Paper short abstract:

This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies pollutes them and reveals their socio-political identity.

Paper long abstract:

In North Bihar, India, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies pollutes them and reveals their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this paper suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness and pollution. This opens the possibility of redefining dirt from the classic "matter out of place" to a semiotic interpretation of its political entanglements. Historical circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt loose their meaning.