Averting danger: taboos and bodily substances in the South African lowveld

Abstract

In this article, I provide a new interpretation of taboos in the Southern African lowveld – particularly those pertaining to sex, pregnancy, abortion, death and widowhood. I argue that an appropriate starting point for understanding such taboos is to focus analytical attention on emic understandings of the body. Residents of Bushbuckridge in South Africa saw bodies as permeable, partible and constantly engaged in the transfer and exchange of aura, breath, blood and other fluids such as breast milk and semen. However, they believed the disorderly coalescence of substances from different bodies could, potentially, give rise to dangerous conditions of heat. For example, by engaging in multiple sexual liaisons with different partners, a man might place a vulnerable baby at risk of sickness. From this perspective, taboos provide a standardized technique of avoiding contaminative exposure and averting danger. In conclusion, I contemplate duality and multiplicity as a source of power, and how it might also explain the unease surrounding twins and the transgression of seniority rules. I suggest that the latter situations represent a multiplicity of social statuses.

Keywords:

• taboos
• Mary Douglas
• pollution
• bodies
• bodily substances
• multiplicity
• Northern Sotho
• Shangaan
• South Africa

Notes

1. I use pseudonyms to describe the village of fieldwork and all personal names. This is done to protect the identity of my informants. Unless otherwise specified, all local phrases are in Northern Sotho.

2. The logic that connects ash to cooling is based on the observation that ash survived and absorbed the fire's heat.

3. Recognition of these processes does not imply that we should invoke the concept of ‘fractal person’ or ‘dividual’ (Taylor 1990). This concept is unhelpful because of the tendency to construct an untenable binary opposition between ‘individuals’ of the west, and ‘dividuals’ of the rest. People generally recognize both modalities of personhood and the difference is frequently a matter of emphasis and context (LiPuma 1998). Moreover, this concept usually posits a ‘meta-narrative of modernity’, which implies an inevitable transition from ‘dividuals’ of gift economies to the ‘individuals’ of capitalism (Englund and Leach 2000). In the South African lowveld conceptions of the unbounded body are not ‘hangovers’ from the past.

4. Taboos in the South African lowveld bore certain resemblances to what Foucault (1990) described as techniques of ‘care for the self’ in Greco-Roman worlds. Such techniques, according to Foucault, amounted to more than a simple compliance with legal codifications of the permitted and forbidden. They aimed to ensure health through the mastery of appetites, particularly in matters sexual.