Don’t Touch That, Don’t Go Near That: Cultural Purity and The Acceptance of Corruption

This paper explores how once we start to consider the complexity of the workings of the oppositional concepts of purity and corruption (along with the danger that corruption implies) in particular, it quickly becomes clear that there is often a two-way dependence that operates between them. In other words, it is often a condition of achieving purity that we already have a recognised state of corruption and it is a condition of corruption that we have a pre-existing notion of how we might oppose this in order to achieve purity. In fact, it may be argued that we have to go through a state of corruption to get to one of potential or actual purity, and that we may only have arrived at a state of corruption because we have already tried to insist too much on making some aspect of culture pure.