Early Theories of Taboos

The word “taboo” is found across the Polynesian language family. It entered English following the publication of the journals and memoirs of crewmembers aboard James Cook voyaged all over the Pacific (1768–1780), in particular the widely read A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (King, Reference King1785), written by James King, who ultimately took command of the third voyage after Cook’s death (Figure 1). These accounts detailed how Cook and his men first learned about taboos (or tapu, kapu, tabu, depending on the language and sometimes its transliterator).

Figure 1 Cook’s voyages to the Pacific.

Figure by author.

The scrupulosity with which taboos were obeyed impressed Cook’s crew, as did the punishments meted out for their transgression, which was often death (e.g., King, Reference King1785, p. 10).

The increased activity by Euro-American mariners in the Pacific in the 19th century exposed more Western sailors to the concept of taboos, which continued to mystify them. In Typee (Reference Melville1893 [1846]), Herman Melville’s (exaggerated) account of his experience among the eponymous people on the island Kuna Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, the American author reflected:

Several pages later, Melville noted: “The word itself (taboo) is used in more than one signification. It is sometimes used by a parent to his child, when in the exercise of parental authority he forbids it to perform a particular action. Anything opposed to the ordinary customs of the islanders, although not expressly prohibited, is said to be ‘taboo.’” (Melville, Reference Melville1893, p. 248)

Like Melville, many travelers and travelogue readers understood taboo as an example of the superstitious ways of non-Christian peoples. Contact with and exploitation of Indigenous peoples around the globe exposed Europeans, through the distorting lens of colonialism, to practices and beliefs that appeared utterly alien. Bewitched by the ethnocentrism of the era, colonial authorities and educated Westerners, like Melville, typically saw taboos as yet more proof of the backwardness of the people they had conquered, for there are few things that seem as irrational, absurd, and ridiculous as a taboo to an outsider.

However, a few Westerners realized they had seen something similar to the Polynesian taboo closer to home. In what can be called a moment of anthropological insight, William Anderson, who had joined Cook’s expedition as the Resolution’s surgeon and naturalist, wrote in his notebook on July 11, 1777: “There is another custom amongst them call’d Taboo whose precise meaning we do not well understand. The word itself implys no more than a thing is not to be touch’d … In some cases it appears to resemble the Levitical law of purification” (Beaglehole, Reference Beaglehole1967, pp. 947–948).

In fact, it became apparent that taboos were quite pervasive in European cultures, even if, prior to Cook’s voyages, English had no word for a type of ritual prohibition enforced by emotional response. Though it took time for them to admit it, English and later other Europeans had intimate experience with taboos, and not just in the food laws of the Hebrew Bible obeyed by Jews. It would not be long before “taboo” entered common usage to indicate something strictly and/or irrationally proscribed. For example, Edmund Burke used the term to defend himself against his colleague, Charles James Fox, who had criticized Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke, Reference Burke, Marshall, Bryant and Todd2015 [1791]). In his An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Burke complained, in the third person, “the topic of France is tabooed or forbidden ground to Mr. Burke, and to Mr. Burke alone” (Burke, Reference Burke, Marshall, Bryant and Todd2015, p. 387). Three decades later, in 1822, the poet Robert Southey began a letter to his eighteen-year-old daughter: “Fortune, I think, has fitted you with a physician to your liking. He has tabooed ham, vinegar, red-herrings, and all fruits” (Warter, Reference Warter1856, p. 305).

The concept of taboo gained more popular usage and attracted academic attention in the Victorian period. Steiner (Reference Steiner1956, p. 50) postulates that this interest in taboos reflected the twofold nature of bourgeois society of the period: On the one hand, it had adopted a “rationalist approach to religion” that demanded scepticism of beliefs. On the other, it held fast to numerous taboos, especially surrounding sexuality; this was a time when museums attached fig leaves to Greek statues and polite society referred to pants as “unmentionables.” All the while, European imperialism continued apace. Contact with distant cultures and their belief systems (and the suppression of them) had become commonplace.

Anthropology and other social sciences cut their teeth in this age defined by colonial expansion and cultural self-critique. Early anthropologists found in the concept of taboo something that was characteristic of both the “primitive” and the “civilized.” It was also, as Anderson recognized during his voyages with Cook, a conspicuous feature of the foodways of the great internal European other: Jews. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of the foundational social theorists of taboo were either wayward Protestants inclined to religious critique (Smith, Frazer) or secular Jews (Freud, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl).

James Frazer’s article “Taboo” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Frazer, Reference Frazer1886) is as good a point as any to mark the beginning of social scientific scholarship on taboo. Frazer saw taboos as a primitive type of religious thought, an early step on the road to enlightenment that ran from superstition to religion to rational thought. Frazer recognized that taboos existed in the “enlightened” cultures of antiquity and modernity. He came to realize that taboos were a universal cultural phenomenon (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, p. 97), even though he understood them as primitive holdovers: “Thus on the taboo were grafted the golden fruits of law and morality, while the parent stem dwindled slowly into the sour crabs and empty husks of popular superstition on which the swine of modern society are still content to feed.” (Frazer, Reference Frazer1886, p. 17)

Frazer continued his work on taboo in the third volume of his tome The Golden Bough (Frazer, Reference Frazer1911). In it, he sketched a historiographical framework composed of three eras: magic/superstition, religion (as in supplication to anthropomorphized deities), and science. Frazer argued that magic, religion, and science each attempt to cause physical changes in the world through specific actions, be they spells, prayers, or chemistry. Each era was a response to the failures of the previous one to effect change in the world. Taboos belonged to the era of magic, and Frazer essentially saw taboos as negative magic. Both taboo and (positive) magic involve “the misapplication of the association of ideas by similarity and contiguity” (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, p. 100).Footnote ¹

Robertson Smith was a close colleague of Frazer. Like Frazer, he recognized the similarity between Polynesian taboos and Levitical food laws. But Smith went further, perceiving within the concept of taboo the key to understanding the nature of “the holy” in ancient Israelite and later Abrahamic religion. He articulated his thesis in his magnum opus, The Religion of the Semites (Smith, Reference Smith2017 [1894]), a book whose critical approach and insistence on a multi-authored Pentateuch earned him a trial for heresy in the Free Church of Scotland (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, p. 55). Smith believed that the Levitical concept of holiness and the prohibitions surrounding it related to animistic beliefs. He saw the perpetuation of such taboos in modern-day Judaism and Islam as essentially vestigial superstitions in religions that had evolved past them. To Smith, taboos had no place in an enlightened theology (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, pp. 53–58).

Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Reference Durkheim1995 [Reference Frazer1912]), based on ethnographic work conducted by others in Australia, centers on a hypothetical dichotomy between the “sacred” and “profane.” The “sacred” was the essential feature of religion and taboos, at least initially, served the all-important role of keeping the two separate (Durkheim, Reference Durkheim1995, p. 306). Thus,

In this passage, Durkheim also attended to the ambivalence that often surrounds taboos, an idea that had also figured prominently in the work of Frazer and Smith. Taboos apply to things that inspire awe/worship and disgust. These sentiments, though seemingly in opposition, are in fact two sides of the same coin. Thus, something that is taboo is dangerous, but it can also serve as medicine (Durkheim, Reference Durkheim1995, p. 411).

Wilhelm Wundt (Reference Wundt1921 [1916]) rejected the notion that taboos protected the “sacred. His argument rested upon the claim that so-called “primitive” religions do not distinguish between the sacred and unclean, and therefore do not possess a concept of the sacred at all.” Wundt argued that taboos stemmed from a fear of “demonic” (not sacred) forces. He then dwelt upon the connection between the totem and the taboo, arguing that taboos began with prohibitions on eating the meat of a totem animal. That the Polynesian and many other cases of taboo did not involve totemic animals was not a problem for Wundt; these societies had simply evolved to the point where they could apply taboos more broadly.

Wundt’s work was absorbed by Sigmund Freud, who differentiated taboo from moral and other types of prohibition, and placed the origins of taboo in associative feelings, not the logical working from first principles. Like Wundt before him, Freud saw taboo as rooted in dread and fear. Freud’s work, especially Totem and Taboo (Freud, Reference Freud2020 [1913]), stands out not because of its particular insights into the anthropological phenomenon of taboo (he largely followed Wundt, Frazer, and Durkheim), but because of his drawing of connections to his patients exhibiting “obsessional neuroses,” or what we would nowadays refer to as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Freud went so far as to suggest that OCD could be referred to as a “taboo disease” (Freud, Reference Freud2020, p. 23). After all, taboos and obsessions lack a clear motive, follow their own “internal necessity” rather than logic, are often marked by contagion, and give rise to rituals (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, p. 135).

Freud made several blunders, anthropological and psychological. He forwarded the demonstrably false notion that the singular worry of the “obsessional neurotic” is that harm will come upon their friends or family if they do not perform their rituals, and he asserted that so-called “primitive peoples” or “savages” had childlike minds. For Freud, only the allegedly more enlightened cognition of Europeans could properly distinguish between a religious notion of the “sacred” and a more physical or health-related notion of the “unclean.” Indeed, the repression of unconscious desires in “civilized” Europeans was a leading cause of distress, he claimed.

Freud got a lot wrong, but he made an important connection between social and psychological fears. We can rescue some of his thesis. Particularly apt was Freud’s observation that many fears are confronted with and contained through specific actions – rituals – whose symbolic power derives from what is often “associative” or “magical” thinking.

