In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.

Menstruation is part of women’s normal life, which requires basic hygienic practices. Managing hygiene can be affected by several factors and situations such as natural disasters. Focusing on ‘super flooding’ in Pakistan’s Sindh Province, we pay attention to how this ‘natural disaster’ has affected hygienic practices of menstrual cycle of women. The study meticulously examines the dynamics of menstrual hygiene management, encompassing the nuanced encounters with feelings of shame and embarrassment among girls and women situated in flood camps, schools, and community shelters. It also intends to highlight women’s challenge and embarrassment to participate in the distribution process of essential resources such as pads. The insights garnered from this study hold potential relevance for various stakeholders, including policymakers, healthcare practitioners, and researchers, offering a nuanced comprehension of the intersection of menstrual hygiene, climate change, and well-being of women.

This study examines a collection of expressions for the taboo topic of menstruation in Dutch, German, and Mandarin Chinese. A model for the identification of conceptualization patterns in taboo verbalizations is set up, analyzing each expression according to the X-phemistic mechanisms and, if applicable, the metaphorical source domains or metonymic vehicles at its origin. The various conceptualizations of menstruation are approached from a socio-cultural perspective; variation in conceptualization is examined through a correspondence regression analysis with three speaker-related explanatory variables (L1 and associated cultural background, menstrual experience, and age group). The underlying interest is linguo-cultural as the study aims to verify whether dominant menstrual attitudes are reflected in the linguistic conceptualization of menstruation within each socio-cultural group. Such correlations are indeed found, although the youngest age-group shows some unexpected linguistic behavior.

Some decision situations are so objectionable or repugnant that people refuse to make a choice. This paper seeks to better understand taboo responses, and to distinguish choices that are truly taboo from those that are merely difficult or confusing. Using 22 scenarios that describe potentially taboo issues, Experiment 1 explores reasons for disapproval of the scenarios. We measure a large number of possible reasons for disapproval and a variety of preference responses (including willingness to accept), in order to test for subtleties in taboo responses. We also test cognitive and affective responses to the scenarios. Experiment 2 further explores the interaction, found in Experiment 1, between affective and cognitive factors. Taken as a whole, our results show that people are able to indicate their disapproval consistently across a variety of preference elicitation methods, that their disapproval is better understood as an attitude measure than as an economic valuation (even when the measure is in monetary terms), and that taboo responses are driven primarily by affect.

Previous studies suggest that choices are perceived as difficult as well as negatively emotion-laden when they tap into moral considerations. However, we propose that the involvement of moral issues and values can also facilitate decisions because people often insistently preclude them from trade-offs with other values. Because such values are treated as inviolable and absolute, they are called sacred values (e.g., Tetlock et al., 2000). Two experiments examined the influence of sacred values (measured by a recent self-report scale) and variation of trade-off type (taboo, tragic, routine trade-offs) on perceived decision difficulty and negative emotions. As hypothesized, decision difficulty and negative emotions show diverging patterns as a function of sacred values and trade-off types. When the decision situation involved two conflicting sacred values (i.e., tragic trade-off), people perceived the decision task as emotionally stressful and difficult. However, when the decision situation was associated with only one sacred value (i.e., taboo trade-off), people perceived the task as more negatively emotion-laden, but as easier to solve, compared to a situation not involving sacred values (i.e., routine trade-off). These findings suggest that reliance on sacred values may work as a heuristic.

This article discusses Maimonides’s rationale for the incest taboo and traces its reception in Christian and kabbalistic traditions in the thirteenth century. Tracing the reception of Maimonides’s view enables recognition of the resemblance between Maimonides and Aquinas, the ambivalent stance toward Maimonides’s explanation expressed by Nahmanides, and the incorporation of Maimonides’s reasoning in one of the most systematic and enigmatic works of kabbalistic rationalization of the commandments, the Castilian Kabbalist Joseph of Hamadan’s The Book of the Rationales of the Negative Commandments. R. Joseph’s acceptance of Maimonidean principles and his integration of them in the theurgic Kabbalah reveal a conflict in the heart of its system and teach us about an important aspect of the theory of sexuality in Kabbalah. The inquiry offered here examines the inter-relations between divergent medieval religious trends in constructing the role of sexuality. Instead of the common presentation of Kabbalah as diverging from the ascetic positions of Jewish philosophy and Christianity, this analysis will elucidate Kabbalah’s continuity with them.

Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this avoidance influences people's perceptions of leaders’ underlying traits, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe costly prohibitions and that observers infer cooperativeness, religious belief, difference from normal humans and supernatural power from shamans’ adherence to special taboos. We investigated costly prohibitions on shamanic healers, known as sikerei, among the rainforest horticulturalist Mentawai people of Siberut Island. We found that shamans must observe permanent taboos on various animals, as well as prohibitions on sex and food during initiation and ceremonial healing. Using vignettes, we evaluated Mentawai participants’ inferences about taboo adherence, testing three different but not mutually exclusive hypotheses: cooperative costly signalling, credibility-enhancing displays and supernatural otherness. We found support for all three: Mentawai participants infer self-denying shamans to be (a) cooperative, (b) sincere believers in the religious rules and (c) dissimilar from normal humans and with greater supernatural powers. People's inferences about religious self-denial are multidimensional and consistent with several functional accounts.

Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent says I love you to death, one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely indicative of a high degree of affection. Such cases have often been noted in the literature as idiomatic, but this view ignores the fact that these are not isolated cases but productive constructions that can be used with a variety of verbs. We explore various resultative constructions in English and Dutch, and give a classification of the subtypes involved as well as their diachronic development from ordinary to degree interpretation. We link these subtypes to lexical semantic classes of verbs. Both English and Dutch show a steady growth in the lexical and structural diversity of degree resultatives throughout the early modern and contemporary periods (1600-2000). We focus in our paper on the period 1800-2000, for which we did an extensive corpus study using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Delpher (a collection of digitized Dutch newspapers, journals, magazines, and other resources). One of our findings is that, similar to other types of expressive language, such as degree modification and emphatic negation, taboo expressions play a role in degree resultatives; in fact, their role is excessive. We outline a number of the commonalities among the semantic domains of expressive language used in resultatives.

This article argues that the establishment of anatomo-power in China preceded and set the foundation for biopower. Anatomo-power is disciplinary power over live bodies in the military, schools, and hospitals, but also the power of the medical profession over dead bodies to investigate pathology through dissection. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese conceptions of political anatomy were used to advocate anatomical knowledge, and an anatomy law in 1913 made routinized dissection possible. Chinese society began to be transformed as old taboos were broken, and thousands of new terms allowed the scientific worldview to take root among professionals and the public. Anatomical researchers addressed both microscopic pathology to cure individuals and macroscopic questions that grouped individuals into a population to be managed, or that sought data to tell new narratives about the origins and future of humanity—a new political anatomy based on the practice of human dissection.

We examined attitudes towards forest and wildlife among Rabha, Bodo and Rajbongshi communities from three villages in the Chakrashila Wildlife Sanctuary of western Assam, India. The study was conducted through open-ended and structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participatory rural appraisal. The respondents identified availability of forest products, biodiversity conservation and the aesthetic beauty of the forest as the major justifications for the establishment of Chakrashila as a protected area. They also believed that people and wildlife could coexist peacefully, although some respondents did not have a cordial relationship with Forest Department staff. Most respondents were favourably disposed towards the golden langur Trachypithecus geei because it did not harm anybody or damage crops, and because of its shining coat and its exalted status in their religious beliefs. They were antagonistic towards the rhesus macaque Macaca mulatta because of its crop-raiding habits, although they were averse to killing it. Most respondents did not want to relocate because they lacked skills and resources and had associations with the forest, where they maintained sacred groves and observed taboos on hunting and plant resource extraction. Thus, the attitudes of the communities were governed not only by their material needs and priorities but also by their deep-rooted cultural–religious bond with the forest. These matters would benefit from being incorporated into forest management strategies in developing countries.