The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
Abstract
Purity and Danger is acknowledged as a modern masterpiece of anthropology. It is widely cited in non-anthropological works and gave rise to a body of application, rebuttal and development within anthropology. In 1995 the book was included among the Times Literary Supplement's hundred most influential non-fiction works since WWII. Incorporating the philosophy of religion and science and a generally holistic approach to classification, Douglas demonstrates the relevance of anthropological enquiries to an audience outside her immediate academic circle. She offers an approach to understanding rules of purity by examining what is considered unclean in various cultures. She sheds light on the symbolism of what is considered clean and dirty in relation to order in secular and religious, modern and primitive life.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Possessions and the Extended Self
Belk, R. W. (1988) · Journal of Consumer Research · doi:10.1086/209154 · Cited by 9,064
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity
Rappaport, R. A. (1999) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511814686 · Cited by 2,295
An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
MacKenzie, D. (2006) · doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262134606.001.0001 · Cited by 1,766
Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism.
Oaten, M., Stevenson, R. J., & Case, T. I. (2009) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/a0014823 · Cited by 1,120
Pleck, J. H. (1977) · Social Problems · doi:10.2307/800135 · Cited by 942
Metadata
- Authors
- McCormack, W., & Douglas, M.
- Venue
- Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1967
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 313
- ISSN
- 0021-8294 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2051268679
- Cited by
- 5,752
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 51.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1384077
- The paper
- McCormack, W., & Douglas, M. (1967). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384077
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
