TABOO

TABOO is a social prohibition or restriction sanctioned by suprasocietal (innate) means or a socially sanctioned injunction alleged to have the force of such a prohibition. Taboo stands at the intersection of human affairs and the forces of the larger universe. Generally it is determined by divine or animistic mandates; but it may involve "punishment" by inherent circumstances as well, for instance, the real, but exaggerated, danger of genetic damage to the offspring of incestuous unions implied in the incest taboo of American folk culture.

The word taboo (from the Tongan tabu, a variant of the more general Polynesian term tapu and the Hawaiian kapu ) reached the West through Captain James Cook's account of his third voyage. He was introduced to the term at Tongatapu, in the Tonga, or Friendly, Islands, and commented that the word had a very comprehensive meaning but generally signified a thing that is forbidden (Webster, 1942, p. 5). In fact, the general Polynesian usage implies that what is tapu is interdicted through its relation to the sacred, or its relation to cosmic forces. Tapu, then, relates the cosmic to human actions, and the realm of tapu amounts to a comprehensive system of religious mandate controlling individual and social life.

In Polynesian religion, tapu has the function of segregating persons, objects, or activities that are divine or sacred, or those that are corrupt or polluting, from the common, everyday realm. Thus chiefs, high-ranking persons, and their lineages were surrounded with tapu ; the heads of all persons, and especially of chiefly persons, were tapu ; but also the clothing and sleeping places of women in their menstrual periods were dangerous to men, who were tapu in relation to them (Best, 1905, p. 212). An "eating tapu " required men and women, and often all classes of persons of unequal status, to eat separately, or even to have their food prepared separately and with different utensils.

Consecrational tapu applied in circumstances of worship and labor performed for the gods and temples, and those involved entered a tapu state, which had to be neutralized later. Life-crises events (birth, marriage, illness, death) involving chiefly persons, wars, and fishing expeditions imposed community-wide restrictions on common activities, including the preparation and eating of food, movement, the lighting of fires, and noisemaking. Tapu could also be invoked through appealing to the gods to enforce a prohibition on some object, crop, or piece of land; in the Marquesas Islands a chief could taboo land in this way by calling it his "head." A temporary taboo laid on crops, trees, or fishing grounds was called a rahui (Handy, 1927, p. 46).

Tapu, as a state of sacred interdiction, stands in contrast to the neutral, or common, state, noa (whatever is free from tapu restriction). Fresh as well as salt water was used throughout Polynesia for the removal and neutralizing of tapu and of polluting influences harmful to one's tapu (Handy, 1927, pp. 51–55). Fire and heat were also used ritually against baneful influences, especially spirits. Many communities maintained a "sacred water" or spring specifically for the removal of tapu.

The cosmic principle or force behind the restrictions and prohibitions of tapu is conveyed in the general Polynesian conception of mana. Mana is invisible and abstract, knowable only through its efficacy and through its manifestation in things, yet it is universal. Like the Arabic barakah, mana combines sacredness with the sense of "luck" or "power" in the most encompassing terms. Chiefs, chiefly persons and their possessions and doings, and rites involving the gods are tapu because they are suffused with mana. The danger of polluting influences is that they may discharge the mana of persons or objects that are more highly endowed; common persons, on the other hand, run the risk of being struck or overcome by mana greater than theirs. Tapu may be seen as the "insulator" between unequal degrees of mana. Thus Handy suggests that electricity may serve as a useful analogy in illustrating the nature of the concept of mana (ibid., p. 28), though of course it is fundamentally a religious rather than a naturalistic concept.

Even modern curers and others who have recourse to its manipulation consider mana distinct in its operation from the world of ordinary life processes, exchanges, and human interaction. Curers who use mana may not accept compensation in money (MacKenzie, 1977). As a universal power, mana is evidenced in every kind of efficacy: a woodcarver manifests mana in his talents and in the tools and circumstances of his work, and canoe makers, gardeners, curers, sorcerers all have their mana, capable of being lost or dispersed unless the proper tapu are observed. Of these examples of mana the chiefly mana is the highest and most concentrated, and it poses a serious danger for the unprotected commoner.

As an abstract and generalized conception of power, mana is analogous to Lakota wakan, Iroquois orenda, and other concepts of power found among indigenous North American groups. The term is by no means universal among Austronesian-speaking peoples, though many have cognate notions. Among the major world religions mana has counterparts, perhaps, in the Islamic notion of barakah, the Hindu notion of sakti, and possibly in the Greco-Christian concept of charisma.

