Ritual Pollution Research Articles

Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100–1700 by Helen Parish (review)

Reviewed by: Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100–1700 by Helen Parish Elizabeth Abbott Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100–1700. By Helen Parish. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2010. Pp. xii, 282. $99.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-3949-7.) The topic of Helen Parish’s authoritative and immensely readable Clerical Celibacy is rooted in millennia of Christian doctrine, discipline, and practice, and remains as timely and contentious as ever. Pope Francis called it “a rule of life that I appreciate very much, and … a gift for the church” but added that “since it is not a dogma, the door is always open.” In her introduction, Parish underscores the vastness and complexity of her subject. Celibacy and marriage are intensely personal and private matters, but in the [End Page 349] context of the Christian priesthood, very public, and at times polemical statements. The commitment to a life of celibacy demanded of the Catholic clergy reaches to the heart of the individual, but also to the heart of the history of the Church that he serves, and clerical celibacy continues to be defined in relation to scripture, apostolic tradition, ecclesiastical history, and papal authority (p. 13). Despite her subtitle (c. 1100–1700), Parish begins by examining the attitudes and experiments of the early Church, which set the tone for centuries of discussion and debate. St. Paul was a towering influence in the debate, and Parish describes how his “infamous statement in defence of chastity” (p. 24) in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, and his moderate though ambivalent observations about marriage fueled the debate about clerical celibacy. So did St. Jerome’s diatribes against any suggestion that virginity and chastity were not the highest form of Christian expression. In his denunciation of the monk Jovinian, who defended the worth of married clergy, Jerome insisted that clerics either remain unmarried or, if married, then abstain from sex—the only way, he believed, they could achieve the holiness that was an essential priestly quality. The sexually experienced St. Augustine, on the other hand, who believed that “all sexual activity [w]as accompanied by ritual pollution” (p. 39), tempered his recommendations about clerical celibacy for the very practical reason that it was difficult to find enough priests. His solution was to accept married men, secure in the knowledge that ordination would bestow on them the grace to live chaste lives. Even as the theological foundation for clerical celibacy developed and matured, the reality of the early Church was that many of its clergymen were married. In this context, the chapter on the history of clerical marriage in the Eastern churches adds a fascinating dimension to the issue, and Parish concludes: The married ministry of the Eastern church might appear be stand in stark contrast to perpetual continence of Latin priests, but the law which committed them to temporary continence was constructed on the same foundations as the celibacy obligation which bound the clergy of the Roman church. (p. 86) The locus of chapter 3, “‘A concubine or an unlawful woman’: Celibacy, Marriage, and the Gregorian Reform,” is “a central place in the history and historical narrative of clerical celibacy,” when many priests were married “and leading a life almost indistinguishable at first glance from that of their parishioners” (p. 89). But when church holdings fell into private hands, these priests were blamed for the common practice of assigning church properties to their children and even founding dynasties. The ensuing churchly campaign against clerical wives and children did not, Parish notes, “manifest the rhetoric of purity and sacerdotalism that was to characterise later attempts to regulate clerical conduct” (p. 96) and relied instead on harsh punishments: removing clergy from office; instructing (often reluctant) parishioners to decline sacraments from noncompliant priests; threatening excommunication; even forcibly separating ordained husband from wife and children. [End Page 350] Interwoven into Parish’s descriptions of centuries of such real-life complexities and dynamics are stories of how Gregorian reformers effected drastic changes in canon law and how the Church’s devotional focus on the Eucharist and Christ’s presence led to the new vision of priests who were chaste and unstained as they handled...

Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603–1912 by Atsuko Hirai (review)

Reviewed by: Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603–1912 by Atsuko Hirai Mark Teeuwen Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603–1912. By Atsuko Hirai. Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. 464 pages. Hardcover $49.95/£36.95/€45.00. Government by Mourning was published just weeks before its author, Atsuko Hirai (1936–2014), reached the end of what she describes in her very personal acknowledgments as an “interminable medical odyssey.” Finishing any manuscript is hard work; in this case, it must have been a veritable tour de force. If it were not for her disclosure in the acknowledgments, however, one would never guess that this thorough and detailed book was prepared for publication under such adverse circumstances. As a reviewer, I feel it is my duty to the author to express my respect by assessing the book’s strengths and weaknesses to the best of my ability. [End Page 135] Government by Mourning consists of three parts. Part 1 addresses the “mourning edicts” (bukkiryō or bukkirei) of the Edo period, which laid down rules for proper mourning following the death of a relative. Part 2 addresses public mourning of prominent figures like the shogun, the emperor, or a daimyo, focusing on the bans on music and other kinds of noise (in Hirai’s terminology, “sounds suspensions,” narimono chōjirei) that were routinely enforced on such occasions. Finally, part 3 shows that after the Meiji restoration, policies of mourning were harnessed in efforts to educate the people in the national values of the state. Mourning edicts are, at first glance, a less than inspiring topic for a book-length study. Such edicts consist of lists of mourning obligations, organized according to one’s relation to the deceased: so many days of “abstention” and so many days of “mourning” for one’s parents, adoptive parents, stepparents, legal mother, alienated mother, and so on. Such lists were, with minor adjustments, based on the Yōrō code of 718, which laid down rules for the number of days officials affected by a death in their family had to stay away from work so as not to spread ritual pollution. What can be gleaned from such subtle changes, implemented over the centuries, and why are they important? Hirai succeeds in breathing life into this seemingly arid area of legislation by arguing vividly that “mourning rituals shaped politics,” while, at the same time, “politics impinged on the rituals” (p. 89). Mourning obligations were first codified by the shogun Tsunayoshi in 1693; his edict underwent minor revisions under Yoshimune in 1736. The resulting Edict on Mourning and Abstention remained in force even into the early Meiji period. Hirai argues that although Tsunayoshi’s edict was drafted not by him but by Confucian and Shinto experts, it reflected Tsunayoshi’s personal circumstances and interests. Those interests included his devotion to his mother and his predilection for the Confucian classics. More important, however, were two aspects that made the edict politically relevant. First, Tsunayoshi’s mourning edict established a clear hierarchy among relatives. In a context where the succession often passed to sons adopted for that very purpose, mourning offered such heirs the opportunity to perform in their role as sons and, through a public display of filial piety (genuine or otherwise), gain additional legitimacy. Likewise, the edict made it more difficult for daimyo to pick the heir of their choice. It left little opportunity to pass over a son or a brother in favor of, say, a nephew or an uncle, because the edict gave the shogunate a juridical reason to withhold its permission for such anomalous successions. Second, Hirai maintains that while the shogun possessed the authority to reduce mourning obligations, including his own, there were situations when it was convenient to invoke the authority of the emperor as the final arbiter of mourning protocol. In that way, a shogun could cut short his mourning period without appearing unfilial. Hirai adduces “the emperor’s authority to interfere with any shogun’s mourning obligations” as an argument in a larger discussion of the relationship between shogun and emperor (p. 101). She argues that the emperor’s authority in questions of mourning...

