'Dingen waar men liefst niet over spreekt': Een verkenning van taboe en verbod rond 1900

It is not easy to define the word 'taboo'. In the nineteenth century, its use still reflected its origins (the language of the tribes in Polyesia visited by James Cook): it signified that some things could not be touched or talked about, and it had connotations of superstition, primitivism and of the irrational: the opposite of the values of Western civilisation. However, some people used it to describe situations within Europe that they considered to be primitive. In present-day dictionaries most of these connotations remain present. Two definitions seem to be basic in any: taboo is that which may not be said (and remains therefore largely invisble in social discourse), or it is that what may not be done. In the latter sense, it is very close to the forbidden - but taboo tends to denote that which is forbidden unofficially. Taboo can be interpreted in terms of social stratification: they instill differences between the haves and the have nots, the powerful and the poor, the in-group and the out-group. However, they do not seem to be eternal or universal: they can gain or lose power in different contxts and times. In this book different taboos (within the two definitions) are studied as dynamic phenomena.