Excerpt from Introduction for Stepchildren of the Shtetl
INTRODUCTION
In a recent interview, by way of explaining his sense of alienness in the Israeli society he had entered as a thirteen-year-old refugee (“And it was demanded of me to be the new Jew. Why should I be a new Jew? I love the old Jews, you know”), the late Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld described a short story he wrote early in his career:
It’s about two characters, Max and Bertha. Max is somewhere around 27, Bertha is maybe 12, 13. He picked her up, somewhere during the war, and brought her to Israel. A retarded child. But he cannot leave her. She’s retarded, but she has something magic in her blood. She is sitting, kneeling on the street. And he’s always leaving her. Giving her food and some money and leaving her, and hoping not to find her. But always he comes back, and she’s still sitting in the same place. I brought this story to a newspaper, it was a very short story. And the editor said, what are you trying here, why Bertha? We came to Israel to forget Bertha. You are taking a retarded girl as the hero of the story? What are you going to learn from such a story? How will this story help us build a new nation of new people? . . . Why are you are bringing these retarded, limited figures into our life?1
Bertha is a remnant of the old country, her “limited” nature a symbol of the deficient, defective nature of the Jews of eastern Europe. As Appelfeld’s editor says so cogently—and cuttingly—the goal of the Zionists who came to the Land of Israel was to forget who they had been before, their alter ego: the crippled, pitiful Jews of the diaspora. And yet, as Appelfeld’s story shows, Max could neither leave Bertha behind in Europe nor forget about her once in Israel. Out of pathos and compassion, presumably, but also because of the “magic in her blood.”
In another meditation on the alienation he experienced during his early years in Israel, Appelfeld wrote,
I was strolling in the city [Tel Aviv] and finally sat on a bench in the boulevard. There were some beggars there who spoke Yiddish among themselves; Yiddish mixed with a few Russian words. I suddenly felt that the nigun [contour] of their language flowed within me. I knew that this was my tongue that was lost on the roads. Now, it was embodied in the beggars . . .2
The people speaking Russian-inflected Yiddish on the bench—a Yiddish with which Appelfeld identified instantly—were beggars. They, like Bertha, were the living embodiment of what Zionism thought it had left behind in Europe: the sense of being the outcast, the rejected, the dregs of society.
The marginal individual is thus a figure of East European Jewish society, since—like Bertha—he or she comes to stand in for that society as a whole. At the same time, however, Appelfeld’s beggars, unlike Bertha, are not fictional characters with a specific role to play in the drama unspooling in their creator’s mind but real people, with lives and emotions and agency of their own. These, then, are the two paths of this book’s exploration into the world of marginal people, sometimes parallel, sometimes diverging, at other moments crossing back on each other: on the one hand, the outcast as person, as historical figure, and on the other, as symbol.
This is a book about the other, the different, the uncanny in the Jewish society of eastern Europe. At times marginal people were invisible, unseen, nonpersons; at other times—crucial junctures in the modern era—they were pulled to the center of the conversation within the Jewish collective about what Jews should look like, or what they should not look like; how gentiles viewed Jews, what they thought about them, why they hated them. Marginal people were consistently ridiculed, mocked, sometimes exoticized, even fetishized; on rare occasions, they were held up as paragons, or even . . . treated as fellow human beings.
At the core of the book’s argument is the proposition that in the modern period, the Jewish marginal people of eastern Europe became a symbol for East European Jewry as a whole, a development that modernizers both advanced unwittingly and lamented and that modernists later embraced. Whether as recruits drafted into the tsar’s army as substitutes for other Jewish boys, as denizens of the ubiquitous and contemptible Jewish hekdesh (poorhouse) that represented the ugliest and most despicable facets of Jewish existence, as central figures in a religious ritual that transformed them into vicarious victims of an epidemic in exchange for the salvation of the community, or as protagonists in classic works of modern Jewish literature—the undesirables of Jewish society frequently served as surrogates for the entire Jewish people, or at least for its subset in the Russian Empire. The internal Jewish discourse of modernization, progress, and integration required the creation of a despised Other to serve as a kind of doppelgänger to be cast out or transformed utterly—until the realization dawned that “they” were “us.”
