Taboo, Personal and Collective Representations: Origin and Positioning within Cultural Complexes

Taboo, Personal and Collective Representations examines the symbolic nature of taboo, asking what is the purpose of a taboo and how does it vary cross-culturally? The book focuses on the concept of taboo as an in-between, organizing principle which separates and differentiates stages through a ritual process of separation of order as clean/blessed from disorder as polluted/disassociated.

This book uses an interdisciplinary approach which compares the anthropological, ethnological, sociologi...