Dirt

New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination

Ben Campkin, Rosie Cox, Ben Campkin, Rosie Cox

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781780764177
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738820
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Dirt - and our rituals to eradicate it - is as much a part of our everyday lives as eating, breathing and sleeping. Yet this very fact means that we seldom stop to question what we mean by dirt. What do our attitudes to dirt and cleanliness tell us about ourselves and the societies we live in? Exploring a wide variety of settings - domestic, urban, suburban and rural - the contributors expose how our ideas about dirt are intimately bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. The result is a a rich and challenging work that extends our understanding of historical and contemporary cultural manifestations of dirt and cleanliness.

Section 1

HOME: DOMESTIC DIRT AND CLEANING

Introduction

ROSIE COX

The contributors to this section explore the meanings of dirt and cleanliness in domestic and quasi-domestic settings. They raise new questions about how we understand the categories of ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ both on physical and metaphorical levels. The first and last chapters show how ideas about the home, and domestic social relationships, can be used to understand notions of pollution and purity in other settings. The remaining authors focus on practices within the home that define who and what are considered ‘dirty’. The chapters range widely in their geographical locations and objects of study – from care workers in the USA to domestic employees in Brazil, to families in England and funeral homes in New Zealand. Together, they suggest both the social importance of ideas of pollution and purity, and the cultural and geographic specificity of concepts of dirt and cleanliness and associated practices.

The authors offer new arguments about cleaning and cleanliness in the domestic sphere that require moving beyond traditional discussions of domesticity, dominated by a focus on gender in relation to responsibilities for reproductive work. Feminist writers and activists have firmly established the importance of women’s responsibility for reproductive labour to their position in society and oppression.¹ In academia this has meant that domestic cleaning and childcare have become recognized as valuable topics for social research and a large literature now exists on reproductive labour.² More recently, studies of paid domestic work and the workers who do it have supplemented this work – bringing ethnic and class-related aspects of reproductive labour into focus.³ While there is now a diverse and thorough literature on both paid and unpaid domestic work, the majority of studies are on the organization of housework and relations between those who do and do not do the cleaning. Little attention has been paid to the physical matter being dealt with – dirt – and cleaning practices themselves. The implications of working with ‘polluted matter’, and the culturally defined nature of cleaning and values attached to cleanliness have yet to be as thoroughly explored.

Bringing together these distinct literatures reveals the importance of dirt and cleanliness in the construction of social relations. The organization of paid domestic labour vividly illustrates how dirt can act as a means of social classification. Employing servants was the primary indicator of middle-class standing in Victorian Britain and elsewhere. When industrialist and social reformer Seebohm Rowntree conducted his survey of York in 1899, he took the ‘keeping or not of servants’ as the dividing line between ‘the working classes and those of a higher social scale’.⁴ To remain ‘respectable’, the impoverished middle classes would struggle to keep a single servant. Those who could not even afford this would attempt to disguise their situation and hide their labours, particularly those that involved the closest contact with dirt.

At this point in history there was a clear and widely acknowledged correlation between class, cleanliness and cleaning work. Historian and heritage consultant Pamela Sambrook argues in relation to her examination of British country house servants between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, that a primary purpose of cleaning was to indicate status. Cleanliness marked higher status in a world where being clean was difficult, and the purpose of servants was to deliver that cleanliness, so demonstrating their employer’s standing to the world.⁵ Household servants were employed to create an environment that was comfortable and that would clearly signal a householder’s high standing, both through ensuring cleanliness and by caring for all the employer’s goods, which were such important markers of rank. Therefore, it was not only the ability to afford to employ domestic servants that marked status, but also the actual product of their work.

For most of the last 500 years having a clean house, as well as visibly clean and well-kept clothing and household linen, was a mark of high status because a clean habitat was so difficult to achieve. Cleanliness demonstrated how many servants were employed and how well those servants worked. The use of open fires, the difficulties of heating water and the lack of modern cleaning products, such as soap or washing powder, all meant that houses were dirtier and cleaning was more time consuming and difficult. Poor people could not maintain their houses and linen to the same standards as people who had servants to work for them, so cleanliness was a sign of wealth and status. Being able to maintain a distance from the dirt, which was everywhere, both inside and outside houses, was something that was only possible for the privileged few.

The relationship between dirt and social status is an aspect of domestic labour that is rarely mentioned today. However, much paid domestic labour (like its unpaid counterpart) still reflects differences in status. Having a beautifully kept home and time for leisure can be an indicator of high status for the owner; being actively involved in dealing with dirt means low status for the worker who does it.⁶

Through their investigations of how and why cleaning is performed, and how working with dirt defines workers’ identities and contributes to the social construction of domestic spaces, the authors of the following chapters offer a view of relationships between home, dirt and cleaning that differs from the majority of existing accounts. They reject ‘common sense’ understandings of dirt and cleanliness as concepts that are objective and known to everyone to explore how these categories are created through everyday practices and within hierarchical social relations.