Pollution and Crisis in Greek Tragedy by Fabian Meinel

414 PHOENIX to identify a feature within a text as “self-consciously” commenting upon itself? These questions are central to the whole project, and it might have been helpful if they had been tackled head-on. But after all Wohl does not claim to offer an exhaustive account of the topic (ix). What she has provided is a thought-provoking discussion which effectively links tragedy’s formal aspects to questions of broader thematic and intellectual interest. Euripides’ undeniable oddity has sometimes led critics to view him as a facile provocateur, but he emerges from Wohl’s book as a serious artist, profoundly engaged with contemporary issues. The University of Exeter Matthew Wright Pollution and Crisis in Greek Tragedy. By Fabian Meinel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Pp. xiii, 278. Pollution, purification, and purity are salient and recurrent concerns in Athenian tragedy, and this book seeks both to interpret individual tragedies through their treatment of pollution and to understand both pollution and tragedy as ways of expressing and negotiating complex problems. The readings of the texts are subtle and sometimes brilliant, even when they are not entirely convincing; Meinel seems to be a deconstructionist at heart, and the book typically finds complications or undercutting ironies wherever a play seems to present a resolution. It is less clear that it is entirely successful in providing the “new perspectives on pollution” (from dust jacket) outside the tragic context. Moreover, Meinel has not fully overcome a frequent problem met when converting the dissertation into a book: the assumption of a reader who is almost as close to the topic as the writer. Thus, terms like “crisis” and “negotiation” are more fashionable than lucid and require more explanation than is given. The introduction presents the premise that pollution “constitutes a convenient tool in the negotiation of tragic crises” (6; “crisis” here means something like “complex sociocultural problem”). The introduction includes some polemic against Mary Douglas’s famous definition of pollution as category-transgression, and especially against the essentialist assumption that pollution can be defined in any one way. So far, so good, although I am inclined to think that category-transgression is a more important aspect of pollution than Meinel acknowledges, albeit not the only one. The author then lists a series of functions and associations of pollution, all of which seem valid. Pollution as a category of thought allows narratives of cause-and-effect to be generated; it is inherently fluid and unstable; it is associated with exclusion from the civic community, while purity helps define the group; it is an evaluative category that is potentially coextensive with other evaluative categories. These are clarified, however, only in the following detailed discussions of particular texts. I would have appreciated, for example, some analysis of the way Greek authors use the language of ritual pollution for moral evaluation and what that can tell us about pollution itself. Sometimes it is easy to see how the following chapters develop these various functions of pollution, sometimes it is not. Chapter One (“Pollution, Interpretation and Understanding ”) focuses on two plays: Hippolytus, which shows pollution as a possible cause, even as Hippocratic causality puts it in doubt, and Oedipus Tyrannus, which invites the audience to identify miasma as the essence of Oedipus while showing the inadequacy of this identification (and the self-blinding as a failed purification). In Chapter Two BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 (“Pollution and the Instability of Civic Space”), the author addresses Antigone, in which Creon is consistently obsessed with boundaries and with stability. Pollution, however, is destabilizing and mobile, as the birds carry bits of the rotting corpse everywhere. In the Oresteia, to which the third chapter is devoted, pollution is closely associated with revenge-justice; each killing is seen as a purification, but the purification is simultaneously a source of new pollution. Ritual purification cannot solve the problem, because there is a wider problem of justice that neither ritual nor revenge can address. In an excursus to this chapter, Meinel argues that in Iphigenia in Tauris—which he sees as truly tragic, not a romance—the allusions to the Oresteia show that in this play, too, purification fails. If the Erinyes were not placated by...

‘Fighting Stick of Thunder’: Firearms and the Zulu Kingdom: The Cultural Ambiguities of Transferring Weapons Technology

This paper investigates the reluctance of the nineteenth-century Zulu people of southern Africa fully to embrace firearms in their war-making, and posits that this was an expression of their military culture. Not that the Zulu could not appreciate the battle-winning potential of the new military technology, or were dissuaded from increasingly determined efforts to obtain large quantities of firearms from traders. Yet, because firearms were prestigious weapons, monopolized by the elite, or professional hunters, Zulu commoners had little opportunity to master them and continued to rely instead on their traditional weapons, particularly the stabbing-spear. Even so, cultural rather than practical reasons were behind the rank and file’s reluctance to upgrade firearms to their prime weapon. Employing recorded contemporary Zulu oral evidence, praise songs, and statements of prisoners-of-war, to unpack the Zulus’ own perception of their heroic military culture, it is argued that, because of the engrained Zulu cultural consensus that only hand-to-hand combat was appropriate conduct for a true fighting-man, killing at a distance with a firearm was of inferior significance, and did not even entail the ritual pollution that followed homicide and the shedding of human blood. Only close combat was worthy of praise and commemoration.

Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan Julia Adeney Thomas (bio) Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan. By Peter Wynn Kirby. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2011. xii, 250 pages. $49.00. Peter Wynn Kirby refers to his book as “a penetrating cultural analysis” (pp. 2–3), but Troubled Natures would be described more accurately as a series of ruminations on contemporary Japan loosely organized around the themes of environment, waste, and pollution. Kirby’s stated purpose is to trace environmental consciousness and conduct, construing “environment” to encompass both natural and social phenomena ranging from physiological reactions to toxins, crow eradication campaigns, garbage collection schemes, ideas of ritual pollution, whaling, declining birth rates, golf courses on landfill sites, questions of identity and social outcastes to changing government policies. In linking all these concrete and metaphorical arenas, Kirby hopes to reveal a distinctively Japanese mode of dealing with contamination. Although the problems of garbage and toxic pollution, along with the social policing of “clean” and “unclean” things and people, are common to all modern and many premodern societies, Kirby’s goal is to reveal “the unexpectedly troubled natures at the heart of Japanese life” (p. 3). An anthropologist, Kirby focused his efforts as a participant observer in two communities that he pseudonymously calls “Izawa” and “Horiuchi” in the “Azuma” ward of western Tokyo. His core research was done in 1998–99 supplemented by more recent visits to these areas. The neighborhood of Izawa was riven by controversy over a large garbage-compacting plant that released toxins dangerously harmful to some residents while apparently leaving others unscathed. Those who became ill, most of them older women, wanted the plant modified or closed, while their unaffected neighbors wanted to protect property values and community pride by downplaying health concerns. The sufferers eventually won their case, garnering scientific evidence of increased toxicity in the area, winning compensation from the government, and forcing changes to the way the plant processed waste. Less than a decade later, however, the government shut down the facility entirely due to a change in its policy from compacting “unburnable” garbage to incinerating all garbage at extremely high temperatures said to eliminate dioxins and other dangerous chemicals (p. 189). This story of Izawa’s shifting fortunes and Japan’s shifting policies appears in several installments in chapters 1, 2, 6, and 8. The problems in Horiuchi, Kirby’s other ethnographic site and the focus of chapter 3, were different. The source of anxiety there was not a local plant but the general sense of toxic pollution spreading throughout Japan’s [End Page 249] food distribution system, its air, and its media. In 1999, a pollution scare arose from the discovery of a cluster of small, poorly regulated incinerators burning Tokyo’s waste just beyond the city’s borders in Saitama Prefecture. According to TV-Asahi, the toxins from these incinerators had contaminated Saitama’s famed spinach crop. Even when this story proved wildly exaggerated—at least for spinach—Kirby’s informants continued to feel anxieties about pollution and illness as well, he admits, as worries about the unrelated economic downturn weighing on Japan since the 1980s economic bubble burst. Later, in chapter 7, Kirby links anxieties about toxins to national demographic worries summed up in the phrase shōshi-kōreika. This phrase refers to both the declining birth rates which are sometimes ascribed to environmental pollutants (though more often to economic constraints and the changing roles of women) and also to the aging population which has little relation to pollution and might be construed to indicate that the Japanese islands are relatively healthy in letting so many people lead long lives. In grouping all these sources of anxiety under a capacious definition of the “environment,” Kirby presses us to see a world of connected worries. Kirby’s final chapter turns to the problematic notion of sustainable development, providing an interesting update on changes in governmental strategies in the last decade. These strategies include more incineration, encouraging the recycling of large appliances and computers, and tapping into “renewable” energy supplies by burning plastic pellets made from PET bottles and by harnessing the methane gas emitted by organic matter in landfills. Kirby...