Associative thinking involves making connections between categories that are not necessarily related. This can foster more rapid cognitive movement compared to rational thought, which operates in a logical manner from first principles (Beaty and Kenett, Reference Beaty and Kenett2023). Magical thinking dovetails with associative thinking, but stems ultimately from the human drive to determine causality (Rosengren and French, Reference Rosengren, French and Taylor2013). It involves attributing intentionality or animate qualities to the inanimate world as well as the belief that one’s thoughts and actions can affect the world through processes that are not physically observable (Piaget, Reference Piaget1930, pp. 131–162; Rosengren and French, Reference Rosengren, French and Taylor2013). Magical thinking thus involves the imagination of causal relations, often attributable to ethereal forces, between categories connected by associative thinking. While magical thinking may peak in early childhood, as the psychologist Jean Piaget observed long ago, it remains a feature of human cognition into adulthood and is connected to the human impulse to imagine (Rosengren and French, Reference Rosengren, French and Taylor2013, p. 43). Praying to a deity to intercede in the world, obeying a taboo to prevent illness, cursing an enemy, wearing lucky socks to a sporting event, blaming one’s misfortune on witchcraft, and feeling guilt when a person one resented dies suddenly are all examples of magical thinking.

Freud was essentially correct that these types of cognition underlie taboos and often play a key role in OCD, though he was wrong to label of associative and magical thinking “primitive.” It barely needs mentioning that even self-described “rational” (and neurotypical) people act on irrational fears (Rozin, Markwith, and Ross, Reference Rozin, Markwith and Ross1990; Nemeroff and Rozin, Reference Nemeroff and Rozin1992; Rozin, Markwith, and Nemeroff, Reference Rozin, Markwith and Nemeroff1992).

Taboo in Early Mid 20th Century Anthropology

Twentieth century anthropology built upon the early works concerning taboo, but injected into them a dose of cultural relativism that, thankfully, neutralized most of the racist and ethnocentric aspects of such theories. While virtually every major anthropologist has had their say on the topic of taboo, we only have space to review a few.

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the father of structural functionalism, viewed society as a rather harmonious collection of mutually supporting structures. He framed his approach to taboos in this vein, but more specifically with reference to the philosopher Ralph Barton Perry’s work, General Theory of Value (Reference Perry1926). Perry and Radcliffe-Brown conceptualized value as occurring when a subject has “interest” in an object (Radcliffe-Brown, Reference Radcliffe-Brown1939, p. 19). A society can be understood as a “system of values” (Radcliffe-Brown, Reference Radcliffe-Brown1939, p. 20) in which there is “harmonization” of individuals’ interests and an agreement concerning shared “social values” (Radcliffe-Brown, Reference Radcliffe-Brown1939, pp. 20–22). Social values benefit individuals, but they also promote social cohesion. Cooking and eating, for example, are valuable to each individual by providing calories, but food also brings people together and confers meaning. For Radcliffe-Brown, taboos not only mark things of social value, they also make value. In other words, they not only protect, they also provide structure. On the other hand, while taboos offer a sense of protection from things that appear dangerous, they also create anxiety around those things – thus making them appear dangerous in the first place and thereby erecting boundaries on social behavior (Radcliffe-Brown, Reference Radcliffe-Brown1939, p. 39).

Margaret Mead (Reference Mead1937) took a somewhat different, if still structuralist, path to taboo. She stressed the Polynesian origin of the term “taboo,” but argued that if it were to have an anthropological significance, the concept had to be separated from its original context (Mead, Reference Mead1937, pp. 503–504). She offered the following definition: “a negative sanction … against participation in any situation of such inherent danger that the very act of participation will recoil upon the violator” (Mead, Reference Mead1937, p. 502). Decades later, Mead (Reference Mead1978) considered the possibility of harnessing the power of taboos for social good. Writing for the women’s magazine Redbook, she argued that the best way to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace was to develop a taboo on such relations, similar to the incest taboo. One could argue that, with the increased attention to sexual harassment and inappropriate workplace relationships in the wake of the #MeToo movement, such a taboo is starting to emerge.

By the middle of the 20th century, anthropology had produced a sizable volume of theory on taboos, their meanings, and their origins. Playing the role of grand synthesizer, Franz Steiner in his lectures on taboo, carefully compiled for publication by Laura Bohannan and with a preface by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956), offered one of the most thorough evaluations of the concept of taboo. The slim book, which remains as enlightening as it was seventy years ago, reviewed the writings of Robertson Smith, James Frazer, Margaret Mead, R. R. Marret, Sigmund Freud, Arnold Van Gennep, Wilhelm Wundt, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Steiner’s prose is biting, his critique unrelenting. Not even Radcliffe-Brown, Steiner’s teacher, escaped unscathed.

Yet for all his criticism, Steiner appears hesitant, even equivocal, in proposing a definition:

Steiner concludes that a taboo “gives notice that danger lies not in the whole situation, but only in certain specified actions concerning it” (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, pp. 146–147). In other words, taboos allow one to focus on certain dangers – and ritually keep them at bay through avoidance – in a chaotic and unknowable world.

Symbolic and Functionalist Explanations

From the 1960s onward, two strands of taboo theories developed: symbolic and functional. The first was broadly consistent with interpretations of taboo proffered by previous generations. Victor Turner (Reference Turner1964) extended Van Gennep’s (Reference Van Gennep1960) Rites de Passage [originally 1909], identifying taboos as protective of liminal spaces, people, or things. The categorical uncertainty of the betwixt-and-between makes it dangerous. Like the sacred in Durkheim, that liminality must be separated from the everyday world; taboos serve that purpose. In a similar vein, Mary Douglas (Reference Douglas1966) conceived of taboos as enforcing purity, preventing allegedly dangerous symbolic mixtures. Her canonical example was the Leviticus taboos and their justifications (e.g., the pig with its cloven hooves but lack of rumination), although she later recanted this theory (Douglas, Reference Douglas1975, pp. 276–318, Reference Douglas2002, p. viii).

Perhaps the most significant of the symbolic interpretations remains that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The Elementary Forms of Kinship (Reference Lévi-Strauss1969) focused on the incest taboo, but its insights are more broadly applicable. Reading Freud (Reference Freud2020), Lévi-Strauss agreed that the incest taboo was a critical and universal feature of human existence, but Lévi-Strauss rejected the notion that it derived from innate (psychologically derived) sexual desires between related individuals. He argued the incest taboo was a social, not psychological, milestone in human existence that laid the foundations for kinship systems and, thereby, culture. It represented a sort of Rubicon in human evolution over which culture passed in pursuit of its goal of subordinating nature. The incest taboo made us human because it forced non-related individuals to form social units as families became socially interdependent for the exchange of marriage partners (women, for Lévi-Strauss). This reproductive interdependence precipitated other material and non-material forms of exchange and interaction. This “alliance theory” holds that the basis of human social existence is the exchange of women between families. “The incest prohibition is at once on the threshold of culture, in culture, and in one sense … culture itself” (Lévi-Strauss, Reference Lévi-Strauss1969, p. 12).

More recently, Maurice Godelier has modified Lévi-Strauss’ argument in The Metamorphoses of Kinship (Reference Godelier2011). Critiquing the notion that marriage exchange and the incest taboo represent the original basis of human social organization (Godelier, Reference Godelier2011, p. 381), Godelier nonetheless argues that the incest taboo, though not entirely universal (e.g., brother-sister marriage in Persian and Egyptian history), reflects a universal concern with controlling sexuality, which can be dangerous to society. Society needs rules (such as taboos) to hem in sexual desire. In turn, these rules give shape to human society – as Lévi-Strauss argued, they are culture itself, in a sense – but they also protect society in the process of its reproduction. I will take this idea further in my own explanation of taboos.

One of the most important ethnographic works in the past few decades is Valerio Valeri’s posthumous book, The Forest of Taboos. Valeri provides an updated synthesis of theories of the taboo, with a particular emphasis on the French social anthropological literature (Valeri, Reference Valeri2000, pp. 43–113). Especially when read in conjunction with Steiner, Valeri exposes the reader to the full breadth of 100+ years of scholarship, offering trenchant commentary. Mostly, however, The Forest of Taboos is based on ethnographic work with Huaulu communities in the Moluku Islands, a people who possess many taboos (maquwoli in the local language). Many pertain to food and hunting.

Valeri’s theory of taboo is Durkheimian: Taboos serve to keep things at an appropriate ontological distance from people – things too dissimilar or too similar are avoided. “The number and importance of food taboos reflect the exceptional dangerousness that Huaulu thought attributes to digestion, a dangerousness ultimately due to the fact that eating amounts to reconstituting oneself by assimilating others – that one is what one eats and that what one eats is not, ontologically speaking, radically different from what one is.” (Valeri, Reference Valeri2000, p. 162)

Valeri thus builds his theory on the assumption that taboos have something to do with the self, with the negotiation between subject and object, and the differentiation, which is to say identification, of a person in a cultural and natural world.

Yet, Valeri is careful not to argue that taboos simply keep the self at a distance, or prevent the accumulation of too many identical things, thus differentiating his theory from those of Françoise Héritier (Reference Héritier, Izard and Smith1979) and Alain Testart (Reference Testart1991). Instead, he strives to build upon the theory of Alfred Gell (Reference Gell and Hook1979), who saw taboos as constructive of the self by allowing a person to separate themselves bodily from the world with respect to three socially charged activities: killing, eating, and having sex.

Valeri recognized that hunting and eating meat is particularly fraught for the Huaulu hunter. The hunter, according to Valeri, perceives both ontological closeness to and distance from their prey. They thus feel a need to negotiate a tension between cannibalism and the ingestion of something so essentially different from the human as to risk becoming non-food. Taboos perform this negotiation. As such, according to Valeri, taboo is fundamentally derived from concerns over both morality and identity, and links the two through practices of avoidance.

