The British anthropologist, Alfred Gell, became fascinated by the concept of taboo when he lived among the people of Umeda village in the West Sepic District of Papua New Guinea. His curiosity was aroused when he inadvertently cut his finger with his knife, while peeling a stick of sugar-cane, and instinctively raised his finger to his lips. When he glanced up he was startled to see expressions of shock and disgust on the faces of his companions from the village: he had broken a fundamental Umeda food
taboo – the taboo on consuming self-killed game. Meditating on the implications of this transgression, Gell realised that there was a close connection between taboo and self in Umeda thought and that “taboo clarifies the phenomenology of self” (Gell, p. 136). Not only was his own auto-cannibalism (and any other cannibalism) unacceptable, but nail-biting, moustache-chewing, swallowing dried mucus and consuming the blood of a pig killed by oneself are all anathema to the Umeda. The same principle underlies the ban on children and ritual novices eating the river fish pannatamwa whose red markings are thought to resemble the red body paint worn at times by them. In fact, the observance of certain taboos identifies (or establishes) a person on both an individual and a social plane.
As an example of how this works, Gell looks at the system of tadv relations. The word tadv means, according to context, “biting”, “striking”, “shooting with an arrow”, “copulating with” and “eating”. Essentially, it refers to killing, eating and having sex but the categories are mutually exclusive: a man may not eat something he has killed (and neither may his closest blood-kin) but those who are sexually available – a man’s wife, her family or members of his opposite hamlet moiety – may eat his game. His actions therefore follow a pattern whereby he first performs an active role (as pig-killer), then a passive one (he allows the meat to be given to others), then again an active role (sexual conqueror) followed by a passive one (as he, or his “self”, is “softened” by his sexual partners). After this, he needs to recover his integrity through a period of withdrawal and asceticism:
The hunter has consummated his vital interests in the realms of venery – in both senses of that convenient homophene – but only at the cost of placing himself in jeopardy from which the only escape is via asceticism, that is to say, via taboo (Gell, p. 145).
The voluntary denials during this period lead the individual back towards an active life. Gell concludes by explaining the importance of the dream in this transition:
Our ascetic hunter, benighted, hungry, and solitary … dreams of the women from whom he has voluntarily absented himself in order to restore his integrity, and of gifts of food brought to him by his sister … Detached from the entanglements of worldly tadv relationships, the ascetic has access to the sublime, to symbolic truths … A spirit will guide his steps to the pig’s lair in the forest, and a wonderful dream about women … will set the seal of ultimate success on his endeavours (Gell, p. 146).
Having restored his sense of self, revitalised, and with divine guidance, the Umeda sets out once more in his venal pursuits.
References
Gell, Alfred. 1979. “Reflections on a Cut Finger: Taboo in the Umeda Conception of the Self”. In Fantasy and Symbol: Studies in Anthropological Interpretation. ed. R. H. Hook, p. 133–148. London; New York; San Francisco: Academic Press.
Green
Green is the colour of plants, leaves, grass, vegetables and young crops and epitomises the fervour and life of spring and regeneration. The Christian, Chinese and Muslim religions all agree on this. Mohammed is thought to have been attended by angels in green turbans at pivotal points in his life and a green banner was identified with the prophet. Under a former Turkish law, only Muslims were allowed to wear green. Yet green can also be a dangerous colour. Frédéric Portal says of it:
H
Hair
Taboos on cuttingThe immense strength of Samson resided in his hair which, as a Nazarite, he was forbidden from birth to cut (although often the Nazarites, consecrated to God by a vow, had their heads shaved at the Tabernacle at the end of the period of their vow). Unfortunately Samson was also extremely naive so that even though the seductive Delilah had asked three times for the secret of his physical prowess, and then attempted to betray him to the Philistines, he finally revealed the truth and she sheared his seven locks. That a certain power, whether bestial, sexual or divine, dwells in the hair, which must therefore never be cut, is a common perception. In Samson’s case, he may have had the force of a great beast but the source was clearly divine – Judges 16. 20 relates how when his head was shorn, Yahweh deserted him, and a rabbinical source describes how his hairs became stiff, and knocked against one another like bells, when the spirit of God was upon him (Midrash Rabba to Leviticus 8.2).
Prohibitions against religious individuals and priests cutting their hair are found on every continent. The anthropologist, James Frazer has noticed taboos against shearing among the Aztec priests, sorcerers in West Africa, rainmarkers on the lower Zambesi, magicians of the Masai clan of the El Kiboron and the Leleen (priest) of the Alfoors of the Celebres, to name just a few (Frazer, p. 258–264). Penalties for violating the injunction include crop failure, loss of rain-making powers, premature ageing, death and the loss of protective spirits. Among the major world religions, Sikh men, Punjabi women and traditional Muslim women never cut their hair. While Hindu men generally cut their hair, long, tangled, matted locks are a sign of holiness. In the case of Orthodox Jews and contemporary Chasidim, the men grow Pais (side-locks). The Christian Anabaptists and Amish of both sexes refrain from shearing and priests of the Greek Orthodox Church grow their beards.
