Elsevier Science International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences Vol. T-Z.pdf

Taboo

vi-Strauss argued

that the incest taboo generates inter-familial relations,

providing the basis for the exchange of women (or

marriage partners of either sex) that in eﬀect consti-

tutes society. Whereas Freud in Totem and Taboo

emphasized the temporal signiﬁcance of the incest

taboo (whose phylogenetic origin in actual historical

events is largely dismissed by anthropologists) and the

implications for intrapsychic and intrafamilial rela-

tions (which ﬁnds broader though not unanimous

support), Le

A concept assumed in the Victorian period to be

central to the religions of supposedly less evolved

societies, the term taboo today generally is used to

refer to prohibitions grounded in custom or religion

rather than in bureaucratic law or common sense and

hence bearing some moral weight. Taboos can be

widespread, observed over the long term, internalized,

and deeply felt, as in the case of incest taboos, or

applied temporarily with respect to speciﬁc persons,

acts, conditions, and objects. This article reviews the

history of the concept which can be seen to reﬂect

the development of anthropological theory more

generally.

vi-Strauss argued that the incest taboo

forms the logical basis of society and is rooted in the

universal mental capacity to make categorical binary

distinctions, notably those between self and other,

culture and nature. In an ambitious attempt to unify

and critique the theory, Rubin added the injunction

against homosexual relations.

It is Le

1. Taboos, Social Order, and Moral Persons

The word taboo is originally Polynesian. Via the

writings of explorers like Cook and missionaries like

Ellis it rapidly entered ordinary usage in Victorian

England. In 1842 the 7th edition of the Encyclopaedia

Britannica deﬁned taboo succinctly as, ‘A word used

by the South Sea islanders, and nearly of the same

import as prohibited or interdicted. It applies equally

to persons and things, and is also expressive of

anything sacred, devoted, or eminent’ (quoted in

Steiner 1999, p. 164). In the hands of Robertson

Smith and Frazer, taboo came to epitomize the es-

sence of primitive thought, distinguishing it from

civilized religion (i.e., the Judaeo–Christian tradition)

in the way it combined holiness with deﬁlement. In a

deconstructive work equivalent to that which Le

vi-Strauss’s emphasis on classiﬁcation that

has most inﬂuenced subsequent analyses of taboos

and has proved fruitful in understanding their varied

and often ostensibly trivial content. Drawing on their

common heritage of Durkheim, both Douglas and

Leach emphasized the role of taboos in protecting

systems of social classiﬁcation by banning anomalous

or marginal words, objects, and practices that might

violate the order of the categories or blur their

distinctions. The title of Douglas’s major work, Purity

and Danger (1966), captures the crux of her argument

perfectly. Dirt, or that which is viewed with revulsion

and hence tabooed, is ‘matter out of place’ and hence

always relative to a system of classiﬁcation but also

dangerous for it. Building on Steiner, Douglas argued

convincingly that individual taboos can only be

understood as parts of larger social wholes; that taboos

are not false or failed attempts at science; that Western

lives are replete with taboos which are no more or less

rational than those of other societies; and that without

principles of restriction, conceptual and moral dis-

crimination would be compromised and the ensuing

freedom of both thought and action would be hope-

lessly chaotic.

Douglas’s argument has inspired much subsequent

work, especially on gender, the body, and food.

Among the merits of her approach is the ability to

show structural similarities in taboos, whatever their

speciﬁc content, both within a given society, between

societies, and across both ostensibly secular (e.g.,

hygiene, courtesy) and sacred realms. Somewhat more

controversial have been attempts both to illustrate

how taboos in various orders of phenomena (notably

vi-

Strauss performed for totemism, Steiner admirably

summarized and critiqued the use of the term through

the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, demonstrating

the problems with applying a culturally particular

concept in a comparative and evolutionary fashion.

Steiner showed that it was impossible to separate

deﬁlement from the sacred in any consistent manner.