The notion of the "psychic unity of mankind," that is, that human cultures everywhere must pass through certain necessary stages of evolutionary growth, allowed speculative writers around the turn of the twentieth century to draw conspicuous examples of primitive religious concepts from particular ethnographic areas and universalize them. The Polynesian notions of tapu and mana lent themselves extraordinarily well to this search for the epitomizing evolutionary trait, for they were already quite abstract and, in Captain Cook's phrase, "very comprehensive" in their meanings. Early anthropologists deemed taboo noteworthy, for it marked the point where a religious idea (mana ) affected the norms and regulation of everyday life. Breach of a taboo meant divine or other suprasocietal sanctions; hence, taboos, or a system of taboos, outlined the spiritual mandate and boundaries for social existence.

In the evolutionary model for primitive religion that emerged in the decades immediately before and after 1900, taboo played the role of archetypal religious rule, or mandate; as mana did of generalized supernatural force, or power; and as totemism did of collective or individual identification with supernatural (or quasi-natural) entities. Thus emerged the alliterative formula "totem and taboo" as an encompassing rubric for primitive religion, to which Freud turned in seeking socially expressed equivalents for psychological states.

In the writings of Émile Durkheim, and among his followers in the schools of French and British social anthropology, taboo came to have the sense of a largely social restriction, or mandate, through the Durkheimian proposition that the religious and the supernatural were the means by which society took account of its own existence—worshiped itself. If, in other words, the suprasocietal forces of the world around us are nothing more than the reflection of society itself, then taboo, however it may be regarded by the members of a society, is ultimately social in its origin. Even in this understanding of it, however, taboo carries a somewhat stronger connotation than mere "law" or "rule," for taboos are special instances in which social constraints are referred directly to the religious manifestation of the social rather than to a secular authority.

The modern sense of taboo has acquired a certain ambiguity through the widespread acceptance of a socio-centric interpretation. Thus, depending on whether one accepts a formal, cultural, or a sociological understanding of the prohibition, the sanctions upon it will be, respectively, divine and innate, or human and social.

But the issue of the sanctioning force behind a taboo involves only a partial appreciation of the distinctiveness of this kind of prohibition. Taboo differs from abstract, codified law in the degree to which the prohibited object or act is specified and developed into a symbol, or even a fetish, of the prohibition itself. Taboo is not so much a system of regulations as it is a scheme of negative differentiation, in which the fact of prohibition and the prohibited act or object itself obscure the reasons for a prohibition. In this regard, the early theorists who saw "totem and taboo" as interlinked bases of "primitive thought" drew attention to a significant relation between them. For taboo designates items in order to prohibit them, whereas totemic representation is based on affinities between social units and phenomenal entities. Yet the practice of exogamy (marrying outside of one's totemic group), once felt to be an integral part of totemism, comprehends both of these at once, for it places a marriage taboo on those who share affinities with the same entity.

Thus taboos serve to control and channel human interaction and collective activity through a system of negative differentiation, marking out certain persons, objects, and occasions by specifying what may not be done to, with, or on them. Words used as names are sometimes tabooed when a person holding the name undergoes a change in status. In the Marquesas and Society islands, a common word included in the name of a king or heir apparent would be tabooed and also replaced in everyday language. When a king of Tahiti assumed the name Pomare, the word po ("night") was replaced in common speech by rui, and mare ("cough") was changed to kare (Webster, 1942, p. 301). Similar taboos are found among the Zulu and the Malagasy. Among the Tiwi of northern Australia, the name of a person who has died, together with the common-noun equivalent of that name, and all the names that the deceased had bestowed upon others, together with their equivalents, are tabooed for ordinary use and transferred to a sacred language (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, pp. 209–210).

Taboos on name use, and often on any sort of interaction, are frequently encountered in the norms for kin relationship. In Papua New Guinea these are so common that the Pidgin term for "relative by marriage" is simply tambu ("taboo"). The extreme case, widespread in Aboriginal Australia and New Guinea, is a taboo involving total avoidance between a man and his wife's (or future wife's) mother. A relationship is set up between them precisely by their not interacting, one that forces them to communicate solely through the bridal exchanges. Thus the tabooing or, in this case, the negative differentiation of relationship creates the basis for future relationships by creating a marriage. Further taboos of affinity control and direct the subsequent course of the relationship by restricting overfamiliarity among other kinspeople brought into contact by the marriage.

Taboos on specific kinds, classes, or styles of food and on food preparation are perhaps the most commonly encountered of all human prohibitions. Many peoples who have no general term for "taboo" have a word for "food taboo." Food restrictions, probably universal in human cultures, often conceal (or initiate) preferences or are themselves disguised as health precautions. Well-known examples include the Hebraic prohibition against using the same utensils for preparing meat and dairy products, the Hebraic and Islamic restrictions against eating the meat of animals that have been incorrectly slaughtered and against eating pork, and the Hindu ritual distinction between pakkā foods, prepared in clarified butter, and kaccā foods, boiled in water. Among the Kaluli of Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea, an elaborate system of food taboos operates to prevent relationships among cultural domains that must not be mixed. Married men and women must not eat fresh meat, and smoked meat is available only through exchanges with in-laws; thus, bonds will form through marriage links rather than with single hunters (Schieffelin, 1976, p. 71).

