social system, one that "was legitimized in ways that produced a scapegoat function for Danzaemon and his subordinates" (p. 15). He presents the factual nuts and bolts that are required to understand the context of his argument, for example the statistic that a substantial population (7,720 households in 1800) lay under Danzaemon's control, three-quarters of whom were classified as eta (or chōri, the preferred term for self-identification); the institutional structure of leadership under Danzaemon; the relationship of those leaders with the shogunate via the Edo city commissioners (machi bugyō); the physical layout of the space in Edo occupied by Danzaemon and the community under his leadership; and the economic basis of his rule, which lay in control of mercantile activities related to leather procurement and handicrafts including leather, drum skins, and candlewicks. Chapter 2 outlines the construction of the Edo outcaste order, tracing its historical formation out of earlier clan-based social arrangements and pre-Tokugawa economic systems. Here Amos lays out the various theoretical debates among Japan scholars about the concepts of ritual pollution and how certain peoples in medieval society came to be regarded as polluted or of inferior caste. Organized into occupational communities, these outcaste groups were...

Girls’ Menstrual Management in Five Districts of Nepal: Implications for Policy and Practice

Discriminatory practices related to menstruation affect the social, mental and physical wellbeing of girls in many low-and middle-income countries. We conducted mixed methods research in five districts of Nepal to explore how menstruation affected girls’ ability to fully participate in school and community life. We conducted 860 structured interviews, 26 group interviews and 10 focus group discussions with schoolgirls in rural areas,14 semi-structured interviews with girls’ mothers, and 10 interviews with health teachers. Girls in all districts experienced social, material and information barriers to confident menstrual management. Menstrual blood was believed to carry diseases, and girls’ movement was restricted to contain ritual pollution and protect them from illness, spirit possession, and sexual experiences. Taboos prevented girls from worshipping in temples or in their home, and some girls were not allowed to enter the kitchen, or sleep in their home while menstruating. Teachers and parents felt unprepared to answer questions about menstruation and focused on the maintenance of restrictions. Teachers and students were embarrassed discussing menstruation in school and classes were not question-driven or skills-based. Gender disaggregated teaching of menstruation and engagement of health facility staff may have positive effects. Community participatory approaches that engage girls, their families and the wider community are necessary to address harmful cultural practices. Cross-sectoral approaches to provide clean, private, safe spaces for girls and increased availability of preferred materials could enable confident menstrual management.

A qualitative study about the gendered experiences of motherhood and perinatal mortality in mountain villages of Nepal: implications for improving perinatal survival

BackgroundWe aim to examine the gendered contexts of poor perinatal survival in the remote mountain villages of Nepal. The study setting comprised two remote mountain villages from a mid-western mountain district of Nepal that ranks lowest on the Human Development Index (0.304), and is reported as having the lowest child survival rates in the country.MethodsThe findings are taken from a larger study of perinatal survival in remote mountain villages of Nepal, conducted through a qualitative methodological approach within a framework of social constructionist and critical theoretical perspectives. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 42 women and their families, plus a range of healthcare providers (nurses/auxiliary nurses, female health volunteers, support staff, Auxiliary Health Worker and a traditional healer) and other stakeholders from February to June, 2015. Data were analysed with a comprehensive coding process utilising the thematic analysis technique.ResultsThe social construction of gender is one of the key factors influencing poor perinatal survival in the villages in this study. The key emerging themes from the qualitative data are: (1) Gendered social construct and vulnerability for poor perinatal survival: child marriages, son preference and repeated child bearing; (2) Pregnancy and childbirth in intra-familial dynamics of relationships and power; and (3) Perception of birth as a polluted event: birth in Gotha (cowshed) and giving birth alone.ConclusionsMotherhood among women of a low social position is central to women and their babies experiencing vulnerabilities related to perinatal survival in the mountain villages. Gendered constructions along the continuum from pre-pregnancy to postnatal (girl settlement, a daughter-in-law, ritual pollution about mother and child) create challenges to ensuring perinatal survival in these villages. It is imperative that policies and programmes consider such a context to develop effective working strategies for sustained reduction of future perinatal deaths.

Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. By Hillary Kaell. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+269. $28.00 (paper).

<i>Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage</i>. By Hillary Kaell. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+269. $28.00 (paper).