In his sweeping and thought-provoking study of the history of disability, Jacques Stiker writes:
To begin with, let us admit the very primordial function that the disabled fill. Like the child for the adult, like woman for man (and vice versa), they are proof of the inadequacy of what we would like to see established as references and norm. They are the tear in our being that reveals its open-endedness, its incompleteness, its precariousness. Because of that, because of that difference, they can, like children and women, be considered expiatory victims, scapegoats. . . . They are the thorn in the side of the social group that prevents the folly of certainty and of identification with a single model.3
This book argues that not only the disabled but all of Jewish society’s undesirable people served as scapegoats. Since in some sense they represented all of Jewish society, that society could, by sacrificing them, by placing the blame for Jewish suffering on them, redeem itself from its abject, suffering state.
I offer the following trajectory in Jewish eastern Europe for the complex balance of integration and exclusion that is the hallmark of any society’s attitude to its marginals. We begin at the end of the early modern period with a traditional society that already held the consummate Other in its midst—the wandering beggar, lacking fixed abode, livelihood, and often family, and often perceived as undeserving of charity—in very low regard. Such vagrants were assisted, as religious law and communal norms dictated, but usually encouraged to move on as quickly as possible. As for disabled people, the mentally ill, and poor orphans, they were cared for by some combination of family, private alms, and charitable societies. But because such people contributed nothing to the communal purse, they could not but be seen as a liability for Jewish communities that were falling into ever greater debt and yet still had to find a way to pay the corporate taxes that they owed first to the Polish authorities and in later years to the Russian government. On the other hand, there was an element of the extraordinary and even the magical about people who did not conform to bodily, cognitive, or societal norms.
As is almost universally the case with social outcasts, marginals began, with the advent of modernity, to play a fraught role as the symbolic Other for Jewish society, which projected onto them its anxieties about its perception in the eyes of the Christian world, the rapid impoverishment of Russian/Polish Jewry, changing sexual mores, and more. Modernizing reformers and philanthropists were particularly concerned that large groups of marginal types, more visible to Christian society in the cities to which Jews were migrating in large numbers, might endanger the positive image of modern Jewry that progressives were attempting to cultivate. In the worst-case scenario, the surrounding society might even, it was feared, mistake the deformed part for the backward but fundamentally healthy whole.
When Jewish notables and progressives (maskilim) began to argue in the middle decades of the nineteenth century for the granting of full civic and political equality to Jews, they also had to explain why the Jews were deserving of such rights. In some cases, the argument about worthiness led inexorably to a statement about which parts of the Jewish people—in other words, which Jews—merited citizenship or expanded rights, and which did not.4 Frequently, the debate revolved around productivity and model behavior: some occupations were considered to be useful to the state and society, and those pursuing them could serve as exemplars for their coreligionists. At the other end of the economic and social spectrum lay the marginals, and especially beggars, who were perceived as embodying traits that enemies of the Jews understood as characteristically Jewish—idlers, parasites, frequently deceitful, often physically repellent—and whom Jewish progressives saw as symptoms of Jewish backwardness. As Catherine J. Kudlick remarks, “Disability is a significant factor in the development of the modern state, by raising questions of who deserves the government’s assistance and protection, what constitutes a capable citizen, and who merits the full rights of citizenship.”5 We could profitably expand her argument from one about disabled people, a significant category of marginal people, to one that includes all marginals.
