These are the things that humans do: thinking, talking, acting. We can’t read thoughts directly, so in practice talking is the evidence of thinking, which reduces it to talking and acting.
Well, sometimes thoughts are obvious even when you are not talking, e.g. if you are socially inappropriately happy or sad. You shouldn’t giggle during a funeral, could be an example of a taboo. But then it falls under the category of doing. So I guess “talking or doing” covers all options.
Well, technically, talking is also a kind of acting, but we have a special category for it. Any other things that deserve a special category? The obvious choice is writing. There are things that are okay to say among friends, but could ruin your life if you write them down. (With internet this gets complicated, when people communicate in writing. Some people got burned by not paying attention to this. Send a private message to your supposed friends, and suddenly its screenshot is trending on Twitter.)
Maybe we could distinguish active and passive taboos. Sometimes you transgress by doing a specific action, sometimes by not doing an action that is required (not responding to greeting; not removing your shoes before entering the temple).
It kinda seems to me that we should then also add the duration parameter or the range-of-context parameter. The no-shoes-in-the-temple taboo hardly governs your behaviour when you aren’t doing temple-related things. The no-inbreeding taboo seems different?
And I still maintain that people use taboos to focus people’s attention to the ‘safe’ forbidden things.
These are the things that humans do: thinking, talking, acting. We can’t read thoughts directly, so in practice talking is the evidence of thinking, which reduces it to talking and acting.
Well, sometimes thoughts are obvious even when you are not talking, e.g. if you are socially inappropriately happy or sad. You shouldn’t giggle during a funeral, could be an example of a taboo. But then it falls under the category of doing. So I guess “talking or doing” covers all options.
Well, technically, talking is also a kind of acting, but we have a special category for it. Any other things that deserve a special category? The obvious choice is writing. There are things that are okay to say among friends, but could ruin your life if you write them down. (With internet this gets complicated, when people communicate in writing. Some people got burned by not paying attention to this. Send a private message to your supposed friends, and suddenly its screenshot is trending on Twitter.)
Maybe we could distinguish active and passive taboos. Sometimes you transgress by doing a specific action, sometimes by not doing an action that is required (not responding to greeting; not removing your shoes before entering the temple).
It kinda seems to me that we should then also add the duration parameter or the range-of-context parameter. The no-shoes-in-the-temple taboo hardly governs your behaviour when you aren’t doing temple-related things. The no-inbreeding taboo seems different?
And I still maintain that people use taboos to focus people’s attention to the ‘safe’ forbidden things.