Ordering burgers, reordering relations

This article analyzes gestural interactions between hearing and d/Deaf Nepalis to argue that local understandings of the consequences of these engagements make visible ways of ideologizing gesture that may be obscured by the gestural typologies widely used by scholars. In Nepal, d/Deafness is associated with ritual pollution that can be shared across persons. Consequently, the use of gesture in a communicative interaction can both presuppose the presence of a polluted d/Deaf body and creatively index the transmission of that pollution to a hearing interlocutor. By the same token, gesturally engaging with Deaf persons can index “modern” rejection of belief in ritual pollution on the part of the hearing participant. While many scholarly typologies of gesture focus on form and decontextualized reference, the pragmatic effects of gesture derived from and contributing to differently positioned personhoods are more significant in local ideologies in Nepal.

Reconstructing Indian feminine self: A case study of Devaki

This essay addresses the applicability of life history as a genre and method to explore culture and self. It looks at how various aspects of culture and society contribute actively to emergence of cultural self, social self and psychological self. The psychological biography of child widow, Devaki from Banaras explores these concerns. A Hindu widow is known for the traumatic rites of passage she goes through from marriage to widowhood. In the case of child widow her adolescence gets enmeshed, with that of the rites of widowhood. She experiences embodiment of shame and ritual pollution along with economic hardships and social marginality. Devaki’s efforts are steered in the direction of releasing herself from the shame that, envelopes her being, and then her emergence as an independent self. The essay also explores possibility of multiple selves.

Impact of ritual pollution on lactation and breastfeeding practices in rural West Bengal, India.

BackgroundBreastfeeding in India is universal and prolonged. Several cultural practices are associated with lactation and breastfeeding in India, mainly revolving around the concept of ritual purity and 'hot and cold' foods, food avoidance, restricted diet after childbirth, and remaining in seclusion for a certain time period because of the polluting effects of childbirth. This study on breastfeeding practices explored how the concept of ritual pollution influenced practices after delivery, including during lactation and breastfeeding.MethodsThe study was conducted in four villages of West Bengal State in India, representing different levels of socioeconomic development, religion, and caste/tribe from September 1993 to April 1994. One hundred households with one woman respondent from each household were selected from each village. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed for data collection. A survey questionnaire was administered to 402 respondents and in-depth interviews were conducted with 30 women in the reproductive age group (13–49 years), and 12 case studies were documented with women belonging to different caste, religious, and tribal groups.ResultsBelief in 'impurity and polluting effects of childbirth' necessitated seclusion and confinement of mothers after childbirth in the study villages. Breastfeeding was universal and prolonged, and food proscriptions were followed by mothers after childbirth to protect the health of their newborn. Initiation of breastfeeding was delayed after birth because of the belief that mother's milk is 'not ready' until two-to-three days postpartum. Generally, colostrum was discarded before putting the infant to the breast in the study villages. Breastfeeding lasted up to five years, and the majority of women in the sample introduced supplementary food before six months. Most infants in the study villages were given a prelacteal feed immediately after birth, only a small number of women (35) exclusively breastfed – after giving a prelacteal feed – until six months in the study villages.ConclusionCultural and traditional practices have considerable implications on lactation and breastfeeding, and in the overall well-being and health of mothers and infants. Breastfeeding programs should take into account traditional beliefs and concepts when communicating with families about practices such as food restriction and food avoidance.

Newborn care practices in Pemba Island (Tanzania) and their implications for newborn health and survival

