Abstract
Although when discovered by the British colonizers, the Polynesian term taboo aroused increased interest from scholars, subsequent research on the concept was disparate and intermittent. Perceived at the time of its discovery as an exotic phenomenon, exclusive manifestation of primitive communities, the concept of taboo has now come to be considered as a universal cultural constant, indispensable to any civilization. The present article follows the sinuous evolution of British anthropologists' conceptions of the taboo, in correlation with the related theories of religion, magic, the sacred and the profane. We propose to analyze in a synthetic projection the role attributed by the Anglo-Saxon school to the taboo in sociology and ethnology, the controversies that the concept has generated and the impact it has had on the current anthropological sciences.