Taboo
1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias A taboo, also spelled tabu, is a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred, or allowed only for certain people.
[1] Taboos may be prohibited explicitly, for example within a legal system or religion, or implicitly, for example by social norms or conventions followed by a particular culture or organization.
[3] The meaning of the word taboo has been somewhat expanded in the social sciences to strong prohibitions relating to any area of human activity or custom that is sacred or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs, or cultural norms.
Its English use dates to 1777 when the British explorer James Cook visited Tonga, and referred to the Tongans' use of the term taboo for "any thing that is forbidden to be eaten, or made use of".
[11] Those words descend from an etymon *tabu in the ancestral Proto-Oceanic language, whose meaning was reconstructed as "forbidden, off limits; sacred, due to a sentiment of awe before spiritual forces".
[11] In its current use in Tongan, the word tapu means "sacred" or "holy", often in the sense of being restricted or protected by custom or law.
[13][14][15] Common taboos involve restrictions or ritual regulation of killing and hunting; sex and sexual relationships; reproduction; the dead and their graves; as well as food and dining (primarily cannibalism and dietary laws such as vegetarianism, kashrut, and halal) or religious (treif and haram).
Zeus, pressed by the cries of the hungry people and by the other deities who also heard their anguish, forced Hades to return Persephone.
On the gods' advice, Orpheus traveled to the Underworld wherein his music softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone, who agreed to allow Eurydice to return with him to earth on one condition: he should guide her out and not look back until they both had reached the upper world.
Aphrodite had fallen in love with the mortal Anchises after Zeus persuaded Eros to shoot her with an arrow to cause these emergent feelings.
Anchises does not heed this speaking taboo and later brags about his encounter with Aphrodite, and as a result, he is struck in the foot with a thunderbolt by Zeus.
[26][27] When Artemis realized that Actaeon had seen her undressed, thus desecrating her chastity, she punished him for his luckless profanation of her virginity's mystery by forbidding him from speech.
In the Judeo-Christian telling, found in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden of Eden by God and are told not to eat from a tree lest they die,[30] but Eve is promptly tempted by a serpent (often identified as Satan in disguise) to eat from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil because they will surely not die,[31] rather, they might become "like God".
[45][46] Iblis swore in the name of Allah that he was their sincere advisor, revealed unto Adam and his wife each other's nakedness, and convinced them to eat from the forbidden tree so that they may never taste death.
In Genesis 19, two angels in the form of men arrived in Sodom at eventide and were invited by Lot to spend the night at his home.
As dawn was breaking, Lot's visiting angels urged him to get his family and flee, so as to avoid being caught in the impending disaster for the iniquity of the city.
[55] Some argue that contemporary Western multicultural societies have taboos against tribalisms (for example, ethnocentrism and nationalism) and prejudices (racism, sexism, homophobia, extremism and religious fanaticism).
Among other reasons, this taboo may come from concern that comments may be taken out of the appropriate context and used to make ill-informed policy decisions that would lead to (otherwise preventable) maternal death.
