llm_council/tests/Allan + burridge - taboos.md

#author: allan & Burridge #text: taboos

Definition

• Taboo = a “proscription of behaviour that affects everyday life” (p. 1).
  • Taboo arises where behaviors “can cause discomfort, harm or injury” (p. 1), encompassing both physical and metaphysical risks, including contact with sacred or dangerous persons or objects.
    • The concept extends far beyond ritual acts or special circumstances.
    • Risk can be metaphysical (contaminating soul), moral, or physical (exposure to disease or power), with possible “contamination” of others (p. 1).
    • Can be protective: rules against incest, waste management, food taboos, and avoidance speech styles are evolutionarily or functionally sensible, though motivation may become obscured as rituals develop (p. 8).

Domains (p. 1)

• bodies and their effluvia (sweat, snot, faeces, menstrual fluid)
• organs and acts of sex
• micturition and defecation; disease
• death and killing
• naming, addressing, touching, and viewing persons and sacred beings
• food gathering, preparation, and consumption

Characteristics

1. not static: relative, context-dependent, historically shifting
2. multi-functional: protects, polices, empowers, and creates
3. systemic: operates across language, ritual, law, social identity
4. generative: produces linguistic creativity and cultural cohesion even as it restricts

Key Mechanisms

1. orthophemism (straight talking)
2. euphemism (sweet talking)
3. dysphemism (speaking offensively)

Informal and Formal Social & Legal Control

• Taboo is imposed externally: constraints “imposed by someone or some physical or metaphysical force that the individual believes has authority or power over them—the law, the gods, the society in which one lives, even proprioceptions” (p. 7–8).
• Informal vs. formal control: Many proscribed acts are maintained “by unwritten conventions governing behavioural standards” in families, teams, or workplaces, and only some become written law (pp. 7–8).
• Consequences span biological, social, supernatural, and legal domains.
  • “Infractions ... can lead to illness or death, as well as to the lesser penalties of corporal punishment, incarceration, social ostracism or mere disapproval” (p. 1).
  • Examples: death for incest in Hawaii, stoning for adultery under Sharia, execution for murder (p. 5), retrospective social blame (“bad karma,” “bad luck”) (p. 6).
  • Consequences can follow accidental or intentional actions.
  • “Even an unintended contravention ... risks condemnation and censure; generally, people can and do avoid tabooed behaviour unless they intend to violate a taboo” (p. 1).

Everyday Censoring vs. Institutional Censorship

• Everyday censoring: “People constantly censor the language they use (we differentiate this from the institutionalized imposition of censorship)” (p. 1).
• “By default we are polite, euphemistic, orthophemistic and inoffensive and we censor our language use to eschew tabooed topics in pursuit of well-being for ourselves and for others” (p. 1).
• Institutional censorship: “Censorship is the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is condemned as subversive of the common good” (p. 13); formal, often governmental or religious, with legally enforced penalties.
• Focus shifted over time—from blasphemy/heresy toward indecency, sedition, political and ethnic slurs (pp. 13–15).

Language Change and Innovation

• Taboo motivates invention: “Poetic inventiveness” and new vocabulary arise as taboos push speakers to “create highly inventive and often playful new expressions” (p. 2).
• Taboo prompts “word addition, word loss, sound change and semantic shift” (p. 2).
• New terms constantly “arise by a changed form for the tabooed expression and by figurative language sparked by perceptions ... of the denotata about faeces, menstrual blood, genitals, death and so on” (p. 2).
• Taboos “play havoc with the standard methods of historical linguistics by undermining the supposed arbitrary link between the meaning and form of words” (p. 2).

Origins and Colonial Encounter: Word “Taboo”

• “The English word taboo derives from the Tongan tabu… [which] means simply ‘to forbid’, ‘forbidden’, and can be applied to any sort of prohibition,” from etiquette to “an order issued by a chief” (p. 2–3).
• Accounts of Tahitian food taboos and gendered prohibitions (“the women never upon any account eat with the men, but always by themselves”) (p. 3); legitimacy or social status marked through eating habits.
• Social function parallels US caste/race systems—exclusion practices reinforce social hierarchy (p. 4).

Fatal, Demonic, and Dangerous Taboos

• Inherent danger: “A nineteenth-century view, attributable directly to Wundt’s folk psychology, is a belief... that there is a ‘demonic’ power within a tabooed object comparable with the dangerous power of a Polynesian chief or the Emperor of Japan or Satan himself” (p. 5).
• Psychosomatic effect: “Cases are on record in which persons who had unwittingly broken a taboo actually died of terror on discovering their fatal error, writes Frazer” (p. 5).
• Some anthropologists argue only certain extremely dangerous taboos (e.g., incest, sacrilege) are believed to carry supernatural consequences (p. 5).

Rituals and Repair After Violation

• Violations often require purification—e.g., “the elders take a sheep and place it on the woman’s shoulders, and it is then killed ... [announcing] that they are severing the bond of blood relationship that exists between the pair. A medicine man then comes and purifies the couple” (Kikuyu, p. 6).
• Balinese build only one-story houses to avoid being under “unclean” garments; Christians confess sins; spitting used for expiation in southern Africa (p. 6).
• Ritual persists even as original motivations fade: many become “symbolic idiom” after the source is forgotten (p. 8).

