Early anthropologists deemed taboo noteworthy, for it
marked the point where a religious idea (mana) affected the
norms and regulation of everyday life. Breach of a taboo
meant divine or other suprasocietal sanctions; hence, taboos,
or a system of taboos, outlined the spiritual mandate and
boundaries for social existence.
In the evolutionary model for primitive religion that
emerged in the decades immediately before and after 1900,
taboo played the role of archetypal religious rule, or man-
date; as mana did of generalized supernatural force, or power;
and as totemism did of collective or individual identification
with supernatural (or quasi-natural) entities. Thus emerged
the alliterative formula “totem and taboo” as an encompass-
ing rubric for primitive religion, to which Freud turned in
seeking socially expressed equivalents for psychological
states.
In the writings of Émile Durkheim, and among his fol-
lowers in the schools of French and British social anthropolo-
gy, taboo came to have the sense of a largely social restriction,
or mandate, through the Durkheimian proposition that the
religious and the supernatural were the means by which soci-
ety took account of its own existence—worshiped itself. If,
in other words, the suprasocietal forces of the world around
us are nothing more than the reflection of society itself, then
taboo, however it may be regarded by the members of a soci-
ety, is ultimately social in its origin. Even in this understand-
ing of it, however, taboo carries a somewhat stronger conno-
tation than mere “law” or “rule,” for taboos are special
instances in which social constraints are referred directly to
the religious manifestation of the social rather than to a secu-
lar authority.
The modern sense of taboo has acquired a certain am-
biguity through the widespread acceptance of a socio-centric
interpretation. Thus, depending on whether one accepts a
formal, cultural, or a sociological understanding of the prohi-
bition, the sanctions upon it will be, respectively, divine and
innate, or human and social.
But the issue of the sanctioning force behind a taboo in-
volves only a partial appreciation of the distinctiveness of this
kind of prohibition. Taboo differs from abstract, codified
law in the degree to which the prohibited object or act is
specified and developed into a symbol, or even a fetish, of
the prohibition itself. Taboo is not so much a system of regu-
lations as it is a scheme of negative differentiation, in which
the fact of prohibition and the prohibited act or object itself
obscure the reasons for a prohibition. In this regard, the early
theorists who saw “totem and taboo” as interlinked bases of
“primitive thought” drew attention to a significant relation
between them. For taboo designates items in order to pro-
hibit them, whereas totemic representation is based on affini-
ties between social units and phenomenal entities. Yet the
practice of exogamy (marrying outside of one’s totemic
group), once felt to be an integral part of totemism, compre-
hends both of these at once, for it places a marriage taboo
on those who share affinities with the same entity.
Thus taboos serve to control and channel human inter-
action and collective activity through a system of negative
differentiation, marking out certain persons, objects, and oc-
casions by specifying what may not be done to, with, or on
them. Words used as names are sometimes tabooed when a
person holding the name undergoes a change in status. In
the Marquesas and Society islands, a common word included
in the name of a king or heir apparent would be tabooed and
also replaced in everyday language. When a king of Tahiti
assumed the name Pomare, the word po (“night”) was re-
placed in common speech by rui, and mare (“cough”) was
changed to kare (Webster, 1942, p. 301). Similar taboos are
found among the Zulu and the Malagasy. Among the Tiwi
of northern Australia, the name of a person who has died,
together with the common-noun equivalent of that name,
and all the names that the deceased had bestowed upon oth-
ers, together with their equivalents, are tabooed for ordinary
use and transferred to a sacred language (Lévi-Strauss, 1966,
pp. 209–210).
Taboos on name use, and often on any sort of interac-
tion, are frequently encountered in the norms for kin rela-
tionship. In Papua New Guinea these are so common that
the Pidgin term for “relative by marriage” is simply tambu
(“taboo”). The extreme case, widespread in Aboriginal Aus-
tralia and New Guinea, is a taboo involving total avoidance
between a man and his wife’s (or future wife’s) mother. A
relationship is set up between them precisely by their not in-
teracting, one that forces them to communicate solely
through the bridal exchanges. Thus the tabooing or, in this
case, the negative differentiation of relationship creates the
basis for future relationships by creating a marriage. Further
taboos of affinity control and direct the subsequent course
of the relationship by restricting overfamiliarity among other
kinspeople brought into contact by the marriage.
Taboos on specific kinds, classes, or styles of food and
on food preparation are perhaps the most commonly en-
countered of all human prohibitions. Many peoples who
have no general term for “taboo” have a word for “food
taboo.” Food restrictions, probably universal in human cul-
tures, often conceal (or initiate) preferences or are themselves
disguised as health precautions. Well-known examples in-
clude the Hebraic prohibition against using the same utensils
for preparing meat and dairy products, the Hebraic and Is-
lamic restrictions against eating the meat of animals that have
been incorrectly slaughtered and against eating pork, and the
Hindu ritual distinction between pakka ̄ foods, prepared in
clarified butter, and kacca ̄ foods, boiled in water. Among the
Kaluli of Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea, an elaborate
system of food taboos operates to prevent relationships
among cultural domains that must not be mixed. Married
men and women must not eat fresh meat, and smoked meat
is available only through exchanges with in-laws; thus, bonds
will form through marriage links rather than with single
hunters (Schieffelin, 1976, p. 71).
Mourning restrictions most often take the form of ta-
boos, ranging from prohibitions on speaking of, or using the8948 TABOO