Religious Taboos: Key Terms and Concepts

Overview of today’s class

• Topic: religious taboos and food in Leviticus, with theoretical framing from Norman’s Food and Religion and Mary Douglas’s The Abominations of Leviticus
• Readings to align with lecture: Leviticus (primary source), Norman’s Food and Religion chapters, and Mary Douglas’s Abominations of Leviticus
• Key goal: define terms, understand how food rules function in religion, and explore how these rules reflect broader social and political power

Key terms and concepts (definitions and significance)

• Taboo
  • Origin: from the Polynesian word tapu, meaning sacred or forbidden
  • Significance: marks a moral/immoral boundary in behavior; taboo can regulate food, conduct, and social order
• Prohibition
  • A rule that forbids certain foods or practices; codified in religious texts (e.g., Leviticus)
• Religious ritual
  • Formal, sacred practices surrounding food (e.g., communion, Sabbath meals, sacrifices)
• Pollution (spiritual pollution)
  • The state of being ritually impure or contaminated, requiring cleansing before re-entering religious status
• Cleansing (purification)
  • Ritual processes to remove pollution and restore holiest state; may involve sacrifices, washing, or ritual acts
• The rules of cooking (cooking rules)
  • Prescriptions about what foods can be eaten, how they are prepared, and with whom they may be combined (e.g., kosher and halal constraints, pork restrictions)
• Identity
  • How food laws help define group boundaries, belonging, and social identity within a community

Visual and textual framing: Leviticus as a primary source

• Leviticus passages (as depicted in the image): marks out foods that can or cannot be eaten
• The Torah as the sacred text of the Jewish people; regulation of dietary practices is part of religious identity and ritual life
• Example schematization shown in class: allowed foods include vegetables, ripe fruits, nuts, honey, mutton, fish with fins and scales, venison; forbidden/unclean include rabbits, pork, bacon, ham, birds of prey, web-footed birds, crustaceans, etc.
• Note: Leviticus contains more complexity; the schematic helps to illustrate core categories to study and comparison over time

Key historical questions to guide study

• Why do food rules come about, and how do they emerge in societies?
• What are the bases for dietary regulations? (plausible versus less plausible explanations; historically grounded reasons vs. speculative)
• What are the consequences of pollution (e.g., the apple of truth leading to expulsion from the Garden of Eden)?
• How do dietary restrictions speak to religious power and authority?
• How do changes in human diet affect social relations and power dynamics?

Food and religion: mechanisms of meaning and power

• The iconic bread-and-wine ritual in Christian tradition (communion)
  • Bread and wine symbolize the body and blood of Christ; linked to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Last Supper
  • The ritual embodies religious authority and sacramental power; its meaning is shaped by beliefs about reality, memory, and community identity
• Historical and cross-cultural relevance
  • Food and drink (bread and wine) serve as powerful religious symbols across faiths and eras
  • Missionary influence and colonization: e.g., Father Kino’s drive to introduce wheat in Southern Arizona and the displacement of corn; diet changes used as a tool of cultural and territorial control
• Religious food as both sacred and everyday
  • Many religious foods are ordinary, everyday staples (bread, wine) transformed by ritual context (Sabbath meals, Eucharist, Ramadan meals, etc.)
  • The transformation of ordinary food into sacred practice reveals how religion reinterprets daily life
• Mary Douglas’s key claim: food as a code
  • Food practices encode social and symbolic meanings; deciphering the code helps explain social structures, norms, and power relations
  • How dietary restrictions structure the social order (who may eat what, with whom, and under what circumstances)
• Cross-cultural examples of religious food rules
  • Hindu vegetarianism as a religiously mandated practice in certain communities
  • Halal vs Kosher: overlapping and divergent rules; some foods are permissible for one group, forbidden for the other, and some are permissible for both
  • Everyday foods reinterpreted through ritual: e.g., holy days, feasts, fasting
• Aestheticism and ascetic practice
  • Aestheticism as an extreme form of religious food discipline, focusing on limited nutrient intake for spiritual purposes; often associated with hermits and ascetic traditions
• Ancient and non-Western perspectives on food and ritual
  • Hesiod (Works and Days) and Theogony: foods favored for religious veneration of the gods in ancient Greece
  • Indian and East Asian ritual frameworks: sacrificial food, ritual purity, and moral decorum
  • The Book of Rites (Chinese tradition): decorum, politeness, and proper ritual forms around food
• Diagrammatic overlap: halal and kosher
  • Some foods are forbidden in both traditions (e.g., pork, crustaceans), some are allowed in one but not the other, and some are allowed in both (e.g., basic grains and many vegetables)
• Practical takeaway: food as a social technology
  • Food practices regulate access, reinforce group boundaries, and express moral and religious values

