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- Convenors:
-
Anna Boermel
(King's College London)
Brigitte Steger (University of Cambridge)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- V501
- Sessions:
- Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
This panel examines how, in times of great uncertainty caused by natural disasters or rapid social change, human beings adopt practices of cleaning and hygiene to re-create order and re-assert control in an effort to cope with visible and invisible threats to their health and safety.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines how practices of cleaning and hygiene help human beings cope with visible and invisible threats in times of great uncertainty caused by natural disasters or rapid social and political change. We seek ethnographic accounts that address the following questions: How do cleaning practices help actors re-create order in the wake of sudden changes to their physical environment caused by earthquakes and floods? What hygiene strategies are used by people to re-assert control and protect themselves when information about exposure to public health risks such as contaminated food or radiation is not made available to them or when they do not regard it as trustworthy? To what extent do people resort to past practices when cleaning their physical environment or designing methods of protecting themselves from exposure to toxins? How do gender and age shape practices of hygiene? How do actors communicate information about the threats that they identify and the practices that they employ to deal with these threats? What role do advances in science and technology, demographic change and social media play in the development of cleaning practices? How are new strategies of cleaning and hygiene assessed by other actors belonging to the same community, the state and the media?
Overall the panel seeks to explore how the creation of new practices of cleaning and hygiene can emancipate actors by helping them form new social ties and enhancing certainty and trust in instable settings.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 13 July, 2012, -Kate Nialla Fayers-Kerr (Universite Libre de Bruxelles & University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Dirt as matter out of place is a key theme in anthropology since Purity and Danger (1966). This paper follows Ngubane (1977) on notions of vulnerability to help understand how the Mun use earths, clays, ash and dung to negotiate the uncertainty of environmental threats and the trauma of illness.
Paper long abstract:
The Mun are a transhumant pastoral community. Migration occurs twice a year, and this exposes the community to great threats and is considered a time of much uncertainty. They negotiate this, however, through the use of gidangi and holi clays to ritually anoint the community. This paper focuses specifically on the notion of gidangi meaning 'grey', 'dirty' or 'polluted'. Why, in times of poor health or in places of high rates of infectious diseases do the Mun chose to anoint themselves with clays, and why would they select a 'dirty' or 'polluting' clay? To answer this, I found Douglas's notion of pollution and dirt were not helpful; instead, I have found an ecological grounding in earth, mud, ash, dung and clay much more revealing.
Despite what Douglas suggests, gidangi things and people are not classificatorily ambiguous, nor is gidangi in opposition to something sacred or profane. Furthermore, my findings are phenomenologically informed and compliment instead the work of the South African Zulu anthropologist, Harriet Ngubane (1977). She based her framework of 'pollution' on the issue of vulnerable people and states: children, the bereaved, outsiders or newly delivered mothers. By focusing on vulnerability within the context of the environment, rather than the sacred and profane, Ngubane incorporates an ecology of health into her concept of 'pollution'. This is much more 'modern' in the sense that it can also be understood in line with 'naturalist' causation of illness, such as germ theory, and epidemiological studies of disease (Green 1999).
Tara Kelly (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines bathing practices in Oku Cameroon as strategies against uncertainty. Personal bathing and traditional medicine 'washing' treatments serve to remove dangerous dust and harmful substances from the body.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines bathing practices in Oku Cameroon as strategies against uncertainty. Bathing hygiene attends more to removing dirt and dust substances that have accumulated on the surface of the body than on removal of the body's own secretions. Dirt comes from without, not from within. For this reason, bathing is often carried out in the evenings to remove the day's accrued dirt. Much like this concept of bodily 'dirtiness', illness is understood to come primarily from exogenous sources.
Some illnesses blow in with the dust of the dry season or the fog of the rainy season; others are bestowed on individuals by human agents using dangerous substances. Personal bathing and post-bathing oiling of the skin mirror the removal of and fortification against harmful (witchcraft) substances carried out in traditional medicine treatments called 'washings' ('kensuuse').
As with personal bathing, medicine washings, carried out in actual or symbolic streams, focus on the removal of harmful substances (placed there by witches) from the surface of the skin. Often this occurs through the use of agents, materials, and substances considered more powerful than those held responsible for having caused the illness. Like surfacing a stain during laundering, harmful substances are located, weakened, and drawn to the surface where they are washed away.
Illnesses that inexplicably endure, resist treatment or are otherwise atypical appear common today and are the cause of bodily, treatment-outcome and social uncertainties. In response to such, bathing, through personal cleansing and traditional washings offer a sense of control and resistance against otherwise uncontrollable contact with dangerous substances known to cause affliction.
Valentina Peveri (The American University of Rome (AUR))
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the connection between food practices, dirt and disorder. It documents the active role of women enduring pain through the process of home birthing and focuses upon the utilisation of a purgative plant which has been banned by health organizations because of its toxicity.
Paper long abstract:
In the Hadiya zone the prevailing ethic of self-control with regard to female bodies becomes evident in times of great vulnerability such as in pregnancy. Women adopt old hygienic practices as a sign of resilience against a wide range of threats.
Home births entail a meticulous training of the body. Among the recipes the use of medicinal plants, and especially of Kosso, stands out prominently as a method to enhance strength without accumulating dirt. Health organizations currently discourage its use.