In the opening chapter Carol Wolkowitz explores conceptualizations of dirt and looks at their usefulness in social theory. Drawing on examples of work with ‘real dirt’ – such as care work and garbage handling, and work that is constructed as abject, such as prostitution – Wolkowitz examines whether the linguistic focus of postmodern social theory can be reconciled with real dirt to provide a critical realist sociology of dirt with political relevance for workers involved in dirty work. Wolkowitz asks us to move beyond symbolic constructions of dirt and to ‘focus instead on how lived experiences of dirt are underpinned by the powers, strategies and constraints available to different social groups’ (page 16). Rather than a conventional understanding of the domestic, in this chapter she extends to commoditized forms of domestic activity.

Following this, Lívia Barbosa offers a detailed view of how concepts of pollution shape the experiences of one group of workers who deal with dirt every day. She examines how paid domestic workers in Brazil are subject to widespread practices and forms of behaviour that segregate them from their employers in myriad ways. Such practices include requiring domestic workers to use different cutlery and crockery from the rest of the household, and prohibiting them from washing their clothes in their employers’ washing machines. Barbosa argues that the design of Brazilian houses and apartment blocks builds such practices into the domestic environment because both the physical environment and the habits and actions of employers separate domestic workers within the home.

Continuing with the theme of interior domestic cleaning, Lydia Martens uses detailed empirical research with families in Britain to examine decisions about what cleaning needs to be done and when. The author argues that during the postwar period a shift took place from temporally-structured practices, such as the emphasis on seasonal (spring) cleaning and the weekly wash, to visually-determined forms of behaviour that prioritize the appearance of dirt rather than cleaning routines. The visual impetus to clean may have driven standards of cleanliness upwards, for householders no longer wait for it to be ‘time’ to clean, while they may also have an effect on the choice of surface materials and other features of interior decoration given that certain materials reveal dirt more easily than others.

In the final chapter of this section Kyro Selket explores the ways in which ideas of home are used in the funeral industry in Aeoteroa, New Zealand. Selket argues that the associations in funeral home design with the middle-class home, and with order and cleanliness, act to disassociate death from disease and contamination. She reads this as a process of metaphorical sanitization for the benefit of the recently bereaved. The chapter traces how modern funeral homes have been carefully designed to echo the respectability and calm of upper-middle-class dwellings; from their location in suburban neighbourhoods to the choice of décor and furniture. However, inside they are laid out so that the living can move through them without coming into proximity with the corpse. It is only through the process of embalming that the dead body is considered to be cleansed and is then permitted into the more public spaces of the home.

Chapter 1

Linguistic Leakiness or Really Dirty? Dirt in Social Theory

CAROL WOLKOWITZ

In this chapter I consider several different conceptualizations of dirt and ‘dirty work’ and their place in social theory.¹ At first sight, one can identify two leading trends in the literature. Postmodern and/or poststructural dirt is purified through abstraction, prettified, much like old neighbourhoods. The apparently polar opposite is the idea of ‘real dirt’ – one can smell it, feel it, it is undeniably disgusting. Although people can become acclimatized, one has an ‘instinctive reaction’. Real dirt is credited with an objective status, for instance as an agent of infection, and is removable only by physical means.

Here I argue that this simple, binary way of categorizing conceptualizations of dirt may hide a more complex and interesting array of theoretical postures. In particular, critical realism can help to prise apart the binary between linguistic leakiness and the ‘really dirty’, making a space for a sociology of dirt that does not have to choose. Critical realists argue that we can, and indeed must, recognize that social phenomena ‘really’ exist, even while being ready to acknowledge that their construction inevitably depends on human activities, including the use of language.

After outlining the binary between naturalistic and social constructionist views of dirt and dirtiness in more detail, I consider two areas of research and debate in which dirt features as a central axis of analysis and debate. My first example is research on how gender divisions influence the strategies of people whose paid work involves contact with disgusting substances. Second, I go on to another example of work that is frequently characterized in terms of its ‘dirtiness’, prostitution, and consider differences between feminist commentators in how they deal with this. Both examples suggest that rather than highlighting the symbolic construction of dirt in culture, we should focus instead on how the powers, strategies and constraints available to different social groups underpin lived experiences of dirt.

