Purity and Danger in Spirited Away
Yes, I have already done a video essay about Spirited Away. But, there are always some new interpretations, new ideas, and new concepts we can dig out to talk about this wonderful piece of art. In fact, I wanted to talk about Spirited Away more as a case study today, something we can use to better understand and think about some other really important concepts and ideas.
To ease us into this, let’s start with the beginning of Spirited Away. Chihiro, our main character, is moving to a new home. On the way, her family gets lost, and ends up in front of a tunnel. They walk through, to an abandoned theme park. Her parents find some food stands, ready and full and waiting for them. While they gobble food, Chihiro gets an odd feeling and refuses the food, and wanders away from them to explore. Running into Haku, she’s urged to run. But when she gets back to her parents, they have turned into pigs.
This is what starts us on our journey, of Chihiro travelling through the spirit world, working and staying in the bathhouse in order to try and eventually save her parents and be able to go back to her own world.
But, I want to actually start right here, in the beginning. With the pigs. Because the pigs are an interesting choice, and one which led me straight to one of my favourite anthropological phrases. And I think Spirited Away is a wonderful case study to use to explain it, detail it, and exemplify why it matters so much.
So, let me introduce you to Mary Douglas.
Mary Douglas was a British anthropologist, specialising in symbols. She used more structural anthropological methods - which I’ll explain a little bit better in a bit - and focused on comparative religion. We’re going to be focusing today on her book called Purity and Danger, perhaps her most famous piece - though it would be a hard argument because she also published Natural Symbols which is another oft-cited piece.
Purity and Danger, originally published in 1966, was all about dirt. Yes, dirt. It’s about dirt in different context, and what it means to be dirt, or be dirty. She also explores things that are sacred, pure, impure, profane, and so much more, but all related to notions of dirt and clean.
The main thrust of the book is this: Dirt is matter out of place.
And this is my favourite anthropological idea. Let’s talk about what it all means.
This is where Douglas’s basis in structural anthropology comes in. Structural anthropology is a whole other conversation, with a whole other set of people to talk about with their own wonderful quotes and ideas. But, at its core, structural anthropology is all about relations - how things are built and understood and relate to one another. And structuralists believe that these relations form an underlying social structure, sometimes understood as subconscious, and sometimes conscious.
So, for Douglas, as we move about in the world, we categorise things. She wants to study these categories, and how they relate, to understand the underlying social structures we live with.
Let’s say you and I go for a nice little picnic. You lay down the picnic blanket, and get out the food. But when I sit down on the blanket I look around us and say “man, this park is really dirty”. I’d be pretty crazy if I said that. You’d think I was crazy. Of course the park has dirt and stuff there - it’s a park! It’s outside!
But, then let’s say you invite me to your house instead of the picnic. And when I walk in, there’s mud and dirt all over the kitchen. Now, if I say “your kitchen is dirty!” I’d be right! It’s dirty!
So, why is the park not dirty, and the kitchen is? Because the dirt belongs outside. It belongs in the park. That’s where it fits. It’s not supposed to be inside. It’s out of place.
But the concept isn’t just for dirty kitchens. The idea of “dirt is matter out of place” can be related to any of our cultural and social categories. We define people, places, things, animals, plants, all through our set up and considered categories. So when something suddenly doesn’t fit, or moves differently to what our categories expect, we think of it as dirty, as gross, as impure. This is why certain groups of people are demonised - because they don’t fit categories, or have moved categories in a way that isn’t socially understood as okay.
But one thing to keep in mind - these socially derived categories are different when moving societies. What is dirty or impure for one group is actually perfect fine and acceptable and clean for another.
I’ve been wanting to talk about this concept for awhile, and apply it to something in pop culture to help explain. And, what better way of doing that, than to look at Spirited Away. I was hesitant to do so at first because I had already talked a lot about this movie, but I mean… come on. It takes place in a bathhouse! Where things get clean! It’s just too good.
In Spirited Away, Chihiro is faced with a view of humans that the Spirits hold - one of humans being gross and dirty. Haku warns that the bathhouse employees will not like her being there, and will do what they can to get her out. As she first enters, with the purpose of appealing for a job, employees and spirits refer to being able to smell humans - its a bad smell, a gross smell. Humans are disgusting. One spirit even mentions that humans “mess everything up”.
When she first comes to the spirit world, Chihro starts to fade away, and Haku has to give her food to keep her present in the world. This fading away is a sign of an important part of Spirited Away - Chihro is out of place. She is literally a human in the spirit world. She doesn’t belong, she doesn’t fit. She’s the dirt out of place. In essence, the worlds are pushing her towards a resolution of the problem of Chihro - to remove her from the place she doesn’t belong. By taking in a piece of food from the spirit world, she has become partly spirit herself, continuing her out of placeness, while complicating her place within that world.
But even when not literally out of place, like Chihro, humans are considered gross and disgusting. They know the bad smell of a human before Chihro comes as an interloper in their space. This is because humans are polluters.
One example of this is when a River spirit comes to the bathhouse. It’s looming stench hits the bathhouse far before its form does. One worker even asks if it’s a human coming before they can see it. The gross stench is like humans. Is it a stench spirit, though? This is one thought. Is it a human? The lumbering form of a large grotesque spirit comes bumbling forward, seeking refuge in the bathhouse.