But even as the process of defining the marginal person as outside the boundaries of the normal was under way, visionary artists were creating literature that challenged this model, emphasizing the essential humanity of Jewish society’s undesirables and suggesting that their wounded condition was representative of the circumstances of Jewry as a whole. It is no coincidence that in addition to Glupsk (Foolsville), the Jewish towns that hold pride of place in the fictional Jewish universe of Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim) are Kabtsansk (Pauperstown or Beggarstown) and Tuneyadevka (Leechville).6 The work of writers like Abramovitsh adumbrated a profound shift in East European Jewish society heralded by World War I and the subsequent Russian Civil War and its accompanying massacres, which left tens of thousands of Jews homeless, destitute, orphaned, maimed, or insane. In newly independent Poland, while popular attitudes of disparagement and condescension persisted, the marginal type was to some extent no longer perceived as marginal at all, but rather as embodying a significant measure of Jewish society, which marshalled its resources to create institutional welfare networks to care for the most vulnerable. The undesirables merited attention from writers and filmmakers because their treatment illustrated both the cruelty and the kindness inherent in human nature and in Jewish communal life; from folklorists because they were both a subject of folk culture and a potential repository of folklore; and from nationalist leaders and social welfare activists because they exemplified the way that even the most abject could be lifted up and transformed into productive members of the Jewish nation. But nationalists, and especially Zionists, harbored profound ambivalence about the disabled Jewish body and psyche: they represented the persecuted, wounded, and deeply unhealthy Jewish nation, and therefore merited concern and sympathy. At the same time, however, they were also the clearest example of the Jews’ degenerate state and therefore had to be done away with through the regeneration and transformation that Zionism promised.
Definitions
I embarked upon this project intending to explore the marginal people in Jewish society. I knew from my previous research project on the Jews of late imperial Kiev that those people existed, and I had a hunch that this was an important category in East European Jewish society. What I did not yet have was a clear understanding of which categories marginality embraced. Poverty? Then we were discussing beggars and paupers. Social status? Servants and yishuvnikes (rural Jews) had to be included. Familial condition? Orphans and widows, naturally. Physical and mental ability? People with physical and intellectual disabilities and the mentally ill. Other definitions might conceivably embrace the religiously lax, converts, prostitutes, and criminals.
Who the marginal people are depends, of course, on how we define marginality. One key factor is poverty. We might attempt to measure marginality in terms of economic position and self-sufficiency: was a given individual able to support himself or herself, or did he or she have to rely on charity or crime to survive? And even if some sort of livelihood was present, was it consistent or unreliable? Instability and unpredictability, as well as isolation—for marginals often fell into their difficult circumstances precisely because they had no family to rely upon—were often hallmarks of a socially marginal life.7 Another indicator of marginal status is social deviance: identification, via behavior or membership, with a group that did not fit neatly into early modern society’s “strict and rigid hierarchies . . . in which everyone knew, or was supposed to know, his or her place.”8 A deviant identity was associated with shame, stigma, and social ostracization, and sometimes even a perceived danger to the mainstream. “Outsiders or pariahs. . . . were considered to be a permanent threat to honorable people. At the same time. . . . their asocial behavior served as a reminder of the positive elements around which a societal consensus had formed.”9 (Had I written this study several decades ago, I might have drawn on sociological terminology to characterize its subject as “involuntary deviants” over and against other categories of deviants who must perforce be lumped together under the very unsatisfactory label of “voluntary”—as if criminals, prostitutes, and others perceived as “asocial” could truly be understood as having chosen their way of life free from societal and economic pressures, biases, and other circumstances. The term “deviant” has, of course, come to be seen as problematic.)10
If the threat posed by people on the margins to those in the center was a metaphysical one, imperiling the foundations of society, the danger represented by the underworld was usually much more concrete. Most obviously, criminals and bandits were clearly a menace to the well-being of all people, rich and poor alike.11 However, the underworld is not identical with the margins of society; while the former evokes the vertical axis, the latter is mapped spatially along the horizontal. The criminal underworld includes those seen as outside the typical definition of proper society but not the disabled, the chronically ill, or the mad, or even ordinary paupers with no means of support.