Steiner’s critique of the abstraction and reiﬁcation of

taboo has been pursued by MacIntyre, while his

insights into its signiﬁcance in Polynesia have been

considerably enlarged by Gell, Sahlins, and Valeri.

The most profound reﬂections on taboo have

concerned its universal social basis. Both Freud and

vi-Strauss have seen the incest taboo as fundamental

to the constitution of society. For Freud, internalizing

prohibitions against intra-familial violence and sexual

15429

relations establishes the conditions for the emergence

of kinship and moral conscience. Le

Taboo

vi-Strauss

demonstrated that speciﬁc positive rules of mar-

riage—made possible by the underlying incest

taboo—generate certain patterns of relationship over

time. Taboos, by contrast, in that they do not specify

what must or should be done, allow greater degrees of

freedom. Yet, as Fortes argued, they are also grasped

more easily and internalized more deeply than positive

injunctions.

While taboos usually are analyzed as discursive

elements, it is important to understand that they

become realized in practice. Often the most con-

sequential taboos are the least explicit. If in a structural

model the semantic contents of taboos distinguish

who or what one is not, from a practice perspective it

is the observance of the taboo that substantiates who

one is. Van Gennep saw taboos as acts of obligation,

creating both continuity and separation. Fortes em-

phasized the morally binding quality of taboos and the

personal signiﬁcance of observing them for the inter-

nalization of an enduring identity and the acknow-

ledgment of dependence on, and obligation to, higher

authorities or values. Moreover, taboos ‘crystallize

these abstract norms in concrete objects and precise

rules of conduct which are the more eﬀective because

they are of no utilitarian or rational value’ (Fortes

1987, p. 129).

Fortes observed both the essentially inward orien-

tation of taboos, especially with respect to eating, and

their continuous nature. An important consequence of

the fact that taboos are phrased in the negative is that

their observance is a relatively continuous and private

form of action, whereas carrying out a positive order is

a discontinuous and relatively discrete and public act.

Hence while the power entailed in observing a taboo

may be less explicit and forthright than a direct

command, the implications may be more profound.

Deﬁance of taboo may challenge subjection, identity,

and value at quite a deep level.

Taboos, then, are not merely imposed, lifted, or

carried out in discrete acts but observed continuously.

As practical disposition the observance of taboos

exempliﬁes Mauss’s and Bourdieu’s notion of the

habitus and Aristotelian virtue that underlies it.

Although not always accepted happily, taboos index

personal dignity and (self-)respect, and insofar as they

are embodied statements, they may be understood as

acts which performatively establish and maintain

moral states of social commitment and individual

conscience. Moreover, in the visceral reactions to the

violation of taboos (nausea, disgust, etc.), underlying

social conventions are naturalized. Hence, as Douglas

also intuits, taboos do not merely signify social or

cosmological order but, in acts of separation, com-

mitment, and principled refusal, they constitute it.

Taboos may be understood phenomenologically

with respect to a dialectic of subject and object. Gell

argues that it is through taboos, applied at varying

levels of speciﬁcity across social categories, and oper-

ating as intentional, if negative, engagement with the

world, that the ego or self is constituted. ‘To observe a

taboo is to establish an identiﬁable self by establishing

a relationship (negative in this case— not eating) with

an external reality such that the ‘‘self’’ only comes into

existence in and through this relationship’ (1979,

p. 136). ‘Taboos on eating, on killing, on sexual in-

tercourse, on looking at, touching, etc., together

circumscribe a ‘‘hole’’ in the texture of shareable

intersubjective reality which, privileged with respect to

a speciﬁc individual, constitutes his soul, or ego, or

personality. Taboo does more than express the self: it

constitutes the self’ (1979, p. 137). When Gell’s ar-

gument that taboos carve out the self is combined with

vi-Strauss’ argument that taboos generate exchange

and hence society, it is clear that the self is relationally

constituted, simultaneously held apart from and con-

nected to others, simultaneously social and itself.

