What M. Douglas mean by the term "secular defilement" (cf. p. 37)?

From sanitary to sacred?

While concepts of impurity are given religious characters, do they not ultimately reflect a concern for sanitariness?

Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. (Douglas)

That system reflects a compendium of knowledge that is itself a product of collective experience.

• This knowledge includes all the "rejected elements of ordered systems." (Douglas)
• Categories that denote what is accepted and what is rejected are relative.
• As a categorical term, "pollution" denotes anything that "confuses or contradicts" established classifications.

Categories provide an ordered experience

According to Douglas, we create ordered systems of classification to alleviate the dissonance of the "chaos of shifting impressions."

As time goes on and experiences pile up, we make a greater and greater investment in our system of labels. So a conservative bias is built in. It gives us confidence. (Douglas)

A person who pollutes is always wrong because he/she introduces chaos into the ordered world.

Recall Durkheim's notion of the soul as the "essence" of collective identity (cf. Fields, p. 25).

Durkheim attempts to avoid the reductive snare of binary opposition with the concept of the soul, which links identity to action:

Individual A is obviously a member of Group A because he/she acts like Group A and articulates the world in ways consistent with an A worldview.

"Soul" denotes the essence of the group, which is also found in limited form in the individual.

That is why the individual can view himself the same as his totem.