Problematizing pollution: Dirty wombs, ritual pollution, and pathological processes

Abstract

Ethnographies, particularly from Southern Africa, often suggest that there is a single notion of pollution as a state of ‘ritual’ impurity, which in medical anthropology can be found as an etiological category. While ‘the’ notion of pollution is often used as a tool in social and cultural analysis, it is rarely considered as an object of analysis, i.e. there is a failure to problematize it. In this paper we argue that in Southern African ethnomedicine, competing notions of pollution can be found. Drawing on preliminary research into the emic illness category ‘dirty wombs’ we suggest that, in addition to pollution being a state or etiological category, there are categories of diseases related to pollution which themselves have etiologies, and that, in parts of the Southern African region, there is a notion of non‐ritual pollution which is an ethno‐pathological process, a general idiom through which disease is expressed.

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