Celebrating Menstruation in the Margins: Bodily Pollution and Purity on Keddaso (Stephanie Chang)

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Mary Douglas speculates that ‘primitive’ religions banish dirt and bodily pollution as a positive motion against the disordered environments they leave. In Purity and Danger, she notes how social taboos are metaphorically “reproduced in small on the human body” (1966:142), and such rituals do not imply primacy. Autoplastic religions ritually reconfigure the body not out of infantile sexual fantasies; rather, they understand that “all margins are dangerous… The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins” (1966:150). Orifices are typically associated with corrupt power because the nature of marginality is that when borders dislocate and shift culturally, threatening the unity of experience. Thus, religions respond creatively; what has “traversed the boundary of the body” (1966:150) is “never to be re-admitted (1966:152). 
This image offers a glimpse into the Kedasso festival of South India’s Tulu Nadu region, where locals celebrate the menstruation and fertility of Bhoomi Devi, their mother goddess, for four consecutive days. Matriarchs are expected to perform duties such as filling the soil, bound to Bhoomi Devi, with coconut oil, before going to wash themselves. Here, menstruation lives within rituals manifested by farming anxieties, away from the margins. This abstract practice is likely due to menstruation’s relationship to procreation, with other ‘primitive’ rituals drawing from the body’s digestive processes.
    However, Douglas may argue that the celebrating periods for the sake of blessing the surrounding natural environment indicates that the people of Tulu Nadu view menstruation as only valuable when it serves a communal good. This festival, while rich with symbolic gestures and natural offerings as highlighted by the image, fails to further Douglas’ point about cultures employing metaphors of bodily pollution and purity in order to reinforce a shared identity and understanding.



Works Cited

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London and New York: Routledge. 

"Keddaso - Festival of worshipping Mother Earth." February 12, 2016. From Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved March 23, 2022 (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keddaso_-_Festival_of_worshipping_Mother_Earth_(21).jpg). 


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