There is a dynamic quality here: Umeda of Papua New

Guinea alternate phases of taboo and consumption; in

Gell’s analysis the taboo phase restores the integrity of

the ego by ‘reconstituting it as a closed system’ (1979,

p. 146). Elsewhere Gell (1995) generalizes the logic of

taboo in its original Polynesian locus where it pro-

duced diﬀerentiation in a cosmos in which sacredness

was immanent rather than transcendental.

2. Transgression

One of Freud’s central arguments concerned the

essential ambivalence of taboos, understood as the

coalescence of the conﬂict between a desire and its

refusal, attraction, and repression. It is clear that

anticipation or suspicion of the violation of taboos

often produces visceral reactions—whether laughter,

lust, or queasiness—disgust rather than mere indig-

15430

diet) reﬂect concerns with the maintenance of social

boundaries and divisions and, at a greater level of

abstraction, to plot the degree of general interest in

maintaining the purity of classiﬁcatory orders against

the underlying nature of the social relations (the type

of society, relatively deﬁned). Following one strain of

Durkheim’s thought, Douglas gives primacy to the

form and integration of social groupings and thus,

despite her radical demonstration of the contingent

nature of particular taboos, the argument appears

rather conservative. Purity and impurity are not only

relative to a system of categories, but this system may

also be arranged with respect to a hierarchy of sanctity

within a holistic universe, as epitomized by Dumont’s

account of the South Asian caste system. Ensuing

questions about the relationship of sanctity and

encompassment to power have been much debated.

While the presence of taboos is universal, their

substance and direction are not, giving rise to cul-

turally speciﬁc social orders. In some parts of the

world, like eastern Indonesia, prescriptive rules are

emphasized, while in others, like Madagascar, pros-

criptions are pervasive (Lambek 1992). Le

Tacit Knowledge, Psychology of

nation. Moreover, because the embodied practice of

powerful taboos goes without saying, their pervasive

presence is only highlighted by the observance of

violation. That is to say, taboos are often indicated

through instances of their transgression, in eﬀect, a

double negation. As Douglas, Gluckman, and Turner

showed, suitably framed transgressions may provide

central episodes in religious experience, moral edu-

cation, and social transition, but otherwise they are

perceived as highly threatening. Transgressions may

establish political dissent or domination, but they are

also the source and substance of neurotic illness, social

panic, and much fantasy.

Stallybrass and White (1986) conjoined these ideas

with Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque and Elias’s

history of manners to explore the signiﬁcance of

taboos in the historical constitution of the European

middle class. The rigorous expulsion of what was

perceived as disorderly, low, and carnal has produced,

in their view, various ‘returns of the repressed.’ These

include nostalgia, longing, fascination, and even the

academic preoccupation with the body.

While some people continue to argue for a biological

basis to the incest taboo (and possibly certain other

widespread prohibitions), the increased acknowledg-

ment of the prevalence of actual incestuous relations

supports those theories that ﬁnd the source of taboos

in culture or society and human ambivalence. Indeed,

the question has been raised whether incest taboos are

any longer necessary and whether they have been de

facto lifted, or at least limited. On another front, the

violence and rape characteristic of twentieth-century

warfare, and the torture carried out by repressive

political regimes, must be recognized. Indeed, these

might be viewed as deliberate and state-sanctioned

liftings of taboos in order to maximize personal

violation. However, due in part to fears of contami-

nation that accompany any discussion of trans-

gression, research has focussed more on the condition

of victims than the acts of perpetration.

Of course, the presence of taboos has always

generated fantasies of transgression. These are often

di cult to distinguish from actual transgressions and

at the same time may produce transgressive acts of

their own, as in the ‘de-repression’ characteristic of

accusations of witchcraft and child abuse prevalent in

recent years in North America and northern Europe

but also globally (Comaroﬀ 1997, LaFontaine 1998).

The need for moral discernment is not always matched

by epistemological clarity, yet the fantasies and acts,

characteristic of sites and moments of moral vertigo

and vacuum, underline the near universality of disgust

in the face of certain kinds of physical and sexual

brutality and invasiveness, the universal need for

avenues for the exercise of digniﬁed moral agency, and

the place of taboos among such means.