All of these theories just reviewed constitute symbolic frameworks for making sense of taboos. The other strand is functionalist. There is a broad literature, but the anthropologist perhaps most identified with this approach is Marvin Harris, who, along with others, sought environmental or biological explanations for taboo. Thus, for example, one reads that pigs became taboo in Judaism and Islam because they required too much water (Harris, Reference Harris1974), that food taboos in Amazonia can be explained by “the faunal productivity” of the region (Ross, Reference Ross1978, p. 15), that incest taboos are an evolutionary adaptation to prevent inbreeding (Van den Berghe, Reference Van den Berghe1980), that taboos which prevent children and women from eating meat in New Guinea is an adaptation to endemic malaria (Lepowsky, Reference Lepowsky1985), and that food taboos on pregnant women in Fiji evolved to reduce the risk of fish poisoning (Henrich and Henrich, Reference Henrich and Henrich2010). Such ideas have proved popular. They offer simple explanations for the seemingly irrational behavior of ritual avoidance. They suggest that history, social behavior, and the mind itself can yield their secrets provided one has the right “key,” that everything can be explained by a simple sentence. Such simplification of the world is comforting in the same way that following a taboo is: It provides the illusion of comprehension in the unknowable chaos that defines our existence.

There are several problems with functionalist interpretations. Most have proven all too easy to shoot down on factual bases alone (Diener and Robkin, Reference Diener and Robkin1978; Simoons, Reference Simoons1994; Fessler and Navarrete, Reference Fessler and Navarrete2003; Price, Reference Price2021). But on a deeper level, one can always argue that any practice serves a practical purpose, just as people can (and often do) devise reasonable explanations for behavior they would otherwise deem irrational, impulsive, or immoral (Schwitzgebel and Ellis, Reference Schwitzgebel, Ellis, Bonnefon and Trémolière2017). Taboos, because they involve avoidance in a world of danger and death, can always be made to appear rational or functional.

None of this is to say that taboos cannot be functional or beneficial. It is possible that some may have helped societies or populations succeed on evolutionary timescales. But we should not conflate effect with cause. Perhaps it is useful to take a page out of Freud’s book and draw an analogy to OCD. A person with OCD may have obsessions that are advantageous. Contamination OCD, with the compulsion to wash one’s hands, will reduce their risk of contracting the flu. However, this benefit does not explain OCD, its causes, or the experience of people living with it. One does not have OCD because one is afraid of catching a virus; OCD causes a person to fixate on the fear of catching a virus. The same is true for taboos. Functionalist explanations offer at best partial explanations for why taboos emerge in the first place, how they persist and evolve, and how people experience abiding by them. Furthermore, just as disease avoidance can allow a person with OCD to rationalize effectively irrational thoughts and in doing so occasionally resist treatment, functionalist explanations can obfuscate, even for those who abide by taboos, the real reasons taboos develop, persist, evolve, and in some cases disappear.

Thinking about Taboos Outside Anthropology

Several important contributions to the study for taboos have come from outside anthropology. Allan and Burridge (Reference Allan and Burridge2006), two linguists, examined tabooed words and censorship. They note that taboos often involve the body – eating, bodily excretions, death, birth, and speaking, thus connecting taboo with identity. They also provide a helpful analogy for the contagion aspect of taboo: “It is as if the tabooed object were like a radioactive fuel rod, which will have dire effects on anyone who some into direct contact with it unless they know how to protect themselves.” (Allan and Burridge, Reference Allan and Burridge2006, p. 5)

Bridging psychology and evolutionary anthropology, Fessler and Navarrete (Reference Fessler and Navarrete2003) contribute to the study of food taboos, especially those on meat. After reviewing and rejecting symbolic and functionalist theories, they develop an approach to taboos based on “normative moralization,” or the way in which common behavioral traits in a population become perceived as right, and “egocentric empathy,” or putting oneself in another’s shoes (Fessler and Navarrete, Reference Fessler and Navarrete2003, pp. 14–15). The first creates group ideals, such as taboos; the second is responsible for emotional response to (and policing of) others’ behavior. Fessler and Navarrete then tackle a question important to this Element – why is meat so good to taboo? They answer it with a combination of evolutionary psychology (meat spoils easily and can cause sickness) and the symbolic power of animals cross-culturally. We will revisit these themes in Section 4.

Fessler and Navarrete note the importance of the emotion of disgust in the psychological experience of food taboos. Much of the work on this topic has been conducted by Paul Rozin and colleagues (Rozin et al., Reference Rozin, Markwith and Stoess1997; Rozin, Markwith, and Stoess, Reference Rozin, Markwith and Stoess1997; Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, Reference Rozin, Haidt, McCauley, Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett2008). Their work has shown that disgust is a powerful emotion, one learned early in childhood, that provides “culture’s most effective means to enforce a prohibition” (Rozin et al., Reference Rozin, Markwith and Stoess1997, p. 79). Indeed, psychologically speaking, the power of taboos often derives from the disgust they elicit. The clinical psychologist Susan Miller (Reference Miller2004), a specialist in shame and disgust, refers to the latter as “the gatekeeper emotion.”

Concluding Remarks

What is a taboo? In the most basic sense, taboos involve fear, but it is often a confusing fear, one mixed with other emotions, including disgust (Miller, Reference Miller2004; Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, Reference Rozin, Haidt, McCauley, Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett2008). A sense of awe and, in some cases, (repressed) desire is not uncommon. Frazer, Smith, and Freud all drew attention to these seemingly paradoxical emotions. The Polynesian concept of tabu/tapu/kapu is also ambiguous – a tabooed thing or person can be seen as either too good or too vile to be touched.

We should also attend to the issue that taboos are implicated in identity. Mary Douglas put it succinctly in her review of Valeri’s (Reference Valeri2000) The Forest of Taboos: “taboos reinforce the oppositions that construct the universe. Animal-human, male-female, these oppositions shore up delicate distinctions that could easily dissolve into each other” (Douglas, Reference Douglas2000, p. 2288). DeBoer (Reference DeBoer, Auger, Glass and McCartney1987), in his assessment of food taboos in the Amazon, reached a similar conclusion: “you are what you don’t eat.” Taboos negotiate in-group and out-group dynamics. Taboos are the wild beasts that howl on the borderlines, separating social identities from one another through emotionally charged avoidance behaviors.

Digging deeper, things become fuzzy. Steiner (Reference Steiner1956, p. 141), the master synthesizer of his era, correctly noted that “taboo” is a catch-all term for many different types of prohibition practices. Indeed, each theorist’s perspective on taboo is influenced by the particular cases they examine and their unique worldview. For Valeri, taboo meant the maquwoli of the Huaulu; for Durkheim it was the taboos he read about in ethnographies of Aboriginal Australians. Freud had in mind the “obsessional neuroses” of his patients, while Turner and Ven Gennep conjured to their minds prohibitions that applied to the ritual initiate. Douglas (and myself for that matter) approached the subject through the pig taboo in the Hebrew Bible. Meanwhile, Radcliffe-Brown and Mead fit taboos into their general structuralist understanding of culture. Taboo is, then, an anthropological abstraction, a theoretical thing that is used to understand certain prohibition behaviors through classification and analogy. But because it can be viewed in many ways, and because it comes in many forms, the issue of how to think about taboos presents different problems for the anthropologist depending on the context.

Taboo and Rationality

Are taboos rational? This is a thorny question. Perhaps a useful framework for approaching it is via Max Weber’s (Reference Weber2019 [1921]) taxonomy of social action, with rational acts deriving from a clear and reasoned train of thought (logical deduction) based upon a set of reasonable first principles or assumptions. Among rational social actions, he distinguished between Zweckrationalität (“goal-ended rationality”) and Wertrationalität (“value rationality”). Zweckrationalität describes actions reasoned from a practical goal “I do not eat meat because I have high cholesterol.” Wertrationalität describes actions reasoned from a moral first principle: for example, “I do not eat meat because I believe that animals should not be harmed.” Weber counterposed these rational types to nonrational social action, notably those deriving from emotions or from tradition (Weber, Reference Weber2019, p. 101). When we consider the psychology of taboos – that is, what people are thinking when they follow them or are confronted with the option of transgression – we can sometimes detect a mix of Weberian social action types. Ultimately, however, I argue that, in essence and in daily practice, taboos are nonrational.Footnote ²

Before proceeding down this path, I want to make it clear that I am not making a value-judgment distinction between “high and low” cognition, as the early taboo theorists did. All human thought in every cultural setting is a mix of rational and nonrational thinking. Already mentioned, one particularly important form of nonrational cognition at play in the reproduction and daily experience of taboos is “associative thinking.” This is the more fluid, pattern-seeking type of thought that, according to some psychologists, is the basis of human creativity (Mednick, Reference Mednick1962; Beaty and Kenett, Reference Beaty and Kenett2023). Associative thinking can move faster and in much less predictable directions than rational step-wise reasoning from first principles, and thus plays a critical role in human cognition. If associative thinking gives us art, stories, inventions, and new experimental approaches, rational thinking allows us to philosophize, write code, analyze text, and perform mathematical proofs.

Taboos may appear to be wertrational in that they can, in theory, be connected to moral first principles. Anthropologists have tried to delineate these connections. For example, Lévi-Strauss (Reference Lévi-Strauss1969) argued that the force of the incest taboo derives from the gift-giving imperative. This sounds nice as a theory, but the reality is that the connections between the ideological values that a community holds (e.g., gift-giving) and the taboos it follows (incest avoidance) are almost always vague, tenuous, or variable between individuals. At best, taboos can be said to represent an unconscious manifestation of structure. Yet the fact remains that taboos, as they are experienced, are felt and followed, not reasoned from first principles.

