toward a semiotics of “purity” and “pollution” in India

Abstract

In spite of the fact that “purity” and “pollution” have been given a prominence in the study of Indian society unequaled by any other indigenous concepts, little attention has been paid to the explication of the content and structure of these as Indian conceptual categories. This paper is intended as a contribution to that explication and an argument for the central place of linguistic analyses in it. The paper contains a structural semantic analysis of the language of “purity” and “pollution” in Kannada and suggests a semiotic framework for integrating that analysis with others, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. [India, purity and pollution, ethnographic semantics, semiotics]