Conversely, it could be argued that the preceding

discussion suﬀers from an overly socialized, moralistic,

and tame conception of taboos; that negation and

excess are central to religious experience; and that

transgression be recognized as ‘the ultimate sacred act’

(Taussig 1998, p. 361).

1966 Totem and taboo. In: Goody J (ed.)

Religion, Morality, and the Person . Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, UK

Freud S 1958 Totem and Taboo . Vol. 13 of The Standard Edition

of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

(Strachey J, ed. and trans.). Hogarth, London

Gell A 1979 Reﬂections on a cut ﬁnger: Taboo in the Umeda

Conception of the Self. In: Hook R H (ed.) Fantasy and

Symbol . Academic Press, London

Gell A 1995 Closure and multiplication: An essay on Polynesian

cosmology and ritual. In: de Coppet D, Iteanu A (eds.)

Cosmos and Society in Oceania . Berg, Oxford, UK

LaFontaine J S 1998 Speak of the De

il . Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, UK

Lambek M 1992 Taboo as cultural practice among Malagasy

speakers. Man 27 (2): 245–66

Leach E 1964 Anthropological aspects of language: Animal

categories and verbal abuse. In: Lenneberg E H (ed.) New

Directions in the Study of Language . MIT Press, Cambridge,

, 1st

edn. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris (1966 The

Elementary Structures of Kinship . Beacon, Boston)

MacIntyre A 1990 Three Ri

mentaires de la parente

al Versions of Moral Enquiry .

Duckworth, London

Rubin G 1975 The trac in women: Notes on the ‘Political

Economy’ of sex. In: Reiter R R (ed.) Toward an Anthropology

of Women . Monthly Review Press, New York

Stallybrass P, White A 1986 The Politics and Poetics of

Transgression . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY

Steiner F 1999

1956 Taboo. In: Adler J, Fardon R (eds.) Taboo,

Truth, and Religion: Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writ-

ings , Vol. I. Berghahn, New York

Taussig M 1998 Transgression. In: Taylor M C (ed.) Critical

Terms for Religious Studies . University of Chicago Press,

Chicago

Van Gennep A 1904 Tabou et tote

misme a

Madagascar . Ernest

Leroux, Paris

M. Lambek

Tacit Knowledge, Psychology of

Tacit comes from the Latin tacitus and translates

roughly as silent ,or unspoken and, indeed, the sense of

the unverbalized, the unuttered, is still carried by

contemporary usage. Usually the Hungarian

British

15431

Bibliography

Comaroﬀ J 1997 Consuming passions: Child abuse, fetishism,

and the ‘New World Order’. Culture 17 : 7–19

Douglas M 1966 Purity and Danger . Routledge & Kegan Paul,

London

Dumont L 1967 Homo Hierarchicus . Gallimard, Paris (1970

University of Chicago Press, Chicago)

Fortes M 1987

vi-Strauss C 1949 Les structures e

Tacit Knowledge, Psychology of

scholar Michael Polanyi is credited with importing the

notion of tacit knowledge into the social sciences and

the credit is deservedly his (Polanyi 1962, 1966, Reber

1993a). In Polanyi’s framework, tacit knowledge was

information that was intensely personal, intro-

spectively opaque, and communicatively unrespon-

sive. It was also, importantly, complex knowledge,

abstract in nature, and deeply causal. He wrote of

knowing more about familiar conceptual domains

than we can tell and characterized his own early life as

a creative scientist as being largely a struggle to make

tacit knowledge available to consciousness and open

to introspection and communication.

Within psychology, this notion of a rich, personal

knowledge base with direct causal links to behavior

has been around for a long time, surfacing and

resurfacing in various forums from the psychoanalytic

to the neurocognitive, from the study of perception

and learning to models of memory and information

storage. The ﬂurry of interest in these issues has

spawned a host of synonyms, so much so that Polyani’s

original term tacit is actually rather rare. Preferred

lexical entries refer to knowledge that is implicit or

unconscious , occasionally to mental processes that are

nonconscious , unaware , procedural , co

an exclusionary clause is invoked, the tacit dimension

includes only those processes and mechanisms that

operate while remaining more or less impenetrable to

top-down, conscious access and control.