Chihro manages, through the stench, to finally get help and support for the spirit. While being hit with water, the spirit lifts Chihro to a thorn in its side. She finally manages to grip it and pulls. From it, comes spilling out a pile of refuse. A bicycle, bits of rubbish, thrown out furniture. When its finally released, the river spirit expresses gratitude for the release. It was humans who put these things in the river, humans who polluted it, and therefore directly dirtied the spirit.
Similarly, Haku himself is a displaced spirit, one who didn’t know where his home was. When Chihro remembers who he is, she mentions that its a river, the Kohaku river, which was filled in to make way for new housing developments.
When the spirit at the beginning of the movie stated that humans “mess everything up”, they weren’t overstating things. Spirited Away highlights the multitude of ways that humans directly mess up everything.
The bathhouse Chihro finds herself in is a place to remove pollution. It stripps the human touch from spirits who have been marked by them. This is how Chihro treats the river spirit, one who was overly harmed by the humans interacting with them.
Essentially, humans still are moving categories, even without the interloper of Chihro. They aren’t just dirt in the park, but dirt that sticks to your shoe and is carried back home with you to slowly, over time, cake the kitchen floor. Because of the way humans treat the environment, their touch mars the spiritually world around them, causing their actions to move categories from one human to one spiritual.
But there is one element to this to figure out: No Face. Obviously, I have a soft spot for No Face, considering I previously really expounded on him as an idea. But for our categorical theories to work as a hypothesis, all elements, people and actions need to have their place. No Face, currently, doesn’t yet precisely work. At least, not on its surface. Unlike the River Spirit, he’s not being directly harmed by Chihro or at least the humans we know in its vacinity. Unlike the other spirits who come to the bathhouse, No Face is actually kinda going crazy in the bathhouse. After Chihro literally purges him, he follows her out and to the train. On the way, she mentions that she thinks the bathhouse is “making him crazy”.
So, unlike other spirits, No Face doesn’t find a release from pollution the way others do. In my previous video essay on him, I talked about how he represents greed and consumption, and how one of the things he finds desperate about Chihro is her lack of interest in “more”. She doesn’t want loads of bath tokens, just the one. She doesn’t want loads of gold, she’s busy trying to help Haku.
But, we’ve been thinking about our categorises as “spirit” and “human” - though these aren’t the only categories in play. Like most stories, there’s a lot going on culturally, and everything is layered on each other. While the bathhouse’s life as a home for spirits makes it also a place for the spirit world and the spirit category, it’s also a category for purity and cleanliness itself. No Face’s spirit of consumption greed is part of all it is. That’s what he is. So trying to clean that up is a problem. It’s causing him to react poorly, almost as an opposite version of the Chihro fading problem. Instead of fading, he’s growing - turning the bathhouse into its own impure domain, rather than removing himself. Where Chihro’s fading was a way the world was trying to right the incorrect placement of thing in category, No Face’s attempt to alter the categorical problem was to completely alter the category itself - to turn the world into one of impurity and greed to match him.
It is not until he moves to a different place, a new location, where things are calmer. Zeniba’s house, where No Face decides to stay, has a strange balance of the greed and impurity. Zeniba openly fights with her sister, pushing against things, trying to obtain some elements or retain her own. She’s the one who attacks Haku. She’s the one who transforms Yubaba’s child and servants. She likes to eat cake, and make things. But everything is slowed down, consumed at a more reasonable and established rate. And is still at the spirit world, rather than the human. With Zeneba, he is no longer in the category of intended purity, but rather one which is comfortably messy.
In other words, he is also out of place in the bathhouse. It’s one of the reasons he may feel drawn to Chihro - they are both out of place. They are both impure. They are both not supposed to be there.
Mary Douglas’s helpful quote of “dirt is matter out of place” really helps us to shift our understanding of categories - especially when questions of purity and impurity pops up. But I don’t think only direct conversations of purity are the only time that this wonderful little quote is helpful. Anything that is considered wrong, disgusting, or just plain “not right” should peak our interest and make us really think about what categories are in play, what social assumptions are being made, and why something is considered so awful. It’s not often something inherent to the thing or person, but rather a socially derived understanding that may, in fact, be different in different places.
It can also make us really think about how these categories interact with one another - or, sometimes, not at all. Why is that dirt in the kitchen is dirty? Maybe because of health concerns. Why are humans in Spirited Away considered so bad and disgusting? Maybe because they have such a negative way of interacting with the other category. They directly harm the spirit world through their careless pollution and treatment of the environment. This can make us learn more about how we should consider these categories, and think about how we affect those around us.
Because socially derived categories may be set up from those around us, and how we grow up. They may seem like large permanent monoliths. But we can change these categories - we already have for over the centuries. It takes time, and effort, and social reflection. It takes an honest stare in the mirror at the way we unconsciously assume something’s place and value. But when we really confront this with honest and open-mindedness, I think we can change our approaches. And that’s what’s so powerful about our pop culture, and the stories that affect us most like Spirited Away. They show us what we can change, if given the proper time and reflection.