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“Purity and Pollution” gathers books that explore how ideas of cleanliness, contamination, and boundary-making shape bodies, beliefs, and social order. Spanning anthropology, religion, history, sociology, gender/queer studies, law, and environmental studies, this category covers ritual purity and taboo; purity cultures around sex, caste, race, and eugenics; food and bodily rules (from kosher/halal to hygiene campaigns); and material contamination in the form of toxins, waste, disease, and ecological harm. Titles examine how purity ideals justify stigma, exclusion, and social control, as well as how “pollution” narratives fuel moral panics, policy, and public health responses. Alongside theory and scholarship, the category includes memoirs and fiction—plague and contamination tales, dystopias, and body horror—that dramatize abjection, boundary-crossing, and the politics of cleanliness and risk.

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