As noted above, the cover term tacit knowledge ,

despite its currency in earlier work and its central

position in Polanyi’s writings, no longer appears in

many ‘keyword’ lists. This is too bad. One of the

di culties with much recent work on the cognitive

unconscious is that connotatively loaded terms such as

awareness and consciousness pepper the ﬁeld and fuel

disputes that are often unproductive and unsatisfying.

In the following, synonyms will be freely interchanged

and attempts will be made to resurrect the core term

tacit . So, with lexicographic inclusiveness in place, the

following are the four primary areas of research.

1. The Four Primary Areas of Research

ert , and, from

time to time, to functions which are incidental or

automatic . However, no matter what cover term is

employed, the focus remains on the cluster of per-

ceptual and cognitive processes that function largely

independently of awareness of both the processes by

which such knowledge was acquired and of the mental

representations that result from such learning. In

short, tacit knowledge , by whatever name enjoys

momentary currency, is knowledge that is acquired

and used with little in the way of the top-down,

modulating control of consciousness. And herein lie

the big psychological puzzles. How is complex knowl-

edge acquired largely outside of consciousness? How

are memories encoded so that their impact on behavior

is manifested by indirect measures while their contents

remain largely unavailable to recall and recognition?

Is the tacit system merely functionally distinguishable

from the more cognitively familiar, consciously modu-

lated systems? Or, as many suspect, are the observed

dissociations reﬂective of deeper neurocognitive

systems? Is it possible that explicit, retrievable knowl-

edge systems are linked with biological systems that

are evolutionarily distinct from the tacit, implicit

systems? Is knowledge that was acquired implicitly

superﬁcial knowledge that is tied to the speciﬁc form

of the stimulus displays, or can such knowledge also be

abstract and symbolic?

While work on these questions since the 1970s has

touched on virtually every area in modern psychology,

it is not unreasonable to distill it down to four classical

problems. Not surprisingly, these four are the classical

topics that have dominated psychological thought

since the nineteenth century: perception, learning,

memory, and motivation. The diﬀerence is that here

1.1 Tacit or Implicit Perception

For the most part, the existence of information pick-

up that occurs when the stimulus materials are

presented under nonoptimal conditions is a generally

accepted phenomenon. The last serious critique of the

eﬀect (Holender 1986) was countered by a large

number of eﬀective rebuttals and it seems safe to

conclude that the acquisition of information about

stimulus displays that participants are unaware of

perceiving is a robust phenomenon. There is also good

evidence that such subliminally perceived represen-

tations have emotive elements (Kunst-Wilson and

Zajonc 1980). For more detail on this issue, see

Perception without Awareness, Psychology of .

1.2 Implicit or Tacit Memory

Implicitly held memories are, in eﬀect, those memorial

residues of experience whose contents aﬀect behavior

while remaining largely unavailable for recall or

recognition. Such memories show up primarily in

indirect tests such as word-stem completion tasks (ﬁll

in the blank with the ﬁrst word that comes to mind:

MOT

Psychology of .

1.3 Implicit or Tacit Learning

Implicit learning is the process whereby knowledge

about complex stimulus domains is acquired largely

15432

) where participants reliably complete the task

using items previously encountered even though they

are unable consciously to recall them. One of the more

intriguing ﬁndings is that implicit memory is relatively

intact in amnesic patients who manifest severely

disordered explicit memories. For additional infor-

mation on this issue, see Implicit Memory, Cogniti

Tacit Knowledge, Psychology of

without involvement of top-down, conscious control

(Reber 1993b). Naturally occurring examples of the

operation of implicit learning are language acquisition

and the process of socialization. Implicit learning

yields implicit or tacit knowledge in that not only is the

learner unaware of the process of learning, the very

knowledge itself is highly resistant to explication.

