I'll get this out of the way: TL;DR: Kassie talks about the cultural importance of rituals and what they're supposed to mean, then ties it back to a thesis she has about how OCD is a pathological manifestation of the human condition.
Mary Douglas & Ron talking about her is supporting my thesis that those of us with OCD are just better at being human than everybody else. As Douglas (one of the founding authors of social/cultural anthropology) writes, every culture has some notion of cleanliness codes, and with them notions of certain things being pure or impure, good or un-good (I say un-good instead of bad, because "bad" has a moral implication that is not necessarily present in all of these distinctions), etc. In Judaism, you get the kosher laws and the emphasis on purity; in Hindu (this is from her work, not mine and I read it last night so I might be misremembering), animals are unclean, but because cows are special and sacred, their genitals can be used to remove a Brahmin's impurities; in most Western society, we have germ theory, whereby we define what's clean and not purportedly by what is "hygienic," ie, what has more or less germs than anything, what is more or less likely to make you sick or promote healthfulness, etc — but if you remove the presumption of sacredness out of all of these examples, you're left with a notion of what she calls "matter out of place."
Like, for example: if you put your shoes on the table, someone is going to go, "Don't put those there; they have germs on them." But let's say that you can theoretically remove all the germs from the shoes — you'll still get told, "Well, they still don't go on the table." Shoes are for wearing on your feet. Shoes go on the ground. Tables are for eating off of, and that means they need to be protected from things that transgress the boundary of "for eating off" vs. "not for eating off." Everyone has different rationale for what boundaries exist, why they exist, what they're doing and so on, but the boundaries are still there.
Things that cross these boundaries are often (at least in Western, Judeo-Christian society) called abominations, which has a negative valence because in the Torah (especially the Book of Leviticus), it's constantly repeated with regards to the various "Thou shalt nots" handed to the Hebrews, but the original Hebrew term, To'ebah does not have a negative valence like "abomination" does. In the words of Religious Tolerance.org: The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (circa 3rd century BCE) translated "to'ebah " into Greek as "bdelygma," which meant ritual impurity. If the writer(s) of Leviticus had wished to refer to a moral violation, a sin, he would have used the Hebrew word "zimah."
Furthermore: When "to'ebah" refers to the breaking of a ritual law it might be better translated "ritually improper," or "involves foreign religious cult practice." But neither of these sources get at the heart of the matter: examples of other terms when to'ebah is used include: Egyptians and Hebrews eating together (Genesis 43:32), eating aquatic animals that don't have fins or scales (Leviticus 11:10), women wearing men's clothes and vice versa (Deuteronomy 22:5), and a woman returning to her first husband after taking a second (Deut. 24:4). The common factor in all of these things is that of mixing: Egyptians mixing their customs with Hebrews, eating things that are aquatic but aren't fish (especially lobsters, which are both aquatic and repheshim, or creeping things), defying prescribed gender roles, and trying to have two sets of marriage vows exist concurrently. Even pork not being kosher is like this: "pigs" to the ancient Hebrews would have been more like boars, which are both cloven hoofed beasts (ie, able to be domesticated, like cows and goats) and wild (ie, unsafe); because they are simultaneously both, they are anomalous and therefore, special, not to be eaten.
Or, to sum up, "abomination" as a term gets its negative valence because of mistranslations and how often the term to'ebah is repeated, when really, what it refers to in context, is anomalous things that can be simultaneously one thing and another. Vampires are actually a great example of what to'ebah means: regardless of your opinion on the psychology, philosophical ramifications, and morality of vampires, they are functionally alive, in that they move around, exhibit sentience, interact with the world, etc. …but are still also dead, in that they are reanimated corpses. to'ebah does not inherently have a positive or negative valence; the Levitical and Deuteronomical prohibitions against certain things as to'ebah simply means that part of the ancient Hebrew identity is founded in eschewing these things that cross boundaries, or establishing themselves as a people who have strict definitions for the things around them and who set apart the anomalies because they did not fall into those definitions. Douglas's thesis is that the prohibition on anomalous creatures and behaviors is meant as a way to give them special status; because they cross boundaries, they're too special for humans to eat or engage in flippantly, and recognizing this and following the prohibitions sets the Hebrews apart as being closer to God.