Purity and Pollution in Protestant Ritual Ethics

Purification of the Church is frequently invoked to narrate Protestant justifications for the break from Rome during the Reformation. It also functions to link the Reformation to a process of modern disenchantment. However, little attention has been paid to the rhetoric of pollution and precisely how the reformers articulated the dangers of polluted ritual. The historical location of the sources examined here is the middle decades of the 16th century when Protestants were dealing with political setbacks to the Reformation cause in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly the imposition of the Augsburg Interim by Charles V. This law was designed to find some middle ground between Catholics and Protestants until the schism would be settled at the Council of Trent. However, the debates about whether certain ceremonies, supposedly non-binding with respect to doctrinal commitments, could be used for politically expedient purposes, pushed Protestant thinkers to reassess the power and dangers of liturgical practices and paraphernalia. This article interprets the discourse of pollution in Protestant controversies about compromise in ritual matters by treating the responses of two theologians writing against the Interim from different parts of Germany: Joachim Westphal and Wolfgang Musculus. By laying out the causes of ritual pollution and its negative effects upon body and soul according to individuals who worked for reform in both their intellectual activity as well as their pastoral service, this article demonstrates the importance of ritual matters for Protestant moral thought.

When Theatre Makes the Ritual Work Imitation, Materialization and Reactualization in the Malayali Ritual Theatre Muṭiyēṯṯu’

When Theatre Makes the Ritual Work. Imitation, Materialization and Reactualization in the Malayali Ritual Theatre Muṭiyēṯṯu’ In Muṭiyēṯṯu’, a ritual theatre performed in some Hindu temples of central Kerala (South India), ritual and theatre are intricately woven to form a cluster that plays a well-defined role in the cult of the goddess Bhadrakāḷi. It ‘works’ as a ritual because of the realistic theatralization of key portions of her myth, the generation of sacrificial violence and ritual pollution, as well as the embodiment of the goddess using an array of musical, dramatic and performative components. With its overt theatrical essence, Muṭiyēṯṯu’ displays all the features corresponding to and expected by Bhadrakāḷi in a specific condition and is thereby seen as a most effective offering to appease, please and worship her. The ethnographic data provided in this article highligh how the Hindu logic of imitation allows the materialization of the goddess—and its culmination in possession—using theatrical and performative tools to create life, hence giving substance and ritual legitimacy to Bhadrakāḷi’s physical manifestation that is at the core of the power assigned to Muṭiyēṯṯu’ in its traditional context.

Signing and Belonging in Nepal by Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway

Reviewed by: Signing and Belonging in Nepal by Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway Erin Moriarty Harrelson (bio) Signing and Belonging in Nepal, by Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway ( Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2016, 176 pp., cloth, $60.00, ISBN: 978-1-56368-664-1) one of the newest offerings by Gallaudet University Press is Signing and Belonging in Nepal, a slim volume by Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway, a hearing linguistic anthropologist. This ethnography is the latest contribution to a growing body of work in the anthropology of deaf groups in the Global South. Currently the chair of the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College, Hoffmann-Dilloway conducted most of her fieldwork as a graduate student in Nepal between 2001 and 2008. This volume is based primarily on the data Hoffmann-Dilloway collected during this period and, as such, should be understood as a partial glimpse into the lives of deaf people in Nepal during this time. Divided into six chapters and an afterword, this book is presented as an introductory volume for undergraduates. In the introductory chapter, Hoffmann-Dilloway lays out her arguments and the theoretical framework for her analysis. She introduces her approach to "language" and provides an overview of specific concepts from linguistic anthropology. The chapter also presents the arguments that she takes up throughout the book and contextualizes Nepal, as well as her methodology and positionality. Chapter 2 provides the historical and social context for the underpinnings of Hoffmann-Dilloway's arguments, such as Nepali conceptualizations of personhood, social categories, and national context. In chapter 3, Hoffmann-Dilloway argues that Nepali associations of deaf people linked a standardized Nepali Sign Language and a Deaf identity with practices and symbols of high-caste Hinduism connoting good karma [End Page 399] and purity in order to combat the understanding of deafness as a stigma. Chapter 4 is a continuation of the author's discussion of Nepal's deaf community and some of its understandings of language, such as situating the origins of Nepali Sign Language in the visual-gestural interactions between the first few cohorts of deaf students at the first formal school for deaf students in the country, framing NSL as having emerged "naturally." Chapter 5 is a discussion of how the Nepali deaf associations deploy concepts of "modernity" and "development" to contest historical associations between deaf people and ritual pollution and to highlight the role of the Bakery Café, a restaurant chain in Nepal, which employs deaf people in that effort. With data from her trip to the country in 2015, Hoffmann-Dilloway concludes the book with a description of being deaf in a "new Nepal." Hoffmann-Dilloway's research took place within the specific historical and social context of Nepal as experienced by an anthropologist and her interlocutors during a period of increased political mobilization by many of Nepal's ethnolinguistic groups (1997–2006). The author argues that, during this period, deaf people in Nepal reterritorialized the concept of deaf people as a linguistic minority for their political project. In the first chapter, Hoffmann-Dilloway introduces the d/D framework, arguing that deaf people in Nepal adopted a Deaf ethnolinguistic identity, a view that advanced in Nepal as a result of relationships between the Nepali association of Deaf persons and a range of international organizations of deaf people, in order to advance their political goals. The author uses capitalized "Deaf" throughout the book, which I found interesting, especially given recent work in the anthropology of deaf people that contests the wholesale application of an identity-based framework to theorize how deaf people in diverse (and understudied) contexts understand themselves. Hoffmann-Dilloway immediately flags her use of the d/D convention in one of the first few paragraphs of this book, noting that she is following "the common Deaf Studies convention of writing the English word 'deaf' in lowercase to indicate the inability to hear, 'Deaf,' written with a capital D, to indicate identification as a member of a signing community, and using the mixed case, d/Deaf to refer to groups or situations in which both biological and cultural framings of d/Deafness are relevant" (2). [End Page 400] She ends this footnote with a statement that her use of...

