A Philosophy Of Dirt

What is dirt, and what does it really mean to be dirty or clean? Dirt and cleaning are often associated with ideas of guilt, otherness, and social control, but also with living responsibly and in harmony with the environment. In this learned, innovative study, Olli Lagerspetz offers a persuasive discussion of dirt and its ramifications across philosophy and culture. Writing with wit and grit, he argues that questions of dirt and soiling can neither be reduced to hygiene nor to ritual pollution. Instead, they are integral to almost every human activity. As participants in material culture, we not only produce things and dispose of them, but we also engage with them practically, aesthetically, and morally. Everything, in essence, comes back to dirt and waste. Ranging through subjects and times, from Heraclitus of Ephesus to the Renaissance (via Heidegger and Mary Douglas), from the hygienic products of modernity to abject art, Lagerspetz constantly questions current thinking on all subjects most foul. Proposing a new view of dirt based on our physical engagement with the world, A Philosophy of Dirt is essential reading for all students of philosophy and for anyone who’s felt soiled—and wants to know why.

In this learned, witty and groundbreaking study, Olli Lagerspetz offers a persuasive discussion of dirt and its ramifications in philosophy and culture.

Dirty theory follows the dirt of material and conceptual relations from the midst of complex milieus. It messes with mixed disciplines, showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, and discovering a suitable habitat in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirty theory disrupts a comfortable status quo, including our everyday modes of inhabitation and our habits of thinking. This small book argues that we must work with the dirt to develop an ethics of care and mainte- nance for our precarious environment-worlds.

Americans in the early 19th century were, as one foreign traveller bluntly put it, "filthy, bordering on the beastly"--perfectly at home in dirty, bug-infested, malodorous surroundings. Many a home swarmed with flies, barnyard animals, dust, and dirt; clothes were seldom washed; men hardly ever shaved or bathed. Yet gradually all this changed, and today, Americans are known worldwide for their obsession with cleanliness--for their sophisticated plumbing, daily bathing, shiny hair and teeth, and spotless clothes. In Chasing Dirt, Suellen Hoy provides a colorful history of this remarkable transformation from "dreadfully dirty" to "cleaner than clean," ranging from the pre-Civil War era to the 1950s, when American's obsession with cleanliness reached its peak. Hoy offers here a fascinating narrative, filled with vivid portraits of the men and especially the women who helped America come clean. She examines the work of early promoters of cleanliness, such as Catharine Beecher and Sylvester Graham; and describes how the Civil War marked a turning point in our attitudes toward cleanliness, discussing the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and revealing how the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War inspired American women--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Louisa May Alcott--to volunteer as nurses during the war. We also read of the postwar efforts of George E. Waring, Jr., a sanitary engineer who constructed sewer systems around the nation and who, as head of New York City's street-cleaning department, transformed the city from the nation's dirtiest to the nation's cleanest in three years. Hoy details the efforts to convince African-Americans and immigrants of the importance of cleanliness, examining the efforts of Booker T. Washington (who preached the "gospel of the toothbrush"), Jane Addams at Hull House, and Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement House. Indeed, we see how cleanliness gradually shifted from a way to prevent disease to a way to assimilate, to become American. And as the book enters the modern era, we learn how advertising for soaps, mouth washes, toothpastes, and deodorants in mass-circulation magazines showed working men and women how to cleanse themselves and become part of the increasingly sweatless, odorless, and successful middle class. Shower for success! By illuminating the historical roots of America's shift from "dreadfully dirty" to "squeaky clean," Chasing Dirt adds a new dimension to our understanding of our national culture. And along the way, it provides colorful and often amusing social history as well as insight into what makes Americans the way we are today.

Leading international environmental philosophers further the debate about the environment and the metaphysical, ethical, social and international implications.

Insights from anthropology, religious studies, biblical studies, sociology, classics, and Jewish studies are here combined to provide a cutting-edge guide to dress and religion in the Greco-Roman World and the Mediterranean basin. Clothing, jewellery, cosmetics, and hairstyles are among the many aspects examined to show the variety of functions of dress in communication and in both establishing and defending identity. The volume begins by reviewing how scholars in the fields of classics, anthropology, religious studies, and sociology examine dress. The second section then looks at materials, including depictions of clothing in sculpture and in Egyptian mummy portraits. The third (and largest) part of the book then examines dress in specific contexts, beginning with Greece and Rome and going on to Jewish and Christian dress, with a specific focus on the intersection between dress, clothing and religion. By combining essays from over twenty scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, the book provides a unique overview of different approaches to and contexts of dress in one volume, leading to a greater understanding of dress both within ancient societies and in the contemporary world.

Sweet and Clean? challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over thirty years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature, revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient's linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practiced. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases-plague, smallpox, and typhus-that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?

Delve Into the Fascinating World of Dirt Dirt is a matter of opinion, according to public health and hygiene authority Terence McLaughli. In this engaging, thoroughly-researched, and often humorous study of the “imperfections” of human existence and our relationship to them, McClaughlin dissects human attitudes about the slime, mud, stench and filth which has accompanied society through history. Our notion of cleanliness has a marked cultural aspect. For instance, McLaughlin cites Old Testament examples of cleanliness which, unbeknownst at the time, helped protect observant followers from the plague. The famous baths of ancient Rome were seen as progress for personal hygiene, and later scorned by Christians who rejected all things Roman. McLaughlin recites a long litany of examples of how we accept or reject substances, exploring why we dislike sensations such as stickiness and sliminess. Cultural attitudes about everything from factory smoke to personal hygiene are constantly shifting with the economic and political exigencies of the era. In this age of pandemic viruses, there has never been a more important time to observe how people think about the possible contaminants around us. Dirt is a key resource for anyone wishing to understand humanity’s role in shaping our environment.