Not surprisingly, there have been numerous attempts to explain the taboos on cutting hair, many of them focusing on the symbolism of hair within specific societies. To be hirsute, in most parts of the world, is to participate in some way in the natural, bestial or demonic realms. In the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the hero meets the strong, hairy Enkidu who lives among the animals without them fearing him, sucks their milk and shares their grass. Lured away from this natural existence by a harlot, he rubs down the matted hair of his body, anoints himself with oil, and appears as a bridegroom but pays the price of alienation from the animal kingdom – the gazelle and all the wild creatures flee from him. The tradition of the “wild man” or “Green man”, dishevelled but fecund, has survived in folk traditions throughout Europe. A myth of the Kukukuku of Papua New
child’s category formation, the substances are ambiguous, they are neither “me” or “not me”; they present the child with a basic uncertainty as to the boundary of the clean self, the true self (Leach, p. 173).
It is true that in the Punjab hair is considered both “dirty” and “polluting” and this explains the mandatory shaving of the Hindu male’s head at the tonsure ceremony and during periods, such as mourning, when he is particularly vulnerable to impurity. The hair of Punjabi women is also polluting but in her case it must never be cut, and must be left tangled and untidy at funerals. The implication is that any loss of purity by the women leads to an increase of purity in the men. Jains allow no hair at all on the bodies of ordained holy men. But things are not quite so simple. While the Brahmin’s hair is kept very short, with just a tuft left unshaven, the ascetic Hindu sadhu leaves his hair long and tangled, and it becomes the highest manifestation of the sacred, and uncut hair is one of the five symbols of Sikhism (the others being a bangle, shorts, a two-edged blade and a one-edged comb) proving membership of the mystical Sikh brotherhood, the Khalsa (the pure). Hair is also considered sacred by the Rastafarians, followers of Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari, “Lion of Judah”) who cite biblical injunctions for not cutting their hair which they wear in long, matted dreadlocks. For Mary Douglas there is no contradiction between hair as a symbol of impurity and as a sign of the sacred: “It often remains true that religions sacrilise the very unclean things which have been rejected with abhorrence” (Douglas, p. 159).
Mary Douglas is right to stress the ambivalence of symbols and it is also true that the taboos on hair cutting cannot be studied outside the particular social contexts in which they occur. C. R. Hallpike regards long hair as a sign of being “outside society” while the cutting of hair means re-entering society or living under a disciplinary regime: to cut the hair means to exercise social control over an individual. As with the previous theories, examples can be found to substantiate this view. The transvestites who play female roles in Javanese plays traditionally grew their hair long and practised homosexuality offstage but the Indonesian government has recently exerted considerable pressure on the actors to cut their hair and refrain from homosexual acts. Moreover, it is customary to shave the heads of prisoners, those one wishes to humiliate, or those entering certain religious orders. Yet among the Tikopia studied by Raymond Firth (Firth, p. 279), where the women cut their hair while the men allowed it to grow, there is no substantial evidence to suggest that the women were subject to greater restrictions (although women who allowed their hair to grow did so as a protest) and in western Europe suffragettes and feminists cut their hair to demonstrate their equality with men. It is probably true to say that those who wish to demonstrate their freedom (or are beyond worldly concerns) act in a way which defies prevailing social norms. In the case of hair this means wearing it in a manner that flouts the conventions, whether they dictate that it be worn long, short, dyed, shaven, plaited, curly, straight, tied up or loose. In the same way, members of a particular group can be identified by a similarity of hairstyle, or, in the case of the judges in British law courts, by bizarre, anachronistic wigs.
Taboos on washing
Because of the magical nature that is ascribed to hair in many societies there are often strict taboos on washing it. No Punjabi woman will wash her hair on a Tuesday (a particularly inauspicious day) unless she has malicious intent: should she, on this day, leave it loose and wet to drip on a child, it will kill the child, which will then be born again from her womb. Hair washing on Sundays or Thursdays can cause the house to lose money while shampooing on the day of the new moon will mean that the dirty water from the hair flows onto the
heads of dead in-laws. Another bad time is the day of a man’s funeral: should she wash her hair on this day, a married woman will marry the dead man in a future reincarnation.
