Menstruation
MENSTRUATION. It is questionable whether late-modern scientific, detraditionalized Western societies can still be said to institute a menstrual taboo. Today in westernized cultures, menstrual blood is more likely to be considered a bodily waste product whose disposal is more a matter of hygiene and social etiquette than a threat to the cultic order. However, the contemporary world is only partially and unevenly secularized, and the role and status of women in the world's religions cannot be fully understood without reference to the negative powers generally ascribed to menstrual blood. And more than that, while menstrual taboos vary in practice and intensity in the world's religious cultures, menstruation remains central to the construction of female difference.
Where early anthropologists and historians of religion claimed that menstrual taboo was universal, more recently Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (1988) have argued that the Western repugnance for menstrual blood and Western cultural alienation from female biological processes have been projected onto the interpretation of indigenous menstrual practices. The power of menstrual blood may not, in fact, be universally regarded as negative, but sometimes as positive and, if handled with due care, life-giving. Indeed, menstruation, and especially menarche (the onset of menstruation) can for North American Indians, such as the Sioux, confer honor and power on a woman rather than stigmatize her.
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