Pollution and Purity: Understanding Voices as Punishment for Un-Wholly Sins

Drawing on Mary Douglas’ influential text Purity and Danger, with its argument about the structures of pollution and purity that inhere in many cultures, this chapter seeks to explore the link between individual voice-hearers’ understandings of their hallucinatory experiences as deserved punishment and broader structural–anthropological suggestions that symbolic transgressions of sociocultural categories demand ritual restitution. Specifically, two case studies from the Voices in Psychosis interview data are used to illustrate how Douglas’ observations concerning the cultural classifications of ‘anomalies’ and ‘abominations’ illuminate the role played by sexual mores and suicidal ideation in the self-understanding of some voice-hearers