SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis is intended as a contribution to an anthropological study of the notion of tabee, with special reference to its manifestation, inter-connections and inter-relations with various social institutions among the Arabs. The primary aim is to formulate the ideas underlying the stystem in its many aspects. To show how ritual avoidances serve to establish or reflect certain fundamental social values to objects of important common interests, to events and even eventualities which crouse common concern and to situations and occasions which could not be controlled by technical means of the peoples concerned. Its immediate object is to demonstrate that the notion of taboo is not only of mere academic interest, but is also of emnirical, practical and secular importance. Ritual avoidances are considered as an integrate part of the mechanism by which the society maintains its existonce. It has been our method to cleave rather closely to primitive phenomena in analyising and examining the literature at hand. In the meantime we have carried the investigation through its successive stages to higher ethical and sophisticated manifestations of the notion in the hope of discovering the fundamental principles regulating the inatitution, and of determining the chief and general phases of its expression amon the Arabs, with the corresponding social and ritual values. For purposes of comparative study, we are partly concerned with ideas common both to the Arabs and various other simpler communities.