Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to demonstrate a relation between the conception of pollution associated with the moral emotion of disgust and gynaecological nurses´representations of the female body in the pregnancy. It presents the results of ethnographic field research at a hospital.

Paper long abstract:

In my contribution I will discuss gynaecological nurses' representations of pregnant women. I will illustrate my argument by the results of ethnographic research at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in a hospital situated in Central Slovakia. I will consider a relation between (1) conception of "pollution" associated with the moral emotion of disgust, and (2) nurses' representations of the female body in pregnancy. I will present the results of analysis of the nurses' stories about (im)proper and (un)hygienic behaviour of the patients admitted into the Division of Risk Pregnancy at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and will relate these results to the Mary Douglas' conception of dirt as a universal symbol of social classificatory systems. I will demonstrate that nurses' descriptions of the bodies of pregnant women are biased toward negative statements: what is not proper for female body during pregnancy, and what pregnant women should not do. Apart from Mary Douglas' Grid-Group Cultural Theory, I will interpret my results in terms of the Moral Foundation Theory developed by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues from the field of cultural psychology. I will argue that combination of those two theories is useful in explanations of social classifications and action tendencies.