The last two months of pregnancy are characterized by the opposite extreme of gluttony, that of the emptying out of the stomach. Disorders, mostly provoked by cravings, are replaced by qualities which can aid a successful birth: "heat" and "dryness" are synonyms for well-being, purity, and the physical/moral energy to go through with the ordeal. White and soft foodstuffs, as well as fat, are considered a hazard. The mother-to-be takes more care of her own body, orienting it towards a dry thinness, than she does of the child which may require frequent and nutritious food intake.
According to attitudes fostered by human rights' rhetoric, practices which are considered traditional or pointlessly painful from a scientific point of view, are indications of irrational behaviour. On the contrary, the native women willfully opt for pain in order to shape themselves as persons of worth.
These dietary rules imply a category of cleanliness and order, raising questions about external scientific medical intervention in local community practices. Even though the authorities have announced the abolition of Kosso, the women keep on employing it at length because they regard official information about exposure to public health risks as misleading.
Jamie Furniss (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers an ethnographic account of the Egyptian government's response to the H1N1 Influenza (so-called 'swine flu') pandemic, or supposed such, in 2009, which was to slaughter all the country's pigs.
Paper long abstract:
Notwithstanding the pleas of the WHO, since it spread from human-to-human rather than from animal-to-human, the Egyptian government's response to the H1N1 Influenza (so-called 'swine flu') pandemic, or supposed such, in 2009, was to slaughter all the country's pigs. This measure mainly affected Cairo's Zabbaleen (informal sector garbage collectors), who until then had raised pigs for slaughter on organic waste, which explains why most of them are Christian: for them, the animal is not taboo.
Through the Arabic-language media discourse and other sources collected as part of 18-months' fieldwork on the Zabbaleen, I attempt in this paper to provide an ethnographic account of the pig-slaughter decision, emphasizing two points. First, this unusual 'public health' measure (no other country in the world apart from Egypt took this route) must be understood as part of the public authorities' longstanding efforts to beautify, develop, and bring order to the city: the Zabbaleen are regarded as uncivilized, un-modern and, ironically, as sources rather than removers of Cairo's infamous 'dirt and disorder.' Pigs constitute an especially sore point in this discourse, which the frenzied emergency of the pandemic threat provided a pretext for dealing with once and for all. Second, Coptic church leadership and political classes surprisingly clambered to beat their Muslim counterparts and be the first to request the pigs' slaughter. The sacrifice of their garbage-collecting coreligionists was aimed at solidifying the appearance of 'national' (rather than communitarian) commitment at at time when it is becoming harder to be at once Christian and a citizen of Egypt.
Brigitte Steger (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Based on field research in shelters in Yamada (a coastal town in northeast Japan), this paper explores what hygienic challenges survivors of the 2011 tsunami have faced and how they have restored order as well as a sense of security and social stability through practices of cleanliness.
Paper long abstract:
On 11 March 2011 an earthquake of magnitude 9 hit the northeast coast of Japan. It was followed by a tsunami, fires and a nuclear disaster. In June and July 2011 I conducted ethnographic research in Yamada, a coastal town in Iwate Prefecture where more than half of the residential buildings were destroyed, and several thousand local residents found temporary refuge in shelters following the earthquake.
In this paper, I discuss the coping strategies of survivors by focussing on issues of cleanliness in shelters. I will show what challenges they faced in overcrowded shelters lacking basic facilities (water, electricity etc.), and how they avoided and treated contamination with infectious diseases. I discuss how dirty, unusable toilets affected their sense of stability and shame. While the difficulties in taking care of personal hygiene after the disaster were unsettling, people became somewhat insensitive to unwashed clothes and body odour; sharing dirt and germs for them became a source of intimacy and solidarity. I argue that the first bath they had after the disaster did not only wash away the accumulated dirt but also started a transition from a state of apathy, memory loss, tension, and angst, to a 'normalisation' process. Survivors soon re-established hygienic conditions in the shelters by resorting to 'traditional' methods of han (group) structures and gender divisions of labour. Through working together for a clean environment and adopting (new) practices of cleanliness they tried to make sense of and re-assert control over their lives.
Anna Boermel (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on longitudinal fieldwork in Beijing this paper documents and analyses the emergence of new hygiene practices adopted by local residents in response to new public health risks such as infectious diseases and contaminated food in the first decade of the 21st century.
Paper long abstract:
Beijing residents were faced with numerous public health risks such as new infectious diseases (SARS, bird and swine flu) and food safety scares (for example pesticides in vegetables, melamine in eggs and milk) in the last decade. Rapid social change, lack of trust in the information made available to them by weak institutions and a new awareness of risk have made them re-assess how to protect themselves from exposure to invisible threats to their health and safety in the form of viruses, pollutants, and toxins. This paper documents and examines the new hygiene practices they have adopted to re-assert control over their physical well-being. It shows that in addition to becoming more careful in their interactions with strangers and in their choice of foods consumed and restaurants visited, they have revived traditional methods of disinfecting their food and houses. Many Beijing residents have also taken advantage of the proliferation of new chemical substances which promise to thoroughly cleanse food items from toxins. The paper also shows that while concerns about health protection span the entire social spectrum, age and gender play important roles in the development of new hygiene strategies.