Taboos are social or cultural prohibitions against behaviors considered dangerous, unacceptable, or improper within a community. They exist in all societies and serve important functions related to defining morality, preserving social order, and protecting the well-being of individuals or groups.
Some quick answers to key questions on taboos:
What are taboos? Taboos are strong social prohibitions against behaviors seen as harmful, unacceptable, or forbidden.
Why do taboos exist? Taboos help cultures maintain order, cohesion, and shared values. They define what’s normal versus deviant.
What are some examples of taboos? Common taboos involve restrictions on sexuality, bodily functions, food consumption, and interactions with the sacred or supernatural.
Do all cultures have taboos? Yes, all cultures have prohibitions on certain behaviors viewed as morally wrong or socially unacceptable. Taboos manifest differently across cultures.
Can taboos change over time? Yes, as cultures evolve, taboos may weaken or strengthen, or new taboos may emerge while old ones fade away.
Origins and Evolution of Taboos
Taboos have existed across human societies for thousands of years. Many early taboos likely originated from practical concerns – prohibitions against incest helped avoid birth defects, restrictions on handling corpses helped prevent disease, and food taboos helped avoid illness or inefficient resource use. Ancient taboos were often rooted in religion or ritual, with certain behaviors seen as impure, profane, or spiritually dangerous.
Over time, the origins of many taboos were forgotten, but the prohibitions persisted as traditions passed down through generations. New taboos have continued to emerge, often when societies are faced with new circumstances, dangers, or morally ambiguous situations that require firm norms.
While some taboos fade over the course of history, those that remain powerful are typically those that continue to serve important functions related to protecting health, safety, social order, or communal values. However, sometimes taboos outlive their original purposes and persist simply through socialization and norm enforcement. Questioning and examining taboos rationally can help determine if they still benefit society or needlessly restrict human freedom and potential.
Functions and Effects of Taboos
Scholars recognize several important functions that taboos can play in society when approached thoughtfully:
Upholding morality: Taboos help define the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Prohibitions on murder, theft, child abuse and other acts serve to uphold moral standards within a community.
Preserving social order: By limiting socially divisive, disruptive or degrading behaviors, taboos help maintain stability, cohesion and harmony within the social fabric.
Protecting well-being: Taboos against incest, adultery, public nudity and defecation serve health and dignity by avoiding outcomes seen as harmful to individuals and groups.
Marking cultural identity: Taboos act as social boundaries that distinguish between groups, creating a shared sense of identity and community through avoidance of taboo behaviors.
Enforcing social hierarchy: Taboos have often upheld traditional power structures, with prohibitions used to control certain groups, maintain gender norms, or perpetuate class systems.
However, taboos can also lead to significant harms when taken to extremes or applied arbitrarily:
– Excessive restrictions on human freedom, choice, expression
– Lack of rationale for ancient taboos that persist out of custom
– Stifling of social or technological progress by limiting innovation
– Enforcing outdated social hierarchies or prejudice against groups
– Causing obsessiveness, guilt, or shame around natural behaviors
– Dismissing useful knowledge by declaring it taboo
Sexuality Taboos
Sexuality is perhaps the most universal source of taboos across human cultures. Every society develops rules about appropriate sexual partners, behaviors, and circumstances. Incest taboos against sexual relations between close kin are present in virtually all societies, likely originally to avoid genetic risks from inbreeding. Most also have taboos against adultery, which helps minimize conflict and promote paternal certainty in offspring.
While these taboos serve social functions, many cultures add a plethora of restrictions on sexuality that have been criticized as irrational, oppressive, or psychologically harmful. Extreme taboos on adolescent sexuality, masturbation, homosexuality, and premarital sex have limited human freedom and understanding without evidence of actual social harm. Modern societies have witnessed a general relaxation of taboos around sexuality, though opposition remains in traditional or fundamentalist communities.
Examples of Relaxed Sexuality Taboos
– Premarital sex
– Homosexuality
– Masturbation
– Interracial relationships
– Cohabitation without marriage
– Casual sex
– Friends with benefits
– Oral sex
Persisting Sexuality Taboos
– Incest
– Bestiality
– Pedophilia
– Adultery
– Group sex
– Public sex
– Use of pornography
– Sex during menstruation
– Sex with contraception (in some cultures)
The evolution of technology and media has also created new outlets for sexual expression that challenge traditional taboos. Pornography, sex work, virtual reality erotica, and digital communities for stigmatized interests have grown pervasive, though often remain morally contested.
Bodily Function Taboos
Cultures also commonly apply taboos to natural bodily processes to maintain health and dignity, define public versus private behaviors, and uphold social norms. Most societies have firm taboos against:
– Public urination or defecation
– Farting audibly or burping loudly in polite company
– Picking noses, spitting, or sniffing fingers in public
– Exposing certain bodily regions considered private, especially genitalia
However, cultures vary significantly on how strictly they control natural functions like menstruation, lactation, nudity, or passing gas. Hunter-gatherer cultures tend to be more accepting, while modern cultures moved these functions into the private sphere. But human bodies remain subject to powerful taboos meant to avoid disgust and remind us to control our primal urges when among others.