Similarly, taboos may appear zweckrational, especially if they prevent illness (Henrich and Henrich, Reference Henrich and Henrich2010) or are environmentally adaptive (Harris, Reference Harris1974). This line of reasoning is the basis of the functionalist approach to taboos. However, Zweckrationalität is not about whether an action leads to a positive outcome; it is about whether it was reasoned from explicit recognition of that outcome. While it may prevent the accumulation of deleterious mutations, the incest taboo is not zweckrational. The reason close relatives avoid sexual contact is not that they have calculated the odds of genetic anomalies in their potential offspring, but because they are fundamentally repulsed by the idea of it. Were it simply zweckrational, nonreproductive sex between close relatives would not be taboo.

There are, of course, wertrational and zweckrational forms of avoidance: moral and health-related vegetarianism, for example, or practicing safe sex to avoid contracting an STD. But these are not, I argue, taboos, though they can give rise to taboos, or feed into the emotional content of a taboo. To be taboo, the sentiments surrounding avoidance behavior must include an emotional response eclipsing, or even fully replacing, rational thought. For what gives a taboo meaning is its connection to moral rectitude through the medium of associational thinking. What gives a taboo power is the emotion of disgust (Rozin et al., Reference Rozin, Markwith and Stoess1997; Miller, Reference Miller2004).

Another way of approaching this issue is through Dan Sperber’s (Reference Sperber1997) dichotomy between intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are those that are felt, that are not questioned, that appear as “spontaneous inference” (Sperber, Reference Sperber1997, p. 79). They arise from received traditions and associative thinking. They guide behavior without requiring self-conscious questioning. Reflective beliefs, on the other hand, are more open to scrutiny. They derive from observations. Such beliefs may be incorrect (one can reflectively believe the sun goes round the earth), but their explanations can be articulated in a clear and step-by-step fashion (the sun appears to traverse the sky, ergo it revolves around the earth).

Taboos derive from intuitive beliefs. They rely on associational thinking. They are therefore fundamentally nonrational.

One could object that, while taboos may derive from intuitive beliefs, people follow them for all sorts of reasons, some of which are rational. On the Cook expedition, for example, women avoided a tabooed sweet potato field claiming they would be killed by their king if they trespassed (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, p. 25). The simple desire to avoid this type of punishment would be a zweckrational reason for steering clear of sweet potato fields. Similarly, some Jews claim to avoid pork for reasons that could be considered wertrational: They abstain from it to belong to their community, to enact their Jewish identity.

Rationality may therefore play a role in preventing transgression. However, I would argue that if rationality becomes dominant, if Zweck- or Wertrationalität overshadows its emotional content, a taboo is not long for this world. In becoming an object of rationality, taboo strays into the realm of reflective beliefs, opening it up to scrutiny and challenge. This is a key issue for any archaeology of taboos, which by necessity takes a long-term perspective.

Things become a bit more complicated when we consider effects that are believed to occur. Valeri’s Huaulu informants cited a number of specific negative outcomes to taboo violation: for example, developing yaws on one’s buttocks if one told a sacred story during the daytime; losing one’s teeth if one ate marsupial meat with lime or chili; blindness if one came into contact with a menstruating woman (Valeri, Reference Valeri2000, p. 150). Similarly, in the United States, once-popular “urban myths” stipulated that masturbation could cause blindness, hairy palms, or infertility. And if TV and movies tell us anything, Americans seem willing to believe that eating human flesh causes prion-based neurological illnesses. This belief, drawn from the association of kuru disease with mortuary endocannibalism among the Fore (Rhodes, Reference Rhodes1997), stems from a mistaken understanding of the mechanism of prion disease transmission within a populationFootnote ³ (examples include the films The Book of Eli and We Are What We Are, as well as The X-Files episode “Our Town”). One could argue that, while the initial premise may derive from an empirical error, within the particular cultural context, it is zweckrational to follow such taboos.

Again, I would argue that, if tracked closely, the logic of illness or other specific misfortune following from taboo violation is, in the final analysis, associative rather than rational, intuitive rather than reflective. The “logic” underpinning the illnesses or physical consequences usually betrays some analogical connection to the violating act. Discussing how his Huaulu informants believed that eating tabooed meat would cause skin diseases, Valeri (Reference Valeri2000, pp. 144–145) contends the diseases bear a resemblance to the skin of certain animals, that the diseases “eats” the skin in the same way the person ate the meat, and that the very visible nature of skin disease matches the social nature of eating. The fear of blindness among would-be American onanists references the visual stimulus of the masturbatory act, the hairy palms a reversion to an animal state, and infertility its non-procreative nature. The fear of kuru-like disease, with its uncontrollable shaking and laughing, elides neatly with a fear of loss of self-control that we are willing to believe accompanies cannibalism.

Another reason to be skeptical that rationality underlies taboos is that, in many cases, the consequences of transgression are ill-defined. Undergraduate students I’ve spoken with do not know what would happen if they ate a dog other than “feeling bad.” Others identify a nebulous sense of “bad luck” as the consequence of taboo violation. This cannot be rational. Because the specific outcome is unknown, there does not exist a logical connection between cause (taboo violation) and effect (“something bad will happen”).

On the flip side, this general feeling of bad luck makes taboo violation a ready-made explanation for any misfortune that may befall a person. Life is full of miseries; and one can never be certain one did not trigger one by accidentally violating a taboo– or that someone close to them did. Thus, one of Politis’ Nukak informants blamed her epilepsy on her mother bathing her in an area tainted by the feces of tapirs, the most powerful of the animals in the Nukak cosmology (Politis, Reference Politis2007, pp. 295–296). Such thinking is part of an arguably natural human desire to make sense of a chaotic world and to live under the illusion that bad things do not happen to good people. “If suffering can be related to taboo, then, it ceases to be senseless” (Valeri, Reference Valeri2000, p. 149). In this sense, the nebulous consequences of taboo violation offer a certain type of reassurance that the world still makes sense, that morality is meaningful in a physical way. This is a positive spin. The negative one is that people can chalk up another’s suffering to presumed sins or transgressions – “victim blaming.” Not only is this unfair, but it also may discourage helping society’s most vulnerable. Similarly, people with illnesses that become subject to taboos, whether Hansen’s Disease or HIV/AIDS, also suffer social stigma. There may be a tendency to blame their illness on moral turpitude.

A final issue pertains to variation in taboo following within a cultural setting and over time. People may follow a taboo for different reasons. A visitor, for example, may abide by a taboo out of respect for their hosts (wertrational); a skeptic might do so only out of fear of punishment (zweckrational). Though I admit I am getting close to splitting hairs, these cases reflect rule-following more than subscribing to a taboo, since there is no emotion surrounding the taboo itself. But even among those who subscribe to the taboo, there will be variation in how those emotions are felt and understood. There may be particular variation over time. It is essential that we differentiate the sentiments that give rise to the initial origin/development of a taboo from the way in which it is put into action and thought about at a later period (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956; Altmann, Angelini, and Spiciarich, Reference Altmann, Angelini, Spiciarich, Altmann, Angelini and Spiciarich2020, pp. 3–4; Price, Reference Price2021, p. 114). And as easily as a taboo can “decay” into a wert- or zweckrational rule, it is also possible to imagine how a rationally conceived law (e.g., a sumptuary law intended to restrict a type of food to the elite) can evolve into a taboo if the original rationale was forgotten.

There is a difference between the “function” a taboo might have in a society, the rules it imposes upon people, and the psychological motivations that underpin it. A taboo can serve a “rational” purpose, such as preventing contagion, and people may follow it out of simple fear of retribution. But the substance of taboo relies on magical thinking, explanations for which are often tautological (“it is bad to touch the statue because touching the statue is bad”) or based upon a false premise (“if I eat pork, I will get leprosy”). In the latter case, were the premise shown to be incorrect (“pork cannot cause leprosy”) the injunction would remain, replaced either by another explanation that fits the received wisdom and common sense of the day (“pork can cause trichinosis”) or a nonspecific sense of foreboding (“I still feel it is wrong”). If rationality breaks through, the taboo evaporates into a reflective belief or the avoidance behavior disappears altogether.

None of this is to say that taboos are meaningless or arbitrary. One can understand why people harbor certain taboos and, in doing so, reveal aspects of their culture. Taboos on eating dog in Western culture, for example, are connected to the place of that animal in the home and the family: Cynophagy is tantamount to cannibalism. Taboos among the Nukak concentrate on large animals, including deer, anteater, and especially the tapir, which are understood to be “like people.” In the Nukak cosmology, such animals embody ancestors’ yorehat (one of the several types of spiritual forces that reside within a living person). Killing and eating these animals is synonymous with killing and eating the ancestors (Politis, Reference Politis2007, p. 295). Taboos, then, offer powerful statements about who we are by defining what we will not do (at least in theory). For that reason, taboos are at the core of social identity. They reproduce social categories such as age, gender, ethnicity; in turn, taboos are reproduced by these categories (Simoons, Reference Simoons1961; DeBoer, Reference DeBoer, Auger, Glass and McCartney1987; Price, Reference Price2021).

How Taboos Work

People avoid many things for many reasons. Pregnancy can cause a strong disgust for certain foods. Animals or people with terminal-stage rabies exhibit an uncontrollable aversion to water (hydrophobia). People with OCD often avoid situations, objects, or people who seem to them a source of contamination. People suffering from specific phobia (SP) have idiosyncratic fears. Some of these are common enough to warrant naming: arachnophobia (fear of spiders), agoraphobia (fear of the outside or crowds), or even turophobia (fear of cheese). Some foods disgust us individually; I personally cannot stand the taste of goat cheese. Anyone who has had the unpleasant experience of food poisoning has probably experienced a temporary aversion to the foods vomited up.