This notion that deep, abstract knowledge about a

complex stimulus domain can be acquired and repre-

sented outside of consciousness is the one that is

closest to Polanyi’s original use of the term. In

Polanyi’s framework, tacit, personal knowledge

played a critical role in everyday life. Moreover, such

communicatively resistant knowledge was also viewed

as lying at the very core of creativity. In Polyani’s

epistemology, to engage in a creative act to struggle to

make tacitly acquired and held knowledge conscious

and communicable. Doing science, in his mind, was

following the urging of one’s carefully crafted

intuitions and slowly shaping the reservoir of initially

unavailable, tacit knowledge out into a communicable

form.

tacit dimension appear to hinge on the notion that

the unconscious, as Polanyi maintained, is just ﬂat-out

smart. Speciﬁcally, we can consider the following.

2.1 Methodological

It has been argued that the observed implicit–explicit

distinction is not an ontological one but merely results

from the procedures used to measure participants’

awareness of held knowledge (Holender 1986, Shanks

and St. John 1994). This argument turns on two

points: ﬁrst, that the measures used to evaluate tacit

knowledge are more sensitive than those used to

evaluate consciously held knowledge, and second, that

no other independent evidence exists to support the

distinction. There are good reasons for suspecting that

the former is (or was) correct. When more eﬀective

methods of inquiry are employed, participants often

have shown more awareness of held knowledge than

ﬁrst suspected. Contemporary researchers are much

more careful to use more sensitive measures of

knowledge held by participants in these studies. The

argument, however, appears weaker on the second

point. There is a large and growing body of evidence

that shows that distinct neuroanatomical substrata are

involved in the acquisition and storage of tacit

knowledge, speciﬁcally structures in the medial tem-

poral lobes. Patients with severe damage in these

cortical regions show often devastating episodic mem-

ory dysfunctions with little or no disruption in the

pick-up and acquisition of tacit knowledge. In ad-

dition, there are good reasons for suspecting that the

two systems have emerged under distinct evolutionary

pressures and have very diﬀerent evolutionary bio-

logical histories (Sherry and Schacter 1987, Reber

1992).

ation

The focus here is the exploration of unconsciously

held representations. The essential argument, which

derives from the classical, Freudian approach, is that

unconsciously held knowledge plays its primary role

by modifying and adjusting perceptions and mem-

ories. This approach goes one step further than the

above in that the unconsciously held knowledge in

assumed actually to change conscious representations

in accordance with deeply held knowledge systems.

This use is found primarily in analytically and psycho-

dynamically oriented research where unconsciously

held knowledge is presumed to have its impact on

behavior through disguised, hidden routes (e.g.,

Horowitz 1988) although hints of it emerge in more

recent work on the development of preferences and

aesthetic judgment (Manza and Bornstein 1995).

2.2 Functional

The point is often made that there is no ‘true’ cleavage

between tacit knowledge and knowledge held at the

edges of consciousness, that the observed dissociations

are mere functional adjustments made to particular

contexts (Whittlesea and Dorken 1993). The argument

here is that participants in standard experimental

settings shift from conscious to unconscious modes

depending upon the constraints placed upon them and

the contexts in which they are required to function.

Neither system is the default system and, in fact, they

should probably not even be thought of as separate

systems but as poles on a continuum running from the

deeply tacit to the poignantly conscious. From a

functionalists point of view, there is much to rec-

ommend in this contention. In all likelihood, most of

the interesting things that human beings do on a

ersies

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the issues raised in

these contexts have proven controversial. It is im-

portant to appreciate that most of modern experi-

mental psychology is built on a foundation that goes

back to Locke and other British empiricists. This

approach, which favored introspection as the primary

method of inquiry, equated mental with conscious and

rejected out of hand the notion of a cognitively

sophisticated unconscious. Although few appreciate

(consciously?) these Lockean roots, many of the

arguments being waged over the characteristics of the

15433

1.4 Implicit or Tacit Moti

2. Disputes and Contro

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