Whiteness, purity, and classification

Whiteness, purity, and classification

Week 9: Normative sexuality, Donald Trump, and whiteness

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Monday, September 23, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/9.1

Main reading: Bjork-James (2020)

When in Rome...

Dalava ehebo ehebo adi kastam vagadi vagadi.

Every village has its own traditional rules.

Do you observe taboos?

What are things that pollute you?

• dumpster diving
• eating the flesh of a dead body
• eating a cockroach
• breastfeeding in public
  • How would you feel if you saw a woman give her child to another woman to breastfeed?
• touching a bathroom door handle
• walking on a carpet in shoes you wear outside
• bathing in the water someone else used to bathe
• drinking recycled wastewater

What is OK for you is something another would avoid at all costs.

And vice versa, what you think makes you dirty is perfectly clean for someone else.

The path from toilet to tap

To address the growing scarcity of clean drinking water, many communities around the world are trying to recycle wastewater.

• It’s quite easy to completely purify wastewater. Recycled water is chemically identical to fresh water.
• Also, all water is recycled. All air is recycled air too.
• It’s still hard to get people to drink it. They say it’s still dirty (Speigel 2011).

Researchers have tested a new approach to encouraging people to consume recycled water. When facts don’t persuade, tell a story (Rozin et al. 2015; see also Nemeroff and Rozin 2018).

• People were more likely to accept drinking recycled water if they heard a story about how it was recycled.
• They learned all the facts of how it is purified.
• They were then told that the recycled water would flow into an underground cave.
• The water in the cave stayed there undisturbed for one year.
• Then it flowed out into the public water system.

The cave didn’t do anything to the water. It’s a symbol. What does this symbol stand for?

Fun fact: The perception of similar kinds of impurity leads people to avoid other recycled products, and inhibits the development of a more sustainable economy (Baxter, Aurisicchio, and Childs 2017).

Purity is not about being clean

“Clean” and “dirty” are social constructs, just like “sacred” and “profane.”

• Every society will have its own ideas of what is “set apart and forbidden” (Durkheim [1912] 2008, 66). And every society will likewise have its own idea of what counts as clean. They are both thoughts of the collective consciousness of each society, or “social facts” (Durkheim [1895] 1982, 60).
• When a society’s sacred is mixed with things it classifies as profane, then sacred things are impure and unclean. The social fact of the sacred and the social fact of cleanness reinforce each other.

Mary Douglas argues that societies are systems of classifications.

• Dirt is not objective. Dirt is “matter out of place” (Douglas [1966] 2005, 44).
• As she also says, “Where there is dirt, there is system” (Douglas [1966] 2005, 44).
• Cleaning is not objective either. It is act that reorganizes things according to a society’s scheme of classifications (Douglas [1966] 2005, 44–45).

If you break a taboo, then I bet you have a way of cleaning yourself and purging the pollution you feel.

In many cases, being clean and being pure means being complete

Douglas’s ideas on purity and pollution help us to understand Nyamnjoh’s concept of an identity based on completeness