Mortality Taboos
Death is a source of some of the most deeply held taboos in many cultures, often rooted in religious beliefs. Handling corpses is limited to certain people or rituals. Rules for proper burial, tombs, treatment of graves and mourning behavior maintain boundaries between the living and the dead. Sudden traumatic death often arouses the strongest taboos given its threats to life and impurity from bloodshed.
Taboos to avoid mimicking or foreshadowing death – on omens, predictions, jokes about dying, tempting fate – reveal a basic human hope to repel and distance oneself from mortality’s inevitability. While approaches differ, nearly all cultures respect taboos on speaking of the dead and encountering dead bodies as a way to master people’s anxiety about their own mortality.
Food and Consumption Taboos
Rules about what foods are acceptable or forbidden are among the most common cultural taboos, often tied to concepts of disgust, danger, or sanctity. Some dietary taboos once had logic – avoiding spoiled foods or difficult-to-digest meats. But many persist out of tradition, including taboos about:
– Consumption of pork, beef, fish, crustaceans, dogs, horses, rodents
– Combining certain foods or eating at certain times
– Use of left hand for food handling in some cultures
– Fasting or avoiding other temptations to build spiritual willpower
– Ritual slaughter practices including Kosher and Halal traditions
Food taboos reveal how societies classify the world into categories like edible/inedible, clean/dirty, or sacred/profane. They serve to maintain cultural boundaries and identity or pass down wisdom about health and resources.
Language Taboos
One of the most powerful taboos in any culture relates to language and word choice. Most languages classify certain words as profane, blasphemous, obscene, insulting or otherwise offensive. Respectable speakers learn to self-censor and choose their words carefully to avoid taboo language. This demonstrates how speech itself acts as an important boundary marker between decent and indecent members of society.
However, linguistic taboos change over time as terms move in and out of acceptability. Swear words can lose their shock value and become mainstream while racist, sexist or homophobic terms are newly recognized as taboo language. Non-mainstream groups often use taboo words to establish internal solidarity and push against mainstream linguistic rules. Overall, taboos around forbidden language reveal the intricate rules for managing power relations and identity through speech.
Sacrilege and Blasphemy Taboos
Cultures with religious beliefs have strong taboos against sacrilege, blasphemy, heresy, and other insults to sacred symbols, rituals, texts, or figures. Violating these taboos provokes not just social outrage but supernatural danger. Rules prohibit desecrating images, icons or shrines, cursing deities, practicing witchcraft, revealing mysteries or secrets, or falsely assuming sacred roles like priesthood. Such taboos serve to maintain social order around religion and shared beliefs by preventing provocative challenges.
However, taboos on blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy have also been used throughout history to suppress disbelievers, thinkers, scientists, and dissidents threatening orthodoxy. Leaders have used taboos both to defend faith in times of change but also to discourage modernization and preserve rigid authority and inequality. Non-believers criticize such taboos as limiting free speech and inquiry. But sacred prohibitions remain among the deepest seated in many cultures.
Ritual and Purity Taboos
In addition to moral taboos, cultures develop ritual taboos dictating behaviors to avoid spiritual pollution and retain purity. Those in non-ordinary states like mourning, menstruation, preparation for rituals or coming of age are separated and must avoid polluting contact with others. Taboos dictate cleansing, admission and avoidance of pollution causing states. Some individuals like priests, monks and gurus maintain permanent taboos that set them apart in sacredness. Strict ritual taboos act as spiritual safeguards, though may also lead to oppression of those deemed impure.
Cultural Taboos and Social Change
Taboos generally persist by socialization and norm enforcement but can change gradually over time or through sudden cultural upheavals. Increased global connectivity and individualism have weakened certain taboos around nudity, sexuality, and conformity though others persist. Periods of revolution and unrest often involve violating long held taboos as an act of protest against traditional authority.
Culture warriors on all sides continue battling over taboos around issues like:
– Gender norms and equality
– Sexual orientation and identity
– Racial integration and mixing
– Bodily modesty and nudity
– Media and pornography
– Language and political correctness
– Science and new technologies
Modern multicultural societies face constant negotiation over respecting diversity versus setting common standards. Taboos remain enforcement mechanisms, though norms keep shifting toward human self-expression. The future will determine if rising new taboos restrictive freedom and inquiry emerge in reaction.
Importance of Understanding Taboos
Taboos reveal the intricate social codes and maps of meaning within a culture. Instinct tells us violating them risks something important, even if mysterious. This gives taboos an intuitive power exceeding rationalist arguments. Wise navigators understand when to question taboos, when to respect them, and when defending or disrupting them may be necessary for social progress.
Taboos show us the sacred foundations at the heart of human societies. We guard these vital to our self-perception even without understanding their origins. And yet taboos may also reveal what societies fear most in themselves – mortality, depravity, loss of control. So we must interpret taboos not only as teachings but also as expressions of cultures seeing their shadows in the wilderness beyond.
Conclusion
Taboos reveal the unwritten rules governing societies and remain deeply ingrained given their importance in upholding order, morality, and stability in communities navigating the unknown. But taboos must continually be reexamined so that only those truly vital persist while useless, oppressive, or outdated taboos fade to liberate human potential. This process requires treading carefully yet thoughtfully through the minefield of the forbidden that resides in all of us, ready to protect yet also mislead when not properly understood.