Because poverty, crime, and marginality are interconnected, marginality can be a key marker for instability in times of social and economic transformation. At the dawn of the industrial age, rapid population growth greatly enlarged the ranks of paupers, and existing charitable institutions could not assist all those in need. Rates of crime and begging grew quickly, “heightening fears among propertied people about the basic social order.”12 That series of causal linkages could, with a few minor modifications, describe the situation of marginal people in Jewish society in eastern Europe in the late eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Not only were they a cause of social anxiety, but, as we shall see, “ordinary” Jews often projected onto them disquiet proceeding from other social disjunctions.
One of the primary litmus tests used in this work to determine social marginality is whether the people whose lives we are studying had to rely for survival on others outside of family members, whether through individual almsgiving, support from charitable confraternities, and/or (in the twentieth century) benefits from welfare networks or institutions. Hence the focus on indigence and pauperism in this study, as well as on the charitable and philanthropic institutions that attempted to alleviate those conditions. As we know from our own twenty-first-century societies, social isolation can be both a factor contributing to and a consequence of poverty. Although in some cases marginal Jews were connected to some form of social network—one thinks of the bands of vagabonds who roamed the countryside en masse—most were socially isolated because of their poverty, lack of familial support, and/or alienating physical and mental characteristics.13
But abject poverty and isolation are not our only criteria for marginality. Across European society, and in the Russian Empire in particular, there were many, many poor people, but—though their lives were undoubtedly unimaginably difficult—not all were marginalized. Shame was a significant factor as well—a factor highlighted by two significant historical phenomena, one physical, the other socio-religious, around which marginal types clustered together most visibly and which I use to define Jewish marginality.14 These were the hekdesh, or poorhouse, and the cholera wedding, a magical ritual to stop epidemics that emerged in the early nineteenth century. During the period that this book covers, the hekdesh was home to a motley crew of itinerant and local beggars, vagrants, madwomen and madmen, chronically ill people, and poor orphans. Similarly, the cholera wedding dragged under the wedding canopy those considered the dregs of society, its misfits, freaks, and monsters: paupers, beggars, “idiots,” cripples, the deformed, the ugly, and the unmarried indigent. Much more effectively than any conceptual philosophy, these two institutions highlight for us those whom Jewish society considered to be marginal, devalued castoffs. Both are significant markers of the transition in East European Jewish society from premodern to modern: the hekdesh underwent a gradual but perceptible transformation in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a transformation linked to a broader range of changes wrought by modernity. And even more starkly, the cholera wedding was both a product of and a reaction to the coming of modernity, a “traditional” (though in actual fact new and innovative) remedy intended to surpass the remedies the modern world proffered for a very modern pandemic by reifying supposedly age-old dichotomies embedded within the matrix of Jewish society.
The collective identity that the hekdesh and the cholera wedding highlight is the socially marginal, yes, but perhaps also the freak. In a perceptive study of the process of “enfreakment,” whereby people with extraordinary bodies are categorized as Other by society and subsequently put on display for a public that is by turns fascinated and horrified, Elizabeth Grosz argues that, paradoxically,
at the same time that enfreakment elaborately foregrounds specific bodily eccentricities, it also collapses all those differences into a “freakery,” a single amorphous category of corporeal otherness. By constituting the freak as an icon of generalized embodied deviance, the exhibitions also simultaneously reinscribed gender, race, sexual aberrance, ethnicity, and disability as inextricable yet particular exclusionary systems legitimated by bodily variation—all represented by the single multivalent figure of the freak. Thus, what we assume to be a freak of nature was a freak of culture.15
To be sure, the Jewish outcasts of eastern Europe were not limited to the disfigured or the deformed and were generally not called “freaks.” But they were put on display in newspaper pictorial sections, ethnographies, and the cholera wedding. Grosz’s insight helps us understand how Jewish society grouped marginal Jews together, collapsing their differences (to use her phrase) into one category of otherness.