Even though many of these aversions can be classified as “emotional” and involve the autonomic nervous system, none of them are taboos because they pertain to individuals, not communities. Valeri recognized this difference in recounting the story of a Huaulu man who would not eat sago, one of the main staple foods. When asked, Valeri’s informants replied “Emaquwoli ipiam” (“he has the taboo of sago”). Valeri referred to these individual aversions as “allergies” to distinguish them from taboos (Valeri, Reference Valeri2000, p. 129). Use of that term would irritate an immunologist, but for the purposes of this Element, it is preferable to “taboo.”

But there is a similarity between these personal aversions and taboos. Freud (Reference Freud2020) argued that the psychological experience of abiding by a taboo is the same as that of phobias and obsessional disorders. For Freud, the obsessive-compulsive patient was a “civilized” person succumbing to their “primitive mind.” We have to reject his race-based logic and mental model, but he was not entirely off the mark in comparing the psychological manifestations of a taboo and those of phobias, obsessions, and personal aversions. In all cases, what drives the compulsion to avoid is nonrational and emotional. But scale matters. What makes a taboo different from, say, my hatred of goat cheese or the discomfort a person with OCD feels when imagining contact with a contaminated surface is that a taboo is a social institution. While it has a psychological manifestation, it exists beyond the scale of the individual. This is precisely why taboos are so heavily implicated in ethnicity and other forms of social identity.

One can thus draw the following diagram:

Figure 2 shows qualitative differences, but the lines between them are not always clear. One cannot say precisely how many people must share a phobia before it becomes a social institution. It depends on the context. Similarly, a phobia or obsessional worry can have elements of rationality. It is perfectly rational to worry about getting sick, but health anxiety OCD (what used to be called “hypochondria”) is a neurosis in which the emotion of worry outstrips rational fear. Finally, a taboo can be encoded in a law (e.g., a ban on public nudity), placing it within a rational-legal framework. What separates an obsessional worry from rational fear, taboo from law is when people obey the prohibition primarily for emotional reasons, not working from first principles. They are felt, not reasoned.

Figure 2 A classification scheme of avoidance behaviors on the axes of individual-society and rational-emotional.

Figure by author.

The Purpose of Taboos

Much of the anthropological literature has attempted to understand not only what taboos are, but also why they exist. Most anthropologists have adopted symbolic approaches: Frazer, Smith, Douglas, Van Gennep, Lévi-Strauss, and more recently Valeri (Reference Valeri2000). Their perspectives have varied, but they have all seen taboos as protective of categories of meaning within a social structure. Offering a variation on this theme are those, like Simoons (Reference Simoons1961) and DeBoer (Reference DeBoer, Auger, Glass and McCartney1987), who take an identity-based approach and focus attention on how taboos separate groups from one another, thereby playing an instrumental role in the development and reproduction of ethnic, gender, and other social categories. Such explanations are in sync with Allan and Burridge’s (Reference Allan and Burridge2006, p. 1) argument that taboos by and large reflect bodily anxieties, and thus sense of self (an issue important to Valeri (Reference Valeri2000) as well), or Fessler and Navarrete’s (Reference Fessler and Navarrete2003) contention that it’s all about “normative moralization.” On the other hand, functionalists like Harris (Reference Harris1974) have tended to see taboos as adaptive, usually by preventing disease or enhancing ecological fitness.

There is no “correct” way of understanding a taboo. All these frameworks are helpful in understanding different aspects of taboos across contexts. However, I offer another perspective, one that draws upon Radcliffe-Brown (Reference Radcliffe-Brown1939) and Godelier’s (Reference Godelier2011) reformulation of Lévi-Strauss (Reference Lévi-Strauss1969): Taboos protect not only the body and the self, as Valeri (Reference Valeri2000) and Allan and Burridge (Reference Allan and Burridge2006) argue, but also proper social reproduction. Social reproduction encompasses not just biological reproduction (sex, pregnancy, birth, and raising a child), but also the material reproduction of life – gathering food, building houses, cooking, fashioning clothing, eating – and the passing down of knowledge and traditions. All of these activities require human conscious interaction with the material world. Social reproduction is the process in which the past, present, and future of a society fit together. It is how values and identities are made and unmade. As such, social reproduction is a potentially dangerous moment as much as it is a necessary one. To be done properly, certain restrictions must apply.

While taboos come in all sorts, most relate to four types of activities: eating, sex, speaking, and social/biological transformation (birth, puberty/adulthood, marriage, pregnancy, death). Each plays a vital role in social reproduction – biologically, materially, or socially. Because these activities are so important, they attract significant emotional energy, the raw material from which to construct taboos. Through associations with existing social structures, taboos guide processes of social reproduction by negation. They build fences around these four key types of activities.

My perspective is not entirely novel. Kahn (Reference Kahn1986), wrote about taboos on taro cultivation by pregnant/breastfeeding women among the Wamira in New Guinea: “The cultivation of taro by men and the birth and nurture of children by women are occasions for men and women to demonstrate their creative powers … Taboos are created and maintained to regulate and minimize conflict between female and male domains of creation.” (Kahn, Reference Kahn1986, p. 118)

Kahn’s “reproduction” hypothesis, like mine, focuses on the process of creation and the proper functioning of social life. It is similar to the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown (Reference Radcliffe-Brown1939), who maintained that taboos protect and support social structures. But the perspective I adopt draws attention to what was arguably structural functionalism’s greatest blind spot: the lack of conflict, contradiction, and domination. As Kahn implies, while taboos regulate social tensions, they also facilitate domination. This is why I write that taboos protect proper social reproduction. What is proper? Proper to whom? Who gets to decide? And – what is particularly important for archaeologists to consider – what happens during cultural change, when taboos may come into conflict with new social structures, human impulses, economic/environmental conditions, technologies, or external influences? These questions force us to consider how power and domination enter into the equation.

In fact, taboos are very much a part of power structures. Taboos can mark and maintain distinctions between social categories with differential access to power. Christine Hastorf (Reference Hastorf2016, pp. 181–187) specifically draws attention to gender taboos. While one may see food taboos on women as protective of socially meaningful gender categories or even health during pregnancy (Speth, Reference Speth2009, pp. 109–112; Henrich and Henrich, Reference Henrich and Henrich2010), Hastorf (Reference Hastorf2016) argues that oftentimes such taboos restrict women from important nutrients and calories, especially animal fat and protein (see also Zvelebil, Reference Zvelebil, Donald and Hurcombe2000):

Similarly, sumptuary rules and the taboos that surround them may limit certain foods to people of higher classes (Hastorf, Reference Hastorf2016, p. 182). Alternatively, powerful people may be subject to additional taboos, such as the avoidance of otherwise good-to-eat eels among the sikerie (“shamans”) among the Mentawi people in Indonesia (Singh and Henrich, Reference Singh and Henrich2020) or the king of the Mamprusi in Ghana avoiding goat and other animals associated with earth-shrines (Dietler, Reference Dietler, Dietler and Hayden2001, p. 87). Taboos may also be lifted for powerful people; brother-sister sex, for example, among elites in ancient Hawaii or Egypt. In their concern for proper social reproduction, taboos participate in a broader process of domination and resistance in a variety of ways, but often through marking through distinction.

Taboos and their transgressions are therefore political. Consider, for example, gender norms in 21st-century America and the taboos that ensconce them. Abiding by these taboos or encoding them in law (e.g., enforcing bathroom access based on chromosomal sex) advances a political agenda concerning sexuality, the family, and personhood. Transgression can also be political. Especially when they have the force of law behind them, violating taboos – entering the “wrong” gendered bathroom or sitting at the “Whites Only” lunch counter at a Greensboro Woolworth’s – can sometimes lead to broader sociopolitical transformation.

A Definition

To close this section, I want to revisit my definition of taboo from an earlier work: “In a general sense, a taboo is a form of culturally prescribed avoidance of a thing or an activity that is surrounded by a high degree of social energy. This avoidance is bound by a moralized cosmological order – an idea of what is right and wrong based on fundamental principles that appear to people as immutable.” (Price, Reference Price2021, p. 92)

I stick to that definition here, but offer a few additional points. First, a taboo is a special type of ritual. While some aspects of taboo avoidance can be argued to be rational, what makes a taboo a meaningful social category is its reliance on associative magical thinking. Second, taboos are social institutions, ones that evolve as a result of the dialectic between thought and action, ideology and practice. Third, one can understand the meaning or purpose of taboos in general in many ways. They protect and divide the self from the non-self. They form barriers around dangerous liminalities and uncategorizable things. But they are also concerned with proper social reproduction and the politics that surrounds it.

Cannibalism

The reader will note that I have largely avoided discussion of what is the most pervasive food taboo across the globe: the consumption of human flesh. I have done so for three reasons. First, especially in ethnographic and historical cases, accusations of cannibalism can be difficult to verify. Because it is such a powerful taboo cross-culturally, cannibalism constitutes a common pejorative thrown at unknown or enemy groups. The “barbarians living just beyond the horizon” are cannibals. Second, cases of cannibalism are so sensationalized – again, in large part because they violate such a powerful taboo – that to give them significant attention in this Element would suck the air out of the rest of the examples. I did not want this to become a cannibalism Element. Third, archaeological, historical, and ethnographic cases of cannibalism are covered extensively elsewhere and are subject to significant debate (Sanday, Reference Sanday1986; Villa, Reference Villa1992; Rhodes, Reference Rhodes1997; Rautman and Fenton, Reference Rautman and Fenton2005; Saladié and Rodríguez-Hidalgo, Reference Saladié and Rodríguez-Hidalgo2017; Winchcombe, Reference Winchcombe2023).