The cycle of life and the medieval worldview of food and divinity

• A simplified medieval representation of how food relates to divinity and the body
  • Soil → seeds → sun (God’s bounty) → growth of plants → raw foods (apples, pears, cherries, wheat) → the chef and cooking (bread) → the body’s digestion and liver processing → bile and waste returning to the soil
• Purpose of the cycle depiction
  • To illustrate how humans and the food they consume are mutually constituted; food embodies divine order and human dependence on cosmic forces
• Implication: everyday nutrition is embedded in a cosmic, moral ecology

Taboos: origins and social functions

• Etymology and meaning
  • Taboo derives from the Polynesian word tapu, meaning sacred or forbidden; over time it has come to mark a boundary between permissible and impermissible behavior
• Taboo as moral boundary and symbolic system
  • Taboos reflect ecological, economic, and social conditions; their violations reveal tensions within a society
• Historical representation and fear-based rhetoric
  • European engravings depicting cannibalism in the Americas reflect European anxieties and political power dynamics; such depictions simplified and manipulated other cultures
• Cannibalism as a historical taboo with regional variation
  • Cannibalism occurred in certain historical contexts (e.g., Aztec and some Pre-Columbian cultures) for ecological or ritual reasons; modern taboos persist but historical practices vary

Pollution and cleansing: core ritual logic

• Spiritual pollution and its consequences
  • Pollution can arise from contact with death, certain foods, or other ritual impurities; it disrupts sacred status and requires cleansing before re-entry into religious life
• Cleansing as a universal ritual category
  • Cleansing rituals aim to render polluted persons or objects clean again; these rituals are widespread across regions (Hebrew, Egyptian, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and Mesoamerican contexts)
• Red heifer ashes ritual (Numbers 19)
  • Procedure: a red cow (cow is not previously pregnant or milked/yoked) is sacrificed by priests; its ashes are mixed with spring water to produce a water of lustration used to purify impure objects and people
  • Practical purpose: purification after contact with the dead; ritual acts restore ritual purity
  • Historical significance: studies suggest possible Egyptian ancestry or influence; indicates cross-cultural exchange and evolution from polytheistic to monotheistic religious frameworks (Judaism’s development)
  • Scholarly insight: the red heifer ritual may reflect earlier, broader ritual practices (e.g., cannibalism or sacrifice) and demonstrates how purification rites can anchor complex religious transitions

The practical and ethical implications of religious food practices

• How rules shape power and social order
  • Food prohibitions can regulate who has access to resources, influence intergroup relations, and legitimize religious authority
• Everyday life vs. sacred duty
  • The tension between ordinary consumption and ritualized food practices shows how religion interweaves with daily routines and identity
• The role of colonization and cultural exchange in food practices
  • Missionary-led agricultural changes demonstrate how diet can be a vehicle for cultural and political dominance, with lasting social and ecological consequences
• Asceticism and social responsibility
  • Ascetic dietary practices raise questions about health, spirituality, and social equity; how extreme discipline interacts with communities and environments

Connections to prior and broader themes

• Recurring terms across lectures (identity, taboo, pollution, cleansing) appear in multiple contexts, underscoring how food operates as a lens on culture, power, and belief
• Cross-cultural comparisons (Greek, Indian, Chinese, Hebrew, Islamic) reveal common patterns in how societies codify, regulate, and ritualize eating
• The idea that food practices are both symbolic and practical; they shape ethics, economics, and politics as much as they express devotion

Take-home messages

• Food rules are not just dietary; they are linguistic and symbolic tools that encode social order, religious authority, and cultural identity
• Taboo, pollution, cleansing, and the rules of cooking together create a coherent system that governs access to resources and participation in religious life
• Religious foods often straddle everyday life and ritual meaning, illustrating how religion continually reinterprets the ordinary to sustain sacred communities
• The study of Leviticus, Mary Douglas, Hesiod, and cross-cultural sources shows how ancient and contemporary societies use food to articulate cosmologies, ethics, and power relations

Summary connections to the primary sources and broader scholarship

• Leviticus provides concrete dietary regulations that illustrate the general concepts of taboo, pollution, and cleansing in practice
• Mary Douglas’s notion of food as a code helps explain why seemingly arbitrary dietary rules carry deep social significance
• Hesiod, Indian ritual practices, and Chinese rites provide a backdrop for understanding how food and ritual have long shaped gods, heroes, and social order
• The continuum from everyday food to religious ritual demonstrates how human cultures embed meaning into ordinary nutrition and how political and religious power is exercised through culinary norms