In the traditional Jewish life-world of eastern Europe, marginal types were perceived as occupying a space that was neither fully within the boundaries that marked the norms of Jewish society, nor fully outside of them. They were betwixt-and-between people; in anthropological language, liminal. They lay outside two of the most central social structures of that society, livelihood and marriage, the first of which was usually critical for the attainment of the second. It was considered a great misfortune to be without independent livelihood, as evidenced—to give just one example—by the thousands of petitions sent to Rabbi Eliyahu Guttmacher in the 1870s by ordinary, mostly Polish, Jews asking for the blessing of parnasah (livelihood) and the large subset of those complaining about dohak gadol (great [economic] distress) or parnasah be-tsimtsum (reduced livelihood/income).16 Jacob Katz’s description of the early modern period applies just as accurately to modernity: Jewish “attitudinal patterns . . . encouraged and favored [a] desire for money and wealth far more than they restricted it,” and poverty was perceived as a trial to be endured.17 And without good prospects (for men) or a dowry (for women), a good match—or sometimes any match at all—was difficult to attain, a deplorable state in a community characterized by “tremendous pressure to marry.”18
Beggars did not have a livelihood, at least not in the customary sense. Poor orphans could rarely hope to rise above their circumstances, even with support from relatives or charitable societies. For both groups, then, marriage was much less easily attainable than for ordinary people. For their part, physically disabled or deformed people did not conform to normative body types, and the cognitively impaired or mentally ill were perceived as lacking full functioning. In some cases, this meant that they were considered by rabbinic Judaism to be less than full members of the religious community; if they were men, that is, for women were never counted as full members. In terms of our larger categories, however, disability often meant that an independent life sustained by gainful employment was impossible, and that marriage and hence procreation would be difficult to attain.19
Such people were not, of course, the only unmarried members of Jewish society, who might also include servants whose circumstances made marriage impossible and widows and widowers who for some reason could not remarry.20 However, servants did often manage to marry, and the expectation for widows and widowers was that they would remarry relatively soon after the death of a spouse. (A separate category altogether were agunot, “anchored” wives whose husbands had deserted them without a writ of divorce, who were technically married but functionally single.)21
Standing outside of society, marginal people were, therefore, marked as Other. They experienced liminality—an ambiguous identity that results from being on the boundary between two discrete, well-defined states of being—not for a limited period of time but for many years (in the case of orphans and beggars) or, among those born with a disability, even an entire lifetime.22 The liminal figure is not only structurally invisible, since society’s definitions do not allow for the existence of a category of “betwixt and between,” but also structurally dead—or suspended between the living and the dead.23 Liminality and ambiguity are also often linked with ritual pollution, because what is neither this nor that is viewed in many societies as ritually unclean.24 As in many cultures, the symbols associated with marginal people in Jewish eastern Europe were drawn from the vocabulary of death; the realm of spirits and demons; disease and bodily un-wholeness (sores, wounds, missing body parts); and filth and pollution. The institutions with which they were often linked—the hekdesh and the cemetery—also exhibited many of the characteristics associated with liminality: secluded, filthy or ritually unclean, inhabited by spirits and demons. And while marginals were sometimes among the most conspicuous people in a town—who could ignore the rantings of a town fool or the insistent pleading of the local beggar?—they were also, paradoxically, among the most invisible members of Jewish society in eastern Europe. The many different kinds of historical evidence upon which this study is based are testament to that invisibility: I had to scour the extant library of sources on East European Jewish culture in order to find documentation of the lives of these stepchildren of the shtetl.
This project started out as a study in social history that would draw on the usual sources of the social historian: archival documents, governmental memoranda, the press, memoirs, ethnographic studies, and statistical works. But over the course of the past decade, I discovered that a vital resource for understanding the place of marginal people in Jewish society, and perhaps even for getting some suggestion of the texture of their lives, was literature. Thus, in the space of a few pages we may begin with recollections from several memoirs, move on to a statistical survey and then a pinkas (communal register), stop briefly to ponder a Yiddish folktale, and conclude with an extended analysis of a late-nineteenth-century Yiddish novel and an early-twentieth-century Hebrew short story.