Scatologising Hindu Eschatology: An (In) Auspicious Journey from Devalaya to Shauchalaya

The Indian prime minister’s clarion call for a ‘Swachh Bharat’ or ‘transparent India’ officially seeks to cleanse the image of a ‘squatting’ nation through building ‘toilets first, temples later’ (‘Devalaya Se Pehle Shauchalaya’)—a laudable slogan that sounds bizarre when heard from the member of a nationalist ‘Hindutvavadi’ political group that usually prioritises hardcore religious sentiments over civic issues. Keeping in mind the traditional Hindu discourse of ritual pollution, it is hard to believe that the Hindu mindset could bear the juxtaposition of the two sites within the space of one single sentence without considering the act as straightforward blasphemy! This article seeks to understand how—and under what sort of social circumstances—this kind of ideational somersault is being attempted today. This ingenious move is polysemic too, we argue, as the virtues of transparency and cleanliness could be rhetorically employed for a variety of purposes. We would examine whether a finer version of Hindutva is on its way to replace a cruder one by enfolding a series of tropes—from Shauchalaya to Mahatma Gandhi—that have never been within its order so far!

In the Margins of the Rabbinic Curriculum: Mastering ʿUqṣin in the Light of Zoroastrian Intellectual Culture

The study situates the Babylonian rabbinic discussion concerning the spread of ritual pollution in produce in a broader cultural and intellectual context, by synoptically examining the rabbinic discussion against the backdrop of contemporaneous Zoroastrian legal discourse. It is suggested that the intimate affinity exhibited between the Babylonian rabbinic and Pahlavi discussions of produce contamination supports a fresh examination of the cultural significance of tractate ʿUqtzin in the Babylonian Talmud and the implications of its mastery on the intellectual and cultural identity of the Babylonian rabbis. The study posits that the self-reflective Talmudic reference to the knowledge and interest later generations of Babylonian rabbis possessed in tractate ʿUqtzin and the spread of ritual pollution in produce reflects the relative significance of these topics in the broader intellectual agenda of the Sasanian period. The later Babylonian rabbis boasted about their knowledge of tractate ʿUqtzin, which extended far beyond the capacity of earlier generations, precisely because this topic best reflected the intellectual currents of their time.

Waste and Worldviews

The global trend toward urbanization has led to increasing waste challenges, especially in developing countries. Although Bhutan is still one of the world’s least developed countries, its economy and capital city have grown rapidly during the past two decades, causing solid waste production to outstrip management capacity. The government instituted new waste management initiatives in 2007, but they gained little traction. Ethnographic research in communities across the country revealed competing paradigms about the identi?cation of waste, the disposition of waste, and household practices of waste management. Vajrayana Buddhism, the dominant religion throughout much of the country, profoundly shapes local beliefs and practices. Local environmental imaginaries and cultural concerns about ritual pollution have con?icted with technocratic management protocols, leading to confusion and incompletely implemented policies. Waste management policies may be more effective if they engage with the values and practices inherent in a lived religion that contributes to cultural understandings of waste.