Newborn mortality accounts for about one-third of deaths in children under five. Neglecting this problem may undermine the fourth Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds by 2015. This study was conducted in Tanzania, where an estimated 32/1000 infants die within the first 28 days. Our objective was to describe newborn care practices and their potential impact on newborn health. We interviewed two purposive samples of mothers from Pemba Island, a predominantly Muslim community of Arab-African ethnicity, and one of Tanzania's poorest. The first sample of mothers (n = 12) provided descriptive data; the second (n = 26) reported actual practice. We identified cultural beliefs and practices that promote early initiation of breastfeeding and bonding, including 'post-partum seclusion'. We also identified practices which are potentially harmful for newborn health, such as bathing newborns immediately after delivery, a practice motivated by concerns about 'ritual pollution', which may lead to newborn hypothermia and premature breast milk supplementation (e.g. with water and other fluids) which may expose newborns to pathogens. Some traditional practices to treat illness, such as exposing sick newborns to medicinal smoke from burning herbs, are also of concern. It is unclear whether the practice of massaging newborns with coconut oil is harmful or beneficial. Interventions to reduce neonatal mortality need to identify and address the cultural rationales that underlie negative practices, as well as reinforce and protect the beliefs that support positive practices. The results suggest the need to improve use of health services through improving health worker communication skills and social management of patients, as well as by lowering healthcare costs.

Changing views about ritual pollution during the formation of medieval Japanese society

Changing views about ritual pollution during the formation of medieval Japanese society

The Domestication of AIDS: Stigma, Gender, and the Body Politic in Japan

In this article, I examine the processes by which AIDS has been “domesticated,” and Japanese women stigmatized as vectors of HIV/AIDS, once regarded as a “foreign” disease in Japan. Women are associated with ritual pollution and impurity in the Shinto tradition. At the same time, Japanese women are blamed for eschewing marriage and motherhood in favor of material pursuits. As a sequel to the “AIDS panic” of the 1980s, which centered on “foreign women” and women who dated foreigners, in the late 1990s, the Japanese media incited widespread anxiety over a phenomenon known as enjo kōsai, or “compensated dating,” in which Japanese teenage girls are said to exchange favors (sometimes sexual) for money with older Japanese men. After describing the social and political conditions making the link between young girls, consumption, and AIDS appear natural in late 1990s Japan, I draw on material from some interviews with HIV-positive women to show how these women are marginalized by narratives that fail to take the particularity and the heterogeneity of their experiences into account. While these women resist the stigma that goes along with being labeled a “sex worker,” their stories are drowned out by larger stories that speak of the body politic and national concerns over generation divides, demographic shifts, and gender relations in times of rapid social change.

Dealing with Dirt and the Disorder of Development: Managing Rubbish in Urban Pakistan

This article unveils the different “thought worlds” that inform urban development policy and the reality of urban service delivery in Faisalabad, Pakistan's third largest city. Focusing on changing patterns of residential waste removal and based on ethnographic work among minority Christian street sweepers, the “little sub-worlds” involved in domestic rubbish collection are explored, showing how these articulate with larger “thought worlds” about dirt and disorder. The symbolic meanings of dirt across public and private spheres are examined alongside efforts by development practitioners and donors to impose generic policy solutions related to privatized delivery. Drawing on Mary Douglas's insights about how ritual pollution or danger-beliefs serve generally to maintain social categories and hierarchies, the article nevertheless points to the historically contingent specificities of caste-like relations in urban Pakistan and how these have been constructed. It shows how, under increasing competition for scarce jobs, entitlements associated with hereditary status-based occupations are once more appealed to and reconstructed by these vulnerable waste workers, shaping in the process urban service delivery and the relations that underpin it. The disjuncture born of diverse logics about dirt and disorder reveals an institutional multiplicity and messy social reality that sits uneasily with development as an ordering and unidirectional process.

Elisheva Carlebach. Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xii, 324 pp.

Unlike the Sephardim, who accepted the concept of taqiyya and the practice of marranism to cope with forced conversions under Islam, the Ashkenazim, especially the Jewish communities of Germanophone Central Europe, developed an uncompromising rejection of Christian baptism. Instead of marranism and deception under Islam, the Ashkenazim, in the persecutions of the Crusades and after, developed a strong sense of martyrdom and detested baptism, whether forced or voluntary, as ritual and spiritual defilement and pollution. The small number of Jewish converts to Christianity were not so much sinners but apostates (meshummadim or the vertilgten). Given this Ashkenazi tradition, it is not surprising that converts were marginalized in Jewish historiography and scholarship. Nevertheless, as Carlebach argues persuasively in this book, they played a significant role in Jewish–Christian relations in early modern Germany; and given the fact that conversions rose rapidly in the late eighteenth century, it is all the more important to understand the prehistory of Jewish conversion and integration in Germany after Emancipation.

