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The late anthropologist Jill Dubisch popularized purity as a driving theme across religious belief, social boundaries, and gender roles. We’ll explore purity as an inteprlay to the domains that Dubisch presents: pilgrimage, gender, physical, and social.
Across these domains, she notes how purity is a requisite to many pilgrims across many religious and spiritual practices. Take praying, fasting, ritaul bathing, holy symbols, paint, and plenty more—all to ensure that one is physically or spiritually “pure.” She notes purity in this sense as being a social practice and ideal.
Furthermore, gender and purity are deeply intertwined. Women’s purity is associated across many cultures with sexual activity, menstruation, and childbirth, which Dubisch notes most often reinforces gender hierarchies and traditional roles. She critiques many of these gender-defined ideas as perpetuation the subordination of women.
Next: physical purity is noted to link spiritual and physical health. The body becomes the sacred site of purification, with perfect bodily “purity” being all but synonymous with peak physical and spiritual health.
As a fourth vertical, Dubisch notes how ideas around purity, which essentially delineate between “good” (accepted) and “bad” behavior on a societal level, serve to reinforce and maintain societal cohesion by linking people together, denouncing behavior that could pull society apart (sexual excess as being “impure” while in practical terms damaging family units being a common example), and creating exclusivity in defining who belongs and who doesn’t.
That’s it; purity as related to gender, society, health, and pilgrimage. Check out my full Religion 101 article list (useful for studying, or just learning!) here.