Every society has rules about the menstruating body. What varies — enormously — is what those rules say, who they bind, and what they are understood to accomplish.

The English word for the forbidden arrived by ship. During his third Pacific voyage in 1777, Captain James Cook recorded the Polynesian term tapu in his journals, describing a system of restriction he could observe but not translate.

An anthropological reading of purity, danger, and why the same small area of human anatomy attracts rules almost everywhere. In Brief Every documented human society regulates the pelvic region and chest in some way — but almost none of them regulate it the same way. Mary Douglas argued…

In 1777, on the third of his Pacific voyages, Captain James Cook watched a group of Tongan hosts refuse to sit or eat in his presence and explain, by way of apology, that they were "taboo." He wrote the word down. It was one of the few Polynesian terms to pass into global vocabulary, and Cook…