Bookshelf: November 2022 Archives

In a column last week on the role ritual and prohibitions play in group identity for Christians, Rod Dreher recalled a passage in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology by Mary Douglas about Irish resistance to the Roman Catholic Church's decision to abolish the Friday fast and allowing meat on Fridays.

Reading today's Douthat piece put me in mind of anthropologist Mary Douglas's well-known 1970 book Natural Symbols. If you've heard about the book at all, it's probably in association with her analysis of the Second Vatican Council's ending the requirement that Catholics abstain from meat on Friday. She argued that the "Bog Irish" -- her term for working-class Irishmen in England -- kept the Friday fast despite the efforts of progressive priests to get them to stop, because it was a "condensed symbol" telling them who they were. That is, it signified connection to the past, to Irish identity, and to a cosmology. By casting aside this condensed symbol, Douglas contends, the Catholic hierarchy discarded something far more important than they understood.

Dreher, who has moved from Louisiana to Budapest, lamented that he left his copy of the book back in the States. He had to settle for a few Google Books excerpts from the first chapter.

I emailed him with good news, good news for everyone who wants to look up a half-remembered passage from a book that is temporarily inaccessible: The Internet Archive (archive.org) has a virtual lending library where you can borrow a book for an hour at a time and read it online, or borrow it for 14 days and download it to a DRM-enabled e-reader. All you need is to register for a free Internet Archive account.

For Natural Symbols, three copies were available for borrowing.

This is the Internet Archive's solution to the problem of works still under copyright. Older works, in the public domain because copyright has expired, are available instantly without an account and can be downloaded in numerous formats without restriction. The virtual lending library for copyrighted works simulates browsing in the stacks (the one-hour checkout) or taking it home (the 14-day loan). Special accommodations are available to the print-disabled for many titles.

The discussion of Irish Catholics and fish on Fridays put me in mind of similar extra-biblical restrictions that once defined the culture of many Baptist churches, including the one I grew up in, the First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills. We went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. We didn't drink and didn't dance. We knew stricter churches that banned standard playing cards, but Rook, without the face cards, was OK. I remember great debate in our church over the propriety of women wearing pants, instead of dresses, to church. My sixth-grade math teacher, Charlie Twiss, was a LDS bishop, and he couldn't join us for our Friday night class outing to see The Little Prince at the Loew's Delman Theater because Friday night was sacrosanct family time. Avoiding caffeine is another practice that would remind a Mormon of his identity and allegiance at very ordinary moments with friends and colleagues. Phrases beginning "We don't...." -- with the emphasis on We -- reinforce group identity.