None of this historical analysis should obscure what lies at the heart of this study: the lives, and the suffering, of real people. These outcasts did not live to be the subject of a historian’s inquiry. They were women and men, children and old people, who lived lives of extraordinary challenge, pain, and misery. Sometimes they were helped by their families or communities; frequently they were not, or that help was insufficient or crudely or insensitively proffered. Although their voices are almost completely absent from the historical record, it is my hope that this work will serve, in some small way, as testament to their collective experience.
Notes
1. David Samuels, “A Last Conversation with Aharon Appelfeld,” Tablet, January 5, 2018, www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/228475/last-conversatio… (accessed December 2, 2019). For the story, see Aharon Appelfeld, “Bertha,” in Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust, ed. Milton Teichman and Sharon Leder (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 149–59.
2. Aharon Appelfeld, “Ba-derech el atsmi,” Moznyaim 22 (June–November 1966): 364–65, cited in Shachar Pinsker, “The Language That Was Lost on the Roads: Discovering Hebrew through Yiddish in Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction,” Journal of Jewish Identities 7, no. 1 (2014): 132. Trans. modified.
3. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 10.
4. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 45–79.
5. Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,’” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (June 2003): 766.
6. Dan Miron, “Sh. Y. Abramovitsh and His ‘Mendele,’” in id., The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 106.
7. See Timothy B. Smith, “Marginal People,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000, ed. Peter N. Stearns (New York: Scribner, 2001), 3: 175, and Wolfgang von Hippel, Armut, Unterschichten, Randgruppen in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 5, 14–15, who stresses poor people’s lack of social esteem (soziale “Ehre”).
8. Richard J. Evans, “Introduction: The ‘Dangerous Classes’ in Germany from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century,” in The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Routledge, 1988), 1. See also Hippel, Armut, Unterschichten, Randgruppen, 4–7.
9. Fernand Vanhemelryck, Marginalen in de geschiedenis: over beulen, joden, hoeren, zigeuners en andere zondebokken (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2004), 9. As the title suggests, the study embraces executioners, Jews, prostitutes, and gypsies in addition to witches and heretics.
10. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe, trans. Haim Watzman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 9.
11. Evans, “Introduction: The ‘Dangerous Classes,’” 1–2. In his study of early modern German society, Evans includes not only pariahs like vagrants, itinerants, and practitioners of despised occupations, such as tanners and executioners, but Jews and Roma among the underworld’s marginalized “dishonorable people” (unerhliche Leute).
12. Peter N. Stearns, European Society in Upheaval: Social History since 1750 (Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1992), 81.
13. For another interesting conceptual approach to marginal people, see Susan A. Ashley, “Misfits” in Fin-de-Siècle France and Italy: Anatomies of Difference (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Ashley discusses two categories of “misfit”: mental misfits, including geniuses, lunatics, and neurotics, and social misfits, including vagabonds, criminals, and sexual deviants.
14. On the role of shame in defining marginality, see Smith, “Marginal People,” 3: 180.
15. Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 10.
16. YIVO Archive RG 27 (Papers of Eliyahu Guttmacher), ser. 1, boxes 1–17.
17. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 59.
18. Ibid.,123. On patterns of courtship and marriage among East European Jews, see Shaul Stampfer, “Love and Family,” in id., Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), 26–55; ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2002), 11–72.
19. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 118.
20. See Shaul Stampfer, “Remarriage among Jews and Christians,” in id., Families, Rabbis, and Education, 56–85.
21. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 123. On agunot, see Bluma Goldstein, Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Haim Sperber, “Agunot, 1851–1914. An Introduction,” Annales de démographie historique 136, no. 2 (2018): 107–35.
22. See Bjørn Thomassen, “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality,” International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009): 5–28.
23. Victor W. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 95–97.
24. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark, 1984), 38–41; Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 98.