Narratives of Conception, Gestation, and Labour in Sanskrit Āyurvedic Texts

This essay looks at the ways in which medical discourse in Sanskrit is linguistically and meaningfully constructed, especially when this discourse directly addresses sexual difference in textual understandings of the ways in which conception, gestation, and the quotidian details of the birth experience are described by the multiple authors of these texts, and in some cases, by their commentators. I see it as my task to uncover and discuss the conceptual position of women in early ayurvedic literature; as objects of practice, but also as medical ̒actors̓ in and of themselves. In my conclusion, I will include some of my own speculations on the transmission of gynecological and obstetric knowledge, on what is ̒public̓ or ̒private̓ knowledge and on what could possibly be construed as ̒male̓ or ̒female̓ science. I will be paying particular attention to the gendered nature of medical authority in my concluding remarks, especially when analysing several circumstances in which women appear as agents and actors. I see āyurvedic texts as part of a larger cultural world: they share information and attitudes with other Sanskrit textual genres, particularly with dharma-śāstras (legal treatises), especially when the subjects in question turn to women and the regulation of their bodies in times of ritual pollution and reproductivity.

Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts. Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge , Cambridge University Press, 2000, X-286 pages, £ 40.00

Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts. Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge , Cambridge University Press, 2000, X-286 pages, £ 40.00

Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany. By Kathy Stuart. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History. Edited by, Sir John Elliott et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. x+286. $64.95.

Previous articleNext article No AccessDefiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany. By Kathy Stuart. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History. Edited by, Sir John Elliott et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. x+286. $64.95.Craig Koslofsky Craig KoslofskyUniversity of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign Search for more articles by this author University of Illinois, Urbana‐ChampaignPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 75, Number 1March 2003 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/377783 Views: 39Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Managing 'face', hygiene and convenience at a Chinese funeral in Singapore

This paper is based on the experience of the writer, then nearing completion of her PhD in social anthropology, at the funeral of her mother in Singapore. On returning to the UK she was struck by the fact that much of her experience contradicted the little that had been documented about Chinese funerals in Singapore, which suggested to her that significant change has taken place. While this writer is not claiming that Chinese funerals in the Singapore metropolis have, on the whole, changed drastically in character since the last comprehensive account (Tong, 1987), it is also unlikely that her experience was unique. The aims of the paper are two-fold. First, to highlight the emphasis on the management of 'face', the accent on convenience, and the importance of hygiene, which seem to supersede the major concern for ritual pollution in previous studies. Second, to elucidate why this is so by examining changes in the religious landscape, the nature of illness, the 'loss' of community and other aspects of modernity in fashioning a new perspective of filial piety.

Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany. By Kathy Stuart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x plus 286pp.)

Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany. By Kathy Stuart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x plus 286pp.)

:Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany

List of illustrations Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Glossary Introduction: defiled trades Part I. The Meaning of Dishonor in Early Modern Society: 1. Medieval versus early modern dishonor 2. Honor, status and pollution Part II. The Dishonorable Milieu: 3. The status of executioners and skinners, 1500-1700 4. Living on the periphery of dishonor Part III. Paradoxical Dishonor: Punishment and Healing: 5. The infamous fur coat, or the unintended consequences of social discipline 6. The executioner's healing touch: health and honor in early modern German medical practice Part IV. Artisanal Honor and Urban Politics: 7. Guardians of honor: artisans versus magistrates 8. Honor and dishonor in the eighteenth century Conclusion: dishonor and the society of orders Select bibliography Index.

Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany. By Kathy Stuart (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 286 pp. $64.95

<i>Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany</i>. By Kathy Stuart (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 286 pp. $64.95