That said, I should say a few words on cannibalism, which will ultimately help us understand why meat is so good to taboo. First, the taboo on cannibalism is universal in that, even in cases in which human flesh is eaten, the act of doing so is surrounded by heightened affect and, more often than not, rituals to separate it from everyday consumption It is an abnormal act. Endo- or exocannibalism, for example, are often components of mortuary or other highly charged rituals – consuming the flesh of deceased loved ones to recycle their bodies into the next generation and free their spirits (Whitfield et al., Reference Whitfield, Pako, Collinge and Alpers2008); eating the bodies of enemies to humiliate and terrorize them, or to embody the animalized (and thus socially liminal) condition of the warrior. In other situations, people resort to the meat of humans only in desperation. And then there are the highly deviant individuals (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer) who, by eating the flesh of other people, turn themselves into criminals or pariahs.

Second, we can think of cannibalism as a keystone taboo, similar to the incest taboo in Lévi-Strauss (Reference Lévi-Strauss1969). This idea is quite old. Durkheim (Reference Durkheim1995), for example, saw cannibalism as the avoidance of eating something like oneself, and thereby drew the connection between incest and cannibalism clearly. He reasoned that many, if not most, food taboos boil down to it. Others have argued in a similar vein (e.g., Valeri, Reference Valeri2000). That cannibalism is a universal and keystone taboo, likely as old or older than Homo sapiens as a species, can help us make sense of the prevalence of taboos on meat. Indeed, emic and etic explanations of food taboos often reference cannibalism (“we cannot eat dogs because to do so is tantamount to cannibalism”). To eat animals is dangerous because animals are like us, and to eat each other is unimaginable.

A Job for Archaeologists

If we consider the main domains of human activity to which taboos apply cross-culturally – sexuality (including modesty in dress), speaking, death, and eating – food taboos are arguably the most visible in the archaeological record. Archaeological indications of food practices are manifold. Much of what we excavate, from ceramic sherds to animal bones to charred seeds, reflects eating and cooking. Many other types of artifacts (e.g., lithics) and depositional features (hearths) are connected to food production. Unsurprisingly, then, there is a copious body of literature detailing foodways in the archaeological record reflecting research conducted by experts in various sub-fields and specialized techniques: zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, ceramic analysis, residue analysis, stable isotope analysis, among others (e.g., Bray, Reference Bray and Bray2003; Fu and Altmann, Reference Fu, Altmann, Altmann and Fu2014; Hastorf, Reference Hastorf2016; Peres, Reference Peres2017; Twiss, Reference Twiss2019; Jaffe, Reference Jaffe2023).

As a zooarchaeologist, what I’m about to write might sound conceited: Zooarchaeology is uniquely and ideally situated to contribute to an archaeology of taboos. This is for two reasons. First, animal bones are recovered in large numbers from archaeological sites, even from contexts with poor preservation or those that are hastily excavated. Simply put, we can say a lot about what types of meat people ate. Second, cross-culturally, most food taboos apply to meat. This does not mean that zooarchaeology should have exclusive access to the taboos of the past; archaeology is always better when multiple sub-disciplines combine forces. But it does mean that most archaeological discussions of food taboos derive from faunal analysis and that zooarchaeology, especially “traditional zooarchaeology,” is often an ideal starting place to begin an archaeology of taboos.

That said, several analytical challenges present themselves to an archaeology of taboos. They range from the typical issues pertaining to distribution, deposition, preservation, and taphonomy, to a more epistemological conundrum – how do we collect evidence of absence?

The Archaeological Detection of Food Taboos

Bones do not come out of the ground screaming they are taboo. That is an unfortunate fact for archaeologists. In very few cases, and in no prehistoric case, can one identify a food taboo unambiguously. The archaeology of food taboos is necessarily one that relies on the spice of conjecture. For those working in prehistory, an archaeology of taboos will undoubtedly be unsatisfying to hard-nosed empiricists allergic to speculation. There is not much that can be done to appease them other than by giving voice to their credible concerns. Still, I argue, along with Fowles (Reference Fowles and Fogelin2008), that pursuing an archaeology of taboos is important, however shaky the empirical ground. If we foreclose on informed speculation, we write out important features of past human cultures.

Historical archaeology is much better situated for the study of food taboos. In these cases, we can use the weight of written or oral records to guide hypotheses and expectations. That does not mean that archaeology can only serve to test the historical record. Rather, archaeology informs us, through the material record, how and under what circumstances taboos evolved, were practiced, were violated, and ultimately disappeared.

Even under the best circumstances, food taboos can be difficult to detect due to discard patterns. If food taboos extend merely to eating a food, and not to killing an animal, zooarchaeologists will be hard-pressed to identify it. Reichel-Dolmatoff (Reference Reichel-Dolmatoff1978, p. 289) noted that Desana groups in Brazil observed a taboo on tapir meat. Yet they nevertheless killed and smoked tapirs to trade with other groups. Unless the Desana traders were meticulous in removing the entire tapir carcasses, the archaeological record would contain evidence of killing and cooking these taboo animals. Similarly, parts of taboo animals could be used as ritual paraphernalia or for making non-food items (e.g., bone used for making tools).

In addition to complicated discard patterns, rules over who must follow taboos and when are often quite variable. A person may have to abide by a taboo in one situation, but not another. Food taboos often apply to women (and sometimes their husbands) who are pregnant, post-partum, menstruating, and breastfeeding (Henrich and Henrich, Reference Henrich and Henrich2010; Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2018). Ritual participants are another group of people to which food taboos frequently apply. The kambanji novices in Turner’s (Reference Turner1967, p. 234) analysis of initiation rites among the Ndembu of Zambia could not eat a host of animals including zebra, striped mice, bushbuck, kingfisher, and other animals with striped or spotted appearance, the consumption of which was believed to cause leprosy. In Meigs’ (Reference Meigs1984) illuminating ethnography of food and sex taboos among the Hua in highland New Guinea, what was off-limits was dictated by a concept of a fluid-like life-force substance called nu that is abundant in fertile women and depleted in young men. To protect and increase their nu, young male initiates observe a host of taboos, especially to foods that resemble, smell like, or otherwise reference female reproduction.

All of these are temporary states, difficult to distinguish archaeologically. Similarly, taboos might only apply, or be lifted, during certain rituals. The Lenten fast, the forty-day taboo on meat observed by Catholics after Good Friday, is an example.

More permanent taboos also pose difficulties. From an archaeological perspective, taboos (general taboos) affecting the whole group are the easiest to observe. The pig taboo in in Judaism and Islam is a prime example. But, cross-culturally, food taboos can apply to many different types of people. It is common for powerful people to have specific taboos. Shamans, monks, and other holy people, for example, often abide by “costly” taboos on meat and sex (see e.g., Singh and Henrich, Reference Singh and Henrich2020). In the northern part of Kiriwina (Trobriand Islands), boiled/stewed foods are taboo to chiefs, but they are the only ones for whom stingray and flatfish are not forbidden (Meyer-Rochow, Reference Meyer-Rochow2009). All types of meat are taboo to members of the Brahmin caste in India, at least in theory, but not to other castes (Caplan, Reference Caplan2008; Khara, Riedy, and Ruby, Reference Khara, Riedy and Ruby2020). In other cases, different foods may be acceptable to different age groups or gender categories. It is only for the old men among the Gidra of New Guinea that pig fetuses are not taboo (Akimichi, Reference Akimichi1998). While it may be possible to conduct a contextual analysis of food remains – for example, food remains from a shrine or an elite domestic structure associated – the messy reality of the archaeological rarely affords such opportunities to explore foodways across the full range of social variation.

The reason it would be difficult to detect these taboos in the archaeological record is because the people following them would be unlikely to present significantly different discard patterns from those who do not. We must remember that most archaeological data, and especially most archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data, derive from secondary deposits that are time- and space-averaged palimpsests (Lyman, Reference Lyman2003). Furthermore, they are usually waste deposits in areas of a settlement specifically chosen to receive discarded items and garbage. This may not perfectly reflect diet; food taboos usually apply to killing, eating, or touching the meat of an animal, not to garbage into which all manner of unholy things may be deposited. Moreover, if multiple groups (gender, ethnicity, etc.) use a space for disposal, any taboo dependent on one of these identities will be difficult to detect.

The strength or power of a taboo is conditional, meaning that some taboos are more likely to be “imprinted” in the archaeological record than others. In much of Polynesia, the power of a certain type of taboo more-or-less directly corresponded to the mana of the person who issued it – and indeed, the power to declare taboo was the very definition of chiefly power (Steiner, Reference Steiner1956, p. 39). Weak chiefs issued weak taboos that were often violated. Other factors can strengthen or diminish the power of taboos. Taboos evolve, changing in meaning and strength over time (Price, Reference Price2021). Politics may come into play. In Hawaii, food taboos constituted a battleground between the priests and the king, part of a larger struggle for political power. In 1819, Kamehameha II defied the priesthood by dining with women, an act that was kapu. In the process, the king effectively lifted the food taboos (Webb, Reference Webb1965). An archaeological study of Hawaiian feasts before and after this decree would be an interesting one to pursue from the perspective of gendered taboos.

Transgression is a regular feature of taboos and, indeed, may be quite common. Despite its clear injunction in the Torah and Quran, many 21st century Jews and Muslims eat pork. Reform Judaism, which dates back to 19th century Germany and is the most popular form of Judaism in the United States, explicitly rejects the Leviticus food taboos. Similarly, many Muslims drink alcohol and many Brahmins eat meat, often in contexts concealed from their family or community (Khara, Riedy, and Ruby, Reference Khara, Riedy and Ruby2020). In fact, any community is likely to be a mix abiders and transgressors. Paradoxically, violation of a taboo, whether in reality, myth, or fiction, can strengthen a taboo by inspiring disgust, horror, and vilification of the perpetrators. What would the taboo on cannibalism be without Jeffrey Dahmer, the Donner Party, zombie films, or Hannibal Lecter? Yet as complicated as this makes identifying taboo, it is also a place where archaeology has something important to contribute. Violating taboos is often not spoken of. It is actively suppressed in everyday conversation and historical records. The material record is often the only proof that it occurred.

