How denotations of purity and pollution vary across cultures - Rakkan A.

 

The image I have provided is a dressing guide for women who are new to traveling in the Middle East. You will see that the instructions tell women to dress more modestly, covering up certain body parts that may be acceptable to show off in more western cultures. This is evidenced by the image telling women to refrain from wearing low cut tops that expose the midriff, spaghetti straps, shorts, short skirts, and both ripped and skinny jeans. Middle eastern societies place a great emphasis on not women not exposing bare arms or legs, as to do so is seen as a violation of moral standards.I interpreted this message to be symbolic of the concepts of purity and dirt that Mary Douglas introduces in Purity and Danger. “Purity” and “dirt” do not refer as much to physical and bodily hygiene practices as they do to social order and disorder respectively. Douglas articulates through her writing how definitions of what is to be considered dirt or pollution varies across societies and cultures. I thought that this graphic was an embodiment of that ideology because it clearly shows how some standards of dress that are normalized and accepted in western cultures are frowned upon in Middle Eastern cultures. In Middle Eastern countries, the belief and practice of modest dressing is perverse in the region, and the imagery depicts how violations of those dressing standards is seen as a breach of purity and is therefore a pollutant to their culture. The fact that the graphic I use compares and contrasts different styles of clothing is a testament to Douglas’s claim that purity, dirt, and pollution are all highly subjective social rules and vary by society. Nothing about what constitutes societal pollution is fixed, as dressing practices that denote impurity in the Middle East are not frowned upon in the slightest in the United States and many other societies and civilizations.