Tying or knotting the hair
A Scottish ballad, Willie’s Lady, tells of a woman who is bewitched by her mother-in-law, a “vile rank witch of vilest kind”, so that she is unable to give birth to her child. She promises her mother-in-law treasures if she will only remove the spell, but nothing will satisfy the old woman who has taken such an intense dislike to her. Fortunately a household spirit, Belly Blind, is more compassionate and advises Willie to make a counterfeit baby from wax, invite his mother to the boy’s christening, and listen well to what his mother says. Thinking that her spells have been broken, and the child born, the mother wonders who has loosened the nine witch knots that were among the lady’s locks, as well as removing the combs of care, loosening the left-foot shoe, removing the kid goat from beneath the bed and taking down the woodbine bush that hung between the bowers of the two women. Willie immediately removes the witch knots and combs of care from his wife’s hair, loosens her shoe, kills the kid and takes down the woodbine, freeing his wife to give birth to a bonny young son.
The witch knots in the hair are a clear sign that magic is afoot. As James Frazer points out: “On the principles of homeopathic magic knots are impediments which tie up the mother and prevent her from giving birth to the child” (Frazer, p. 295). The Lapps, Scots, Indonesians, and tribes in Sulawesi (Celebes), West Africa, North Borneo and countless other regions traditionally made sure all knots were untied at the time of childbirth. There are nine knots just as there are nine months of pregnancy. On the Indonesian island of Roti a cord used to be fastened around the waist of a new bride:
Nine knots are tied in the cord, and in order to make them harder to unloose, they are smeared with wax. Bride and groom are then secluded in a chamber, where he has to untie the knots with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand only. It may be from one to twelve months before he succeedes in undoing them all. Until he has done so he may not look upon the woman as his wife … When all the knots are loosed, the woman is his wife … we may conjecture that the nine knots refer to the nine months of pregnancy, and that miscarriage would be the supposed result of leaving a single knot untied (Frazer, p. 311).
The “combs of care”, in binding the hair, similarly restrict the birth channels of Willie’s lady as does the tightly bound shoe. Just as binding the hair constricts the natural flow of things, loosening the hair releases power and energy. Among Punjabi women:
val khule (loose hair) is used of sorcery, also of a woman in mourning loosening her hair for the period of pollution, and lastly of a woman possessed who in a trance whirls her head with the hair
flying free (Hershman, p. 277).
See also
Knots; Pollution
References
Berg, Charles. 1951. The Unconscious Significance of Hair. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Child, Francis James, ed., 1882–1898. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston, Massachusetts; New York: Houghton Mifflin. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Firth, Raymond. [1973] 1975. Symbols. Public and Private. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Hallpike, Christopher R. Hair. Encyclopedia of Religion. ed. Mircea Eliade. vol. 6. New York: MacMillan. Hershman, P. 1974. “Hair, Sex and Dirt”. Man, n.s., no. 9, p. 274–298.
Leach, Edmund R. 1958. “Magical Hair”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, no. 77, p. 147–164. Leach. 1965. The Nature of War in Disarmament and Arms Control. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Halal
A Muslim should partake of no meat that is not halal, the Muslim term for acceptable food. Certain animals, such as swine and scavengers, are not to be consumed and no meat is halal unless it has been ritually slaughtered. Cyril Glassé describes the procedure:
A M oslem must consecrate the kill by saying the words Bismi-Llah; Allahu Akbar, and cut the throat (both windpipe and jugular vein) with one stroke. Game is halal if the words of consecration are spoken when it is shot, or when a trained dog is released to retrieve it. Fish are halal if caught when alive, but dead fish which have been gathered are not (Glassé, p. 133).
Cutting the throat drains the animal’s blood; though an animal’s blood must not be drunk it is permissible to consume the blood that remains in meat after draining. Since Islam contains an injunction to be reasonable in all things, non-halal meat can be eaten in cases of necessity.
See also
Wine
References
Glassé, Cyril 1989. The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. London: Stacey Publications.
Islamic Desk Reference: compiled from The Encyclopaedia of Islam. 1994. ed. E. Van Donzel. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
Haram
The Islamic term haram means “restricted, forbidden, sacred”, and, by extension, “sacred possession or place”. The areas around the mosques in Mecca and Medina are designated haraman and, with the exception of dangerous animals, it is forbidden to kill in these vicinities and non-Muslims must not enter them. In Arabic the part of the house that is reserved for the women is called by the related word harim (hence: harem).
Another related word refers to things that are forbidden for revealed, or sacred, reasons. Under the terms of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) there are five categories: (1) that which is prohibited (haram); (2) that which is discouraged (makruh); (3) that which is neutral (mubah); (4) that which is recommended (mustahabb); (5) and that which is obligatory (fard).
References
Glassé, Cyril. 1989. The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. London: Stacey Publications.
Hekmat, Anwar. 1997. Women and the Koran. The Status of Women in Islam. New York: Prometheus Books.
Islamic Desk Reference: compiled from The Encyclopaedia of Islam. ed. E. Van Donzel. 1994. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Wikan, Unni. [1982] 1991. Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman. Chicago, Illinois; London: University of Chicago Press.