Fowles (Reference Fowles and Fogelin2008) rightly points out that taboos are defined by absences, and archaeological reasoning tends to cut against treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence (see also Russell, Reference Russell, Ivanova, Athanassov, Petrova, Takorova and Stockhammer2018, p. 15). After all, bones may not enter the archaeological record for all sorts of reasons: for example, extirpation of a species, the cessation of hunting for cultural or economic reasons, the appearance of a more reliable and abundant food source. Even if a species is consumed, species-dependent processing or discard patterns, such as particular cooking practices or the need to remove larger bones from near houses (Meadow, Reference Meadow1980), might make that species practically invisible to archaeologists.

Ethnoarchaeology of Taboo

Ethnoarchaeological studies of food taboos are badly needed. It is only by studying the material record taboos under known conditions that we can hope to understand, or at least come to grips with, the various complexities I have covered. Unfortunately, there has been little work in this vein, with one major exception: Politis and Saunders’ (Reference Politis, Saunders, Miracle and Milner2002) ethnoarchaeological study among Nukak communities in the Amazon (see also Politis, Reference Politis and Lovis2016).

Politis and Saunders (Reference Politis, Saunders, Miracle and Milner2002) provide a template for doing an archaeology of taboos that should serve as both a beacon of inspiration and a shadow of caution for archaeologists without the benefit of rich ethnographic information to fill in the gaps. On the one hand, they provide an example of the ways in which zooarchaeological data, specifically species counts and distribution of elements, can inform an understanding of taboos, even for sub-groups within a population. For instance, the white-lipped peccary is taboo to Nukak women and children, but not men. Many women displayed “great discomfort at the idea of eating peccary or smelling its smoked meat” (Reference Politis, Saunders, Miracle and Milner2002, p. 119). When men hunt and eat the animal, they are careful to keep the meat away from household spaces, typically cooking and consuming peccaries at a distance from their residential camp. The result is a pattern of butchery and discard spatially distinct from that of other animals, whose bones would be found close to residential units.

A more specific description of typical peccary hunting and consumption patterns reveals how zooarchaeological information can reflect nuances in food taboos across space (Figure 3). Following a successful hunt, men typically remove peccary heads and leave them at a temporary butchery location near the kill site. This pattern of field butchery, in which low-utility parts are left near kill sites is common among hunters, especially of larger animals. Zooarchaeologists have understood this since Theodore White (Reference White1952) first postulated it as an explanation for unexpected bone frequencies at archaeological sites (for a review of the history of the concept, see Lyman, Reference Lyman1985).

Figure 3 Hypothetical archaeological excavation of a Nukak settlement. Squares show excavation trenches A1-A4 and B1 and the faunal remains recovered. The pattern of finds represents the material signature of a taboo on white-lipped peccary, applicable only to women and children. See text for details.

Figure by author.

Following primary butchery, Nukak hunters bring the peccary carcass to a grilling spot just outside the residential camp, where it is cooked, processed for marrow, and eaten. Most long bones, ribs, and vertebra are deposited around these grilling spots, and that is where Politis and Saunders recovered them archaeologically (Reference Politis, Saunders, Miracle and Milner2002, pp. 118–119). Because they are in close proximity to the residential camp, and because they are likely used repeatedly, these sites stand a higher chance of being detected and excavated, even though their archaeological impact is lower than residential areas. Still, the location of the grilling spots at a remove from residential sites means that archaeologists would only recover them if they excavated trenches in lower-density areas at the edges, or just off the edges, of the site.

The Nukak woman/child taboo on white-lipped peccary, therefore, should result in a relatively interpretable pattern: Peccary remains (minus crania) should be found near the edges of habitation sites, where there would be evidence for cooking but not architecture. However, the picture is not as neat as one might like. An archaeologist might find peccary remains inside a residential camp. Small bones like phalanges or long bone fragments may find their way into the residential camp area due to dog or other post-depositional transport processes. Complicating things further, people sometimes keep immature peccaries as pets. Though they are not eaten, when they die, their remains usually enter the archaeological record within the residential camps. Thus, one would have to modify the expectations for an archaeological signature of this taboo: White-lipped peccary remains in significant proportions should be found with evidence of cooking and butchery at the edges of habitation sites, but very low proportions of small/highly fragmented peccary bones (say, less than 2% by Number of Identified Specimens (NISP)) may be found in proximity to residential units. Articulate skeletons of peccaries lacking cooking or butchery marks are also expected near residential units.

It would be relatively straightforward to apply this pattern deductively. That is, if one approached the archaeological record with this template of zooarchaeological and spatial data in mind, there would be a good chance of establishing a gendered taboo on peccary meat in the past. Furthermore, if, say, one wished to track the evolution of Nukak peccary taboos, one could excavate habitation sites from the past few centuries to discern changing patterns. However, it would be quite difficult to identify the taboo inductively. That is, a zooarchaeologist without any prior knowledge of Nukak foodways would be unlikely to conclude from the zooarchaeological data that a taboo on peccary meat applied exclusively to women and children. It would not, however, be impossible. A bit of ethnographic analogy and some informed speculation could lead a creative-minded zooarchaeologist to draw the correct inference. However, they would be hard-pressed to convince a skeptic.

Nevertheless, the spatial distribution of faunal remains does reveal, if not taboos, per se, then unexpected patterns. In a later article, Politis (Reference Politis and Lovis2016) compared the ethnoarchaeological faunal patterns of the Nukak to a nearby group, the Hotï. The latter followed fewer food taboos, but disposed of food waste in a structured fashion, often separating the remains into piles specific to animal type. Politis attended to how these taboos and other cultural ideals could be read from these atypical discard patterns, or “bonescapes.” Indeed, archaeologists often encounter unexpected bonescapes: for example, the lack of wild boar bones at Çatalhöyük (Russell, Reference Russell, Ivanova, Athanassov, Petrova, Takorova and Stockhammer2018). Archaeologists can also bring unexpected zooarchaeological patterns into conversation with other lines of evidence, such as art. For example, Bonomo et al. (Reference Bonomo and Politis2021) found an unexpected pattern in their contrast of faunal remains and ceramic depictions of animals at sites belonging to the Goya-Malabrigo tradition in northeastern Argentina. Generally speaking, animals depicted were not consumed. Similarly, Peters and Schmidt (Reference Peters and Schmidt2004) noted contrasts between the faunal remains and stone carvings of animals at the iconic site of Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey. While we may not be able to diagnose taboos from these patterns with certainty, they do implicate powerful ideological structures ensconcing human-animal relations – situations in which taboos often develop and persist.

Politis and Saunders’ ethnography is informative in many other ways. Nukak taboos on piranha, deer, and jaguar offer additional complexities, but also tantalizing options for zooarchaeologists to interpret their data. In these cases, the meat of the animal is taboo, but the carcasses are not. In fact, Nukak catch piranha not to eat, but in order to use their teeth to fashion knives, carving tools, and hair-cutting implements. Piranha remains therefore enter into the zooarchaeological record – just not as food. Similarly, while deer and jaguar are not hunted, the Nukak make flutes from deer tibia and jaguar humeri that they scavenge. It is taboo to kill or eat these animals; it is not taboo to touch their bones (Politis and Saunders, Reference Politis, Saunders, Miracle and Milner2002, p. 124). This pattern bears similarity to other cultural contexts. For example, horses in medieval Europe were taboo to eat, but their bones were used in tool manufacture and dead horses were skinned for hides (Serjeantson, Reference Serjeantson and Rowley-Conwy2000, p. 184). Taboos may apply to touching an animal, killing it, eating its flesh, or touching products derived from its body parts. Sometimes taboos apply to all of these aspects; sometimes to only one or two. While difficult to discern, these rules impact a taboo’s archaeological signature.

Again, a deductive approach – that is, analyzing the assemblage with the prior knowledge of the taboo and the expected pattern – is more compelling than an inductive one, in which the zooarchaeologist has no prior knowledge of specific expectations. “Discovering” inductively the piranha, deer, or jaguar taboos at a Nukak archaeological site would require careful analysis of body part representation and cut marks, the latter in order to differentiate marks made by skinning/tool manufacture and butchery. This is possible, but would require large sample sizes (on the order of at least 1,000 specimens identified to these taxa), extensive documentation of taphonomic factors affecting the assemblage, and excavation and sieving protocols to ensure high rates of recovery. In addition, identifying these taboos would require, as emphasized already, a fair amount of speculation informed by ethnographic analogy and some creativity. In other words, the zooarchaeologist would have to exercise the creative (associational) and analytical (rational) aspects of their cognition.

Moving Forward with an Archaeology of Food Taboos

Where does this leave us? We know that food taboos are an essential part of the human condition and we can observe the diversity of food taboos ethnographically. An archaeology of food taboos is therefore, I would argue, a critical component of any approach to past foodways. In particular, because meat is most often subject to taboo, and because animal bones are among the most common finds at archaeological sites, zooarchaeology is uniquely positioned to contribute to the conversation. Yet there are major methodological hurdles.