Fun fact: considering this, there is absolutely no basis for using your faith as an excuse to call homosexual activity immoral, or morally wrong. (This specifically refers to male homosexual activity; according to the Bible, lesbians don't exist and I think there's a Talmudic commentary that posits it might be possible for two women to sleep together, but also says that it's either so unlikely we don't need to think about it or that it's just not wrong.) Anyway, all to'ebah means for homosexual activity is that it crosses an established boundary, ie that men have sex with women and not with each other, and that it's improper for men to do so as with womankind, ie in the same way they would with women, ie in a way meant to procreate. You'd think it would go without saying that two cis-men (because physical sex and gender are the same thing in the ancient Hebrew conception thereof) can't have a baby together, so I think that the emphasis on it here is not meant to condemn the homosexual sex acts themselves as much as it is to say that they just shouldn't be used in place of sex that can produce a child. Which, you know, makes sense, considering the Hebrews are an oppressed tribal people that suffered a genocide in their recent memory around the time the narrative surrounding Leviticus took place, and were in exile, having been pretty decimated beforehand, when they started codifying these texts properly.
Okay, so back to rituals. The purpose of rituals — both religious (ie, prayer, sacrifice, etc.) and not (ie, hand washing) — Ron and Douglas argue, is then to present by way of repetitive behavior, an anodyne or a comfort, which reminds the self of its inherent selfness in the face of anomalous things, or any degree of change that makes one question one's identity. In other words, rituals remind you that you are yourself, even when outside stimuli challenge this assumption. In the context of groups, rituals reinforce group identity in the face of the outside world, ie, kosher laws being kept to remind people that they're Jewish, secret handshakes being used to identify members of the He Man No Girls Allowed Club, etc. and specifically in terms of social and religious groups, rituals are a way to return to group identity after encountering anomalies that challenge the established order.
OCD is an anxiety disorder typified by extremely ritualistic behavior that has no logical or rational explanation. Like, from personal experience: I cannot tell you WHY it gives me comfort to count things in fours, but it does. I separate my M&Ms into groups of four, I try to take bites that are multiples of four, and four and its multiples just give me comfort for no definable reason. Three and its multiples also do this, but to a lesser extent. In terms of the boundary discussion, OCD is a need to reassert the boundary between the self and the rest of the world, even when it isn't being challenged. If we argue that a fundamental part of the human experience is defining categories and boundaries, and trying to preserve our essential selfhood in the face of the chaos that arises when our assumptions about boundaries (especially re: binaries) are challenged, then OCD is an expanded, pathological version of these tendencies.
Again, in my personal experience, an aspect of my OCD relates to being constantly aware of the universe's fundamentally chaotic nature and trying to assert order over it in ways that make sense to me, even though I can't explain them to anyone else because of their inherent irrationality. Religion and science (and by extension, statistics) operate in a similar way: life is chaotic and threatening and inscrutable; religious systems of thought give their adherents a way to think of the world that's less terrifying, and science as we currently understand it is a post-Enlightenment manifestation of the same tendency, which relies on defining some kind of law in the chaos and predicting what is likely to happen based on our objective, observable experiences. Every person has some way of using a system of thought, whether or not it's religion, and OCD is a similar thing... only it doesn't make sense, even to the people who suffer from it, just as our different systems of thought will eventually crumble under the scrutiny of an assumption that everything must at its core be infallibly logical when facing examination.
This is a really existential take on everything, and I don't think I'd have the chance of coming to any of my conclusions if I hadn't read Absurdism, Camus, and Sartre for various conference projects beforehand. But basically, if the human condition is one wherein we constantly seek to define the chaos around us, and to define who we are by mapping out our relationship to the chaos by way of establishing prohibitions and rituals, then OCD is this human behavior taken to an extreme degree, coupled with an uncomfortable recognition of the inherent meaninglessness of how we operate as a species. We who have the so-called disorder have, in the terms put forth above, very sensitive notions of the boundary between ourselves and the rest of existence, as well as an easily agitated notion of order vs. chaos, and regardless of the fact that our repetitive, ritualistic behaviors are inexplicable beyond a purely sensory level (ie, "it makes me feel better"; "things are wrong and this puts them right," etc), they do what everyone tries to do in the world: they remind us that despite the outside input, we're still ourselves.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into things.
(On a personal note, some cases of Asperger's [like mine] also manifest with this ritualistic behavior, but I'm not really read up on what, if anything, differentiates the two experiences.)
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