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referring to this same threat. Neither she nor anyone in Kau Sai volunteered the still more generalised argument in terms of the classical Chinese cosmological dualism between 'Yin' and 'Yang' that might be expected from a literate informant though they probably all could have done so. Dualism was an unquestioned assumption with which every Kau Sai person I talked with was familiar, but which was very seldom invoked. For most of them most of the time the polluting nature of menstruation was a self-evident and sufficient reason for the taboos.
It is perhaps worth noting that Kau Sai men never raised these matters with me, and when I enquired about the sexual divisions of labour always ascribed them entirely to differences in physical strength and health and (with reference to cooking and the care of young children on the one hand, and marketing fish and building junks on the other) in know-how. Women, who were voluble and endlessly inquisitive about all matters connected with female physiology, stressed much more than the ritual prohibitions the personal discomfort, inconvenience, and above all sheer embarrassment of having to cope with the menstrual flow in the confined space of a small boat where "everyone must know about it". One of the great advantages of moving ashore was felt to be that this particular problem was much easier to deal with there.**
Two further physical and ritual peculiarities associated with women and their participation in work in the fishing boats must be mentioned before leaving this digression. Pregnant women were under no special prohibitions that I could discover, but after either birth or miscarriage a woman was unclean, for a full month or until after the performance of the ritual known as "changing the gods” (woon shan). A birth, indeed, put not only the mother but also the boat and all its company into the ritual quarantine I have already mentioned, like a death; it did not put an end to fishing operations however, and though the woman herself was theoretically not supposed to do so, I was told that in fact she often did help with the drawing in of nets etc., once she was strong enough, provided that she observed the usual (menstrual) taboos.
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