Taboo

Franz Steiner's Taboo, published posthumously from a series of Oxford lectures edited by Laura Bohannan with a preface by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, is the classic critique of how earlier anthropology took the Polynesian word tapu and stretched it into a supposedly universal comparative category covering everything from menstrual restriction to royal untouchability. Its authority rests on Steiner's close philological attention to the Polynesian sources themselves and on its recognized place as the direct precursor to Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger, which developed the same critique into a fuller theory. Its limit is genre and completion, a set of lecture notes assembled after the author's death rather than a monograph he lived to finish revising, so its argument is more suggestive across some cultural comparisons than exhaustively documented. Cite it for its founding critique of the taboo concept, not as a comprehensive ethnography of any one tradition it discusses along the way.