Taboos as Strategy: Exploitation and Symbolic Power

• Strategic tabooing keeps others away (e.g., land, trees, or objects marked as belonging to chiefs or spirits to deter theft) (p. 7).
• Gender and power: women’s genital organs viewed as “potent means of defeating evil”; exposing the vulva to demons drives evil away (pp. 7–8).
• Symbolic authority: names, body parts, and behaviors may be tabooed for status/power or to assert territorial/customary rights (p. 7).

The Relativity and Contextuality of Taboo

• No universal taboo: “Nothing is taboo for all people, under all circumstances, for all time... Every taboo must be specified for a particular community of people, for a specified context, at a given place and time” (p. 10–11).
• Variation examples: “Women ... exposed one or both breasts in public ... as a display of youth and beauty” in 17th-century Europe; taboo today. Visual representations of nudity or death vary dramatically by culture (p. 10).
• Taboo applies to behavior, not objects: “Where something physical or metaphysical is said to be tabooed, what is in fact tabooed is its interaction with an individual... In short, a taboo applies to behaviour” (p. 11).
• Deliberate flouting: during conscious violation, “the so-called taboo is flouted... [it] does not function as a taboo for the perpetrator” (p. 10).

12. Psycholinguistic Contamination and “Strong Language”

• Core idea: taboo words are “contaminated” by their association with taboo referents; the denotatum taints the word itself.
• Quote: “Society’s perception of a dirty word’s tainted denotatum contaminates the word itself and we discuss how the saliency of obscenity and dysphemism makes the description ‘strong language’ particularly appropriate” (p. 1).
• Expansion: Burridge suggests a quasi-psychological mechanism; signifier inherits stigma of the signified, explaining euphemism cycles (“lavatory” → “toilet” → “bathroom” → “restroom”).
• Implication: Taboo operates semiotically—contamination spreads through linguistic signs, not just physical contact.

13. Mary Douglas’s “Matter Out of Place”

• Core idea: Douglas’s theory of pollution is structuralist—dirt is “matter out of place”; taboo marks category boundaries.
• Quote: “Mary Douglas’s anthropological study of ritual pollution offers insights here. As she saw it, the distinction between cleanliness and filth stems from the basic human need to structure experience and render it understandable. That which is taboo threatens chaos and disorder” (p. 8).
• Expansion: Taboo is not about intrinsic danger of substances (blood, corpses, menstruation) but about violations of categorical boundaries (life/death, male/female, pure/impure).
• Implication: Taboo is a cognitive and cultural ordering device enforcing symbolic boundaries.

14. Social Cohesion and Boundary-Work

• Core idea: shared taboos bind communities together.
• Quote: “Shared taboos are therefore a sign of social cohesion. Moreover, as part of a wider belief system, they provide the basis people need to function in an otherwise confused and hostile environment” (p. 8).
• Expansion: Taboo is constitutive—it creates “us” vs. “them,” reinforcing group identity.
• Implication: Taboo performs boundary-work, policing acceptable speech/behavior to define the community.

15. Language as Shield, Weapon, and Release

• Core idea: language is strategic in relation to taboo.
• Quote: “Language is used as a shield against malign fate and the disapprobation of fellow human beings; it is used as a weapon against enemies and as a release valve when we are angry, frustrated or hurt” (p. 2).
• Expansion: Euphemism shields, dysphemism weaponizes, swearing releases tension; taboo structures the emotional economy of language.
• Implication: Taboo enables expressive force, catharsis, and aggression, not merely avoidance.

16. Authority Behind Taboos

• Core idea: taboos are enforced by multiple sources of authority.
• Quote: “The constraint on behaviour is imposed by someone or some physical or metaphysical force that the individual believes has authority or power over them—the law, the gods, the society in which one lives, even proprioceptions” (pp. 7–8).
• Expansion: Authority is plural—legal, religious, social, bodily—undermining single explanatory models.
• Implication: Taboo is a multi-level regulatory system spanning external institutions and internalized bodily responses.

17. Political Correctness and Contemporary Censorship

• Core idea: modern tabooing behavior manifests as political correctness and linguistic prescription.
• Quote: “Political correctness and linguistic prescription are aspects of tabooing behaviour” (p. 1).
• Expansion: As older taboos policed sexuality or blasphemy, contemporary taboos police race, gender, and identity categories.
• Quote: “There is software to sanitize DVDs … filters sensitive to sex, drug use, some violence, profanity and crude language and bodily humor to skip scenes. It is nationalistic and politically biased” (p. 26).
• Implication: Taboo evolves with cultural priorities; mechanisms of censoring remain constant.

18. Taboo as Creative Force in Language

• Core idea: taboo drives euphemistic innovation and linguistic creativity.
• Quote: “Taboo and the consequent censoring of language motivate language change by promoting the creation of highly inventive and often playful new expressions… These creations occasionally rival Shakespeare” (p. 2).
• Expansion: Avoidance of taboo generates cycles of euphemism → contamination → replacement, acting as a motor of semantic change.
• Implication: Taboo is paradoxically productive. It restricts speech but enriches language.

🧩 Synthesis

• Taboo is not static: relative, context-dependent, historically shifting.
• Taboo is multi-functional: protects, polices, empowers, and creates.
• Taboo is systemic: operates across language, ritual, law, and social identity.
• Taboo is generative: produces linguistic creativity and cultural cohesion even as it restricts.