Naturalistic accounts

In what Mick Smith and Joyce Davidson call ‘naturalistic’ or ‘evolutionary’ accounts, ‘dirt’ is found in nature rather than defined by human societies.² According to Smith and Davidson, such accounts focus on what is taken to be the natural aversion to the objective characteristics of the offending articles and their biological significance. Research in biology and neuroscience emphasizes the universality of disgust as an innate response to relatively similar objects across cultures, including bodily excretions and body parts, decay and spoiled food, particular living creatures, certain categories of outsiders and violations of morality or social norms.³ Stimulated by sensory cues, such as smell, feel and sight, material that is ‘dirty’ or contaminated naturally excites disgust and avoidance. Disgust is especially evident in situations in which contamination might take place through ingestion or touch. The universality of these responses is explained by the evolutionary advantages of disgust in protecting ports to the body, such as the airways, the gut, the genitals and the skin. Even moral disgust is seen as having evolutionary benefits because it leads to the avoidance of outsiders who are likely to carry germs or viruses to which one does not already have some resistance. Such arguments for the universality and evolutionary benefits of disgust are now being reinforced by evidence that the disgust response is rooted in brain chemistry.⁴

Whatever their merits (surely many emotional reactions are registered ‘in’ the brain, but this does not explain them), such naturalistic views have had little role in feminist scholarship or sociology, which usually cite Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, discussed further below, as a foundational text.⁵ A recent article by Tim Dant and David Bowles, however, asks social scientists to pay more attention to the ‘natural’, as against the symbolic, qualities of dirt.⁶ In the abstract of their article, which is based on research on the way that car repair workers deal with dirt, Dant and Bowles suggest that a ‘common sense’ approach to dirt – as naturally unpleasant and to be avoided if possible – may be more useful in understanding how dirt is dealt with than the historical and anthropological analyses of dirt that predominate. They say that the workers they observed displayed a rational attitude towards the causes of dirt and dealt with it in an instrumental, flexible and matter-of-fact manner. They recommend we be cautious of any reduction to culture that overlooks prior bodily and material concerns. While we may want to take this point on board, Dant and Bowles’s failure to discuss properly the distinctions between nonorganic and organic dirt, which as they say in a footnote were pointed out by a reader, the gendering of different kinds of ‘dirty work’, or the gendering of attitudes to (different kinds of) dirt suggests that one cannot simply put social constructions of dirt to the side.

We should be careful not to conflate a critical realist account, which I think is what Dant and Bowles are actually after, with naturalism, since the first neither seeks the positivist certainties of evolutionary laws nor sees the social as explicable in terms of biological universals. As Andrew Sayer argues, critical realism highlights the distinctiveness of social phenomena.⁷ Social phenomena are emergent phenomena in the sense that they have properties that are irreducible to their constituents. While ‘social phenomena are emergent from biological phenomena, which are in turn emergent from chemical and physical strata’, we cannot explain social life simply in terms of biology or physiology. However, this ‘does not mean that we can ignore them’ either; since we are embodied beings ‘the interactions between the social and physical needs to be acknowledged’.⁸ Critical realism is thus compatible with phenomenological understandings of our interactions,⁹ including aversion to dirt, for human bodily morphology lends itself to particular ways of experiencing our being in the world, for instance our sense of the interior and exterior of the body, even if it does not determine it.¹⁰

Symbolic dirt

Social constructionist notions of dirt of the kind Dant and Bowles criticize are associated most closely with Mary Douglas, and, in feminism, their further development by Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz.¹¹ For Douglas social constructions of dirt are intertwined with social constructions of the body in particular societies. The body is ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Materialities and Metaphors of Dirt and Cleanliness
• Section 1 Home: Domestic Dirt and Cleaning
• Introduction
• 1. Linguistic Leakiness or Really Dirty? Dirt in Social Theory
• 2. Domestic Workers and Pollution in Brazil
• 3. The Visible and the Invisible: (De)regulation in Contemporary Cleaning Practices
• 4. Bring Home the Dead: Purity and Filth in Contemporary Funeral Homes
• Section 2 City and Suburb: Urban Dirt and Cleansing
• Introduction
• 5. Degradation and Regeneration: Theories of Dirt and the Contemporary City
• 6. From the Dirty City to the Spoiled Suburb
• 7. Dangers Lurking Everywhere: The Sex Offender as Pollution
• 8. Hygiene Aesthetics on London’s Gay Scene: The Stigma of AIDS
• 9. Spiritual Cleansing: Priests and Prostitutes in Early Victorian London
• 10. Mapping Sewer Spaces in mid-Victorian London
• 11. The Cinematic Sewer
• Section 3 Country: Constructing Rural Dirt
• Introduction
• 12. Dirt and Development: Alternative Modernities in Thailand
• 13. Dirty Foods, Healthy Communities?
• 14. Dirty Vegetables: Connecting Consumers to the Growing of their Food
• 15. Dirty Cows: Perceptions of BSE/vCJD
• Contributors
• Notes
• References