Mourning restrictions most often take the form of taboos, ranging from prohibitions on speaking of, or using the names of, the deceased, through those on the use of the house or property of the deceased, to severe injunctions of seclusion (for widows or widowers). In parts of the Pacific, there are restrictions against washing or self-adornment, and often the mourners must wear relics. In traditional China, specific degrees of mourning behavior were specified according to one's relationship to the deceased. Among the Yi people of Yunnan Province in China visitors are prohibited from entering a compound where there are newborn infants or piglets, where someone is gravely ill, or where someone has died. Immediately upon a person's death, among the Usen Barok of New Ireland, a taboo called the lebe goes into effect: no gardening can be done, no fires can be made, and no arguments will be tolerated until the conclusion of the final mourning feast, up to a week later. It is also forbidden to utter a cry of lament until the mourners hear the first squeals of the pigs being slaughtered for the first feast.

Taboos surrounding ritual or worship are often the severest of all, for they involve mediation with the very forces that are understood to mete out the sanctions. The major ritual of the Daribi of Papua New Guinea concerns the placating of an unmourned and angry ghost, who possesses the habu ritualists in the process. Any deviation from the prescribed format of the ritual results in the affliction of the offenders with the dread habu illness, a malign act of possession that is merely the intended therapeutic possession gone awry (Wagner, 1972, p. 156). Food taboos accompanying the Chihamba ritual among the Ndembu of Africa keep the participants from "eating Chihamba" or the characteristics associated with this spirit (Turner, 1975, pp. 71–72). The sense of ritual indiscretion as mediation gone wrong is conveyed by the Navajo belief that ghosts cause people to do the opposite of whatever has been decreed in taboos.

The emphasis of a taboo, however negatively it may be phrased, is always upon the thing, act, or word tabooed. We tend to contemplate the object of the taboo itself in a search for motives, or possibly origins, for the prohibition. Thus, for instance, pork is a potential carrier of trichinosis, mothers-in-law have many potential conflicts of interest with their sons-in-law, and interbreeding among close relatives may lead to the expression of deleterious recessive genes. The difficulty with this sort of literalistic thinking can be seen in these examples. Taboo is usually indirect; its real object is not so much what is forbidden as it is the cultural and social circumstances affected by the prohibition. The Kaluli do indeed say that the juices of fresh meat are unhealthy for women and that their husbands should avoid it out of compassion. But the taboo on the eating of fresh meat for married persons serves to force them into the painstaking and appropriate activity of preparing and exchanging smoked meat with relatives by marriage. It aligns with a number of other taboos to restrict interaction to culturally appropriate categories.

The Daribi, in another example, actually have no experience of disagreeable mothers-in-law, for a married person is never allowed to see the mother-in-law, much less speak with her. But the taboo forces each party to be especially aware of the other and to funnel their efforts into organizing the exchanges that must pass between the two sides. An effective relationship is formed through the principle of "not relating"! Finally, what we know as the "incest taboo" is actually the summation of a number of particular kin relationships, which are of differing extent and content in different cultures. What may be considered to be incestuous, or a relative, or a relationship, varies from one culture to another. But the fact of kin regulation through restriction, or kin taboo, if you will, is common to all cultures, for it is the essence of kinship. Hence, whether its prohibitions are imposed by men or gods, taboo incorporates the regulatory imperative of culture itself.

See Also

Evolution, article on Evolutionism; Power; Purification.

Bibliography

Best, Elsdon. "The Lore of the Whare-Kohanga." Journal of the Polynesian Society 15 (1906): 147–162. An early, but classic, discussion of mana and pollution in Maori lore.

Handy, E. S. Craighill. Polynesian Religion. Honolulu, 1927. A dated, but synoptic, summary, with comprehensive sections on mana and tapu.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. La pensée sauvage. Paris, 1962. Translated anonymously as The Savage Mind (London, 1966). A challenging and highly original treatment of the symbolism of differentiation and classification.

MacKenzie, Margaret. "Mana in Maori Medicine: Rarotonga, Oceania." In The Anthropology of Power, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson and Richard N. Adams, pp. 45–56. New York, 1977. An engaging and illuminating account of the use of mana in a modern, mechanized society.

Schieffelin, Edward L. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York, 1976. A well-written ethnographic exploration of an exotic worldview, including a comprehensive investigation of food taboos.

Turner, Victor. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y., 1975. A mature consideration of ritual and ritual prohibition by a foremost modern authority on the subject.

Wagner, Roy. Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion. Chicago, 1972. A discussion of the symbolism of taboo and ritual prohibition in a New Guinea society.

Webster, Hutton. Taboo: A Sociological Study. Stanford, Calif., 1942. A highly detailed documentation of taboos and related ethnographic usages in a somewhat dated scholarly style.

Roy Wagner (1987)