There are some who would take the position, arguably more analytically sound, that food taboos are perched upon the higher rungs of Hawkes’ (Reference Hawkes1954) “ladder of inference.” Archaeologists, they would argue, must come to grips with the fact that most food taboos will remain invisible to them. Just as we cannot reconstruct the languages of Upper Paleolithic Eurasia or discern what, if any, clothing Homo erectus wore, the “forest of taboos” (Valeri, Reference Valeri2000) which many of our archaeological subjects inhabited will remain uncharted. At best we can hope that future methodological techniques will enable us to detect them in new ways. Fowles, for example, despite pushing for an archaeology of taboos, adopts an equanimous pessimism, bordering on the blasé: “We will never know whether it was taboo for a Cro-Magnon hunter to eat the game he himself killed or whether certain behaviors were forbidden to a Natufian woman during menstruation … Fair enough.” (Fowles, Reference Fowles and Fogelin2008, p. 33).

Fair enough, indeed. But there is no need to bow to defeatism or to the deus ex machina of future technology. We need a way forward. Fowles suggests the search for “conspicuous absence” in the archaeological record, even while recognizing that such a prescription may be as much a cop-out as an insight (Fowles, Reference Fowles and Fogelin2008, p. 33). He recommends archaeologists develop “criteria of conspicuousness” – for example, the rapid disappearance of a food (or other tabooed thing) over time or abrupt spatial differences (Fowles, Reference Fowles and Fogelin2008, p. 33). But when is an absence conspicuous or unexpected? What is “rapid” or “abrupt?” One simply sets up a fight on the battlefield of adjectives.

On the other hand, Fowles’ approach may be the only possibility in prehistoric contexts and other cases in which archaeologists approach taboos inductively. His approach has its benefits. It forces our gaze onto the singular importance of context. The archaeology of taboos is not so much about finds, or lack thereof, as it is a careful reading of material culture patterns (à la Hodder, Reference Hodder1986) within their spatio-temporal frameworks. This requires engagement with, and a tolerance for, informed speculation. Admittedly, we may not know if a specific taboo existed in the past, but we do know that some taboos did, since they exist in all known human cultures. We can therefore speculate as to which taboos existed and how they operated.

A deductive approach to taboos stands on sturdier ground. The use of direct historical analogs and other a priori information allows archaeologists to lay out specific expectations for patterning in the faunal and other material cultural records. There are some risks. The many studies of the origins of the pig taboo in the southern Levant in the Iron Age have made much use of the direct historical approach, but can be accused of anachronistic projection. We cannot assume that an absence in the past means the same thing as an absence today. Nevertheless, it is within historical archaeology that we have the best chance of doing the most analytically sound work on food taboos. Moreover, such analyses can help us better refine our interpretive and analytical frameworks, for under a deductive approach, we can ask specific questions about transgression and context. In the next section, I draw on several case studies to show how this is possible.

Finding Taboos Without Writing: Prehistoric Archaeology

The Archaeology of Historically Attested Taboos

Defining Food Taboos and Placing Them on the Archaeologist’s Table

The word “taboo” derives from a Polynesian concept that articulates with notions of political power and charisma (mana), gender, magic, health anxieties, and a cosmological sense of rightness and wrongness. To the members and readers of Cook’s expeditions, the concept offered a way to describe a certain type of avoidance behavior that was more emotional than rational, more felt than reasoned. Though these pre-Boasian thinkers had many faults, and though they often succumbed to the ethnocentrism and racism of their times, one can give them credit for recognizing that taboos were a universal phenomenon. Taboos are a part of the human condition.

That said, the concept of taboo is an abstraction. Because the particularities of taboos differ from context to context, it can be complicated to define and understand this phenomenon. I have argued that taboos are neither wertrational (actions reasoned from a moral first principle) or zweckrational (actions reasoned from a practical goal), although it is possible that some taboos have their origins in these types of rational thought, prior to becoming enfolded by feelings and instinctiveness and then ferried into the realm of taboos. More relevant to taboos are Weber’s (Reference Weber2019) two other factors in determining social action: emotion and tradition. The latter hallows taboos, the former energizes them. Taboos are what Dan Sperber (Reference Sperber1997) calls “intuitive beliefs.” As Freud (Reference Freud2020) recognized, there is a kinship between the emotions that surround taboos and those that surround contamination obsessions in people suffering from OCD. While the key difference is that taboos are social while obsessions/phobias are personal, it is the emotionality that gives both taboos and obsessions their strength.

Admittedly people follow restrictions for rational reasons and emotional reasons, but when an avoidance behavior is more rationally followed than emotionally, it can be argued not to be a taboo. Certainly, when a taboo begins to be subjected more to rational thought, it can lose its power. This might explain why the zooarchaeological record of early modern Japan is so full of butchered animal remains, despite the injunction against the meat of land mammals. It may have been more a Buddhist-inspired wertrational avoidance than a taboo in the strictest of senses. Similarly, the frequent consumption of pork by many Jews today, and the lifting of the Biblical prohibitions on food laws by the Reform Movement, are examples of taboos fading in response to rational thought.

Many anthropologists and archaeologists have attempted to construe taboos as functional. They argue taboos are, at least from an evolutionary perspective, zweckrational. While, again, there may well have been rational reasons for a taboo to develop, and while behavior can have unanticipated positive or negative effects, I think it is a mistake to approach taboos through this lens. Just as it would miss the point to describe the social imperative for Jews and Muslims to circumcise their sons with respect to the fact that circumcision can lower the risk of transmitting HIV, I think it is a mistake to frame Fijian food taboos around the risks posed by fish poisoning to developing fetuses (Henrich and Henrich, Reference Henrich and Henrich2010). While the biomedical implications are correct, they are not the reason people follow the taboo, nor do they shed light on the cultural structures that support and are supported by taboos. To mention but one dimension, taboos are intertwined with power and the maintenance of boundaries between social identities. This is why taboos are so often gendered or determined by ethnic affiliation.

The archaeology of food taboos, as I have argued, is essential for the simple reason that taboos are a universal and important part of the human condition, one that influences social structure and, of course, diet. An archaeology that discounts them restricts our ability to comprehend or even appreciate the tapestry of past foodways. The good news is that food taboos, compared to other types of taboos (for example, injunctions against speech or sex acts), are available for study, since so much of the archaeological record reflects the material remains of food production, storage, preparation, consumption, and disposal. However, there are methodological challenges. The disciplinary allergy to deriving meaningful interpretations from “absence of evidence” is among the greatest epistemological hurdles (Fowles, Reference Fowles and Fogelin2008). Another is the unwillingness to speculate – that hesitancy is usually a plus in the social sciences, but in this case, it limits the potential of archaeological interpretation.

Invigorating the Archaeology of Food Taboos

Outside of the extensive literature and resulting debates surrounding cases of cannibalism, the archaeology of food taboos remains in its infancy. While there is more of a willingness to engage in informed speculation, particularly in the past twenty years, there has been little progress on the methodological and theoretical issues as they pertain to archaeological investigation since Fowles (Reference Fowles and Fogelin2008) and Russell (Reference Russell2012). Moreover, although archaeological science has arguably undergone a revolution in the past two decades, traditional zooarchaeological techniques have predominated in the study of food taboos.

Within zooarchaeology, analyses of taboo focus on fragment counts (NISP) and estimates of minimum numbers of individuals (MNI); to a lesser extent, analysts have employed spatial analyses of body part representation and butchery patterns. Thus, by and large, it is zooarchaeologists using traditional methodological tools who navigate the seas of food taboos in the past. There are good reasons for this – after all, bones are well represented in the archaeological record, and most food taboos apply to meat – but work needs to be done to increase inter-disciplinarity. One issue that future work on archaeologies of taboo will have to grapple with is how to combine these methodologies in a coherent fashion. As we saw with the hypothetical Neolithic European taboo on marine foods, the addition of new lines of evidence from different methodologies can provide contradictory results. Another issue is the misinterpretation of zooarchaeological data by non-specialists, who may not be aware of the methodological issues pertaining to site formation processes, taphonomic factors, and variable recovery that affect faunal datasets (see Price, Reference Price, Fu, Shafer-Elliott and Meyers2022).

As the examples show, historical archaeologists are well-positioned to undertake an archaeology of food taboos, for unlike prehistorians, they work in contexts in which taboos are known to have existed. They can work deductively. That is, they can use the textual record not as a guide, per se, to the archaeological record, but as a set of hypotheses to be tested. For archaeologists working without the benefit of a relevant textual or ethnographic record, a deductive approach is more elusive. It is possible only to the extent that one can hypothesize that a taboo known from historical or ethnographic data existed in the deep past (e.g., the Tasmanian fish taboo or the pig taboo among early Israelites). Instead, they often work inductively by attempting to find taboos where the faunal record does not match functionalist expectations. This is simply a repackaging of the notion that non-functional behaviors must be ritual.

Historical archaeology offers additional benefits. As the examples here have shown, one of the interesting parts of an archaeology of food taboos is not so much the detection of them, but rather the nuances in context in which they apply and are violated. Ethnoarchaeological research is also quite interesting in this regard. Here, the work of Gustavo Politis (Politis and Saunders, Reference Politis, Saunders, Miracle and Milner2002; Politis, Reference Politis2007) among the Nukak stands out. Ethnoarchaeology offers a rare opportunity to study contemporary taboos and the contexts in which transgression occurs.

It is here that analysts should heed caution. In historical and ethnographic settings, uncovering instances of taboo violation may be politically sensitive endeavour, to put it mildly. Taboos reflect deeply held intuitive beliefs that articulate with a sense of right and wrong. Presenting evidence of transgression can pose difficult questions to people regarding their ancestors. It can challenge their sense of identity and, by extension, sense of self. Revealing taboo violation among present-day people can jeopardize the immediate safety of individuals and communities; there is potential for similar risks to descendant communities of archaeological investigations into taboos. These are not trivial issues, but ones that touch upon some of the stickiest ethical questions in our discipline. Should an archaeology of food or other taboos take off in the way that I advocate here, professional societies and granting agencies must adopt a set of regulations to prevent this important work from causing harm.