Purity and Danger

The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her study Purity and Danger, remarks that “unwanted sound” is just as scorned in native cultures as dirt. In the search for purity, numerous societies attempt to rid themselves of all that is deemed unclean—and mostly this takes the form of strict guidelines and rules regarding the body, sex, and food—and also to erase as many sounds as possible from their environment.

The regulation of sound and the imposition of a mute acoustic ecology is a way to create order out of chaos, regulating the social body and individual speakers. Sophocles is attributed with saying that “silence is the kosmos [good order] of women:” in order to control the unruly fairer sex, antiquity says that power must be wielded and the powerless silenced. Noiselessness is purity, unattainable.