Dirt is Healthy II

There of course is a second kind of dirt which is healthy: It is not "clean" like mud or soil. It is rather "real dirt" that makes you healthy because your body has got to fight against it and when doing so it becomes stronger. This somehow remindes me of antique Rome, where the people was meant to watch cruel gladiator fights to stop "sissification" which would lead to the downfall of the empire.

that's what I'm talking about

Reisepanne.de - post your bad experiences on the net!

Bernadette Lahengst

This musicion LaHengst has something very wise to say: "Ich will nicht mehr entscheiden müssen zwischen Scheiße und Scheiße" (I don't want to decide between shit and shit anymore). Yes exactly I've got to decide on my topic and I find it hard!

Dirt is Healthy

"Dreck ist gesund" (Dirt is healthy). One can read or hear about this insight regularly, both in scientific and every day life context. Dirt is framed healthy because we live in a world that is too clean; so clean that it seems unnatural; so clean, that we get ill of its cleanliness. I wonder which kind of dirt is the clean type: A quick glimpse into google gives me a preliminary answer: it is soil, mud or clay that is healthy (see also deep face cleansing). E.g. 'some medical experts say' eating mud or clay 'may be beneficial, especially for pregnant women'.

Anyway, the dirt-is-healthy insight obviously stems from a world that perceives (or experiences?) itself as very clean, assumingly by comparing itself to others or the good old past. Travelling to “dirty countries” might therefore serve an affirmation of the travellers cleanliness (and all the different meanings that come with it e.g. civilization, distinction, education,…).

Ganz normaler Dreck, Varanasi, Indien
Taken from some hompage found via "dreck"-google-image-search

dirt is matter out of place I

All of this thinking about dirt makes me kind of numb! "matter out of place" here, "matter out of place" there! The problem is that I can't figure out what the real problem of this definition is: "dirt is matter out of place!" (Mary Douglas).

I guess the main problem I have with it, is that you cannot turn around the defintion: matter out of place is not necessarily dirt! E. g. a fork in a bed is certainly out of place, but is it therefore really dirt? I don't think so!

Too easy for the people, too dificult for the researcher

When S. first came to the CTCC I asked her, "what do you do with rubbish at Jeju Island?" (South Korea) This question actually came to my mind not only because tourist islands often have a waste problem due to limited space/infrastructure, but also because I miss heard "treisure island", which doesn't sound like a dirty place, does it? Anyway, she looked at me puzzled by my absurd question and answered with a grin: „into the waste bin, what else?“.

Well yes, in “real life”, waste is not a topic (at least as long as you can do what you always do). And as soon as people like my self start thinking about it, it gets highly complicated. No, waste is not just what you through away, it is much more: it has cultural significance, you get rid of something and define yourself through that, you perform this act, it shows your relation to the material world, etc. etc.

I wonder where this complication of things brings us to. And honestly I am a little afraid of going too far. E.g. I would argue that waste is a problem for the tourist gaze. On the other hand a few weeks ago I found this waste in Manchester (in a tourist spot), and I don’t care about it at all!

Manchester, 28th of October 2007

Why one should not read this blog II

Waste, dirt, disgust etc. etc. are no new topics to the humanities, even though people regularly like to claim so (e.g. Cohen 2005). Yesterday I started reading William Ian Millers "The Anatomy of Disgust" (1997), which quotes Susan Miller, who has published an article on disgust in the International Review of Psychoanalysis as early as 1986. Interestingly Susan says exactly what I said in my first entry (and William Miller agrees): She complains that "contact with the disgusting makes one disgusting. To study disgust is to risk contamination; jokes about his or her unwholesome interests soon greet the disgust researcher." Well, I wouldn't say it that harshly-- and I think she does exaggerate--but it strongly reminds me of the big laughs I got when people told each other I was writing a PhD on rubbish. I guess it is something people cannot take seriously without risking contamination.
The sad thing about it though is that according to XF of the STRC PhD researchers should do research on successful things, whereby they become experts on success - in this sense I'll be an expert on disgusting stuff, which surely provides great employability. No, of course I don't share that collaborative perspective anyway.

Keep the mountains clean! Don't leave your waste!

Thanks Josef for this very nice picture! It was taken at Hohe Tauern (Austria) when walking to the OeAV Badener hut. I've seen these signs on other mountains in Austria as well, indeed at the Schneekuppe you have them all over the place. Anyhow, they seem quite historic. The way "Lasst" was spelled suggests that this sign was put up at latest in 1998 when the german orthography was reformed. By the way, I enjoyed titanic's comment on the discussion around the reform, when the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung refused to deploy it: http://www.titanic-magazin.de/fileadmin/wwwold/www/archiv/0904/images/cover0904.jpg What a waste of time. & What a connection back to the topic: This sign is the most obvious piece of evidence of how tourists are being disciplined through regulating their material basis and behaviour.

Why one should not read this blog...

Finally, William A. Cohen made me realize why John Scanlan quotes a New York Dolls song (wrongly, as John remarks). This light bulb moment, which is the kind of the researcher's compensation for a nerdy low-income life in the libraries, made me start this blog and scream it warningly into the world:

"Trash, don't pick it up - Don't throw your life away"

No, don't pick it up, because it's gluey, it's sticky and you won't get rid of it again. Or to say it with the more complicated words of William A. Cohen: "By the time one has encountered and repudiated filth, it is too late - the subject is already besmirched by it. In this way, filth challenges the very dichotomy between subject and object. It does so according to a psychoanalytic logic, whereby repulsion and attraction unconsciously converge, and phenomenologically as well: the filth of the object defiles the subject who, identifying it as such, has had to rub up against it."

What does that really mean in practice? Do you have to touch the filth, to see it, to feel it, or is it even enough to just read and write about it? It indeed is: Read Laporte's 'History of Shit' and you'll know what I am talking about. Exhibit 'the handling of waste in history' and people will call you 'Mag. Muell' (in case you have academically studied the phenomenon). Start a PhD on rubbish and you'll get information on (what's hot and) what's not every other day. The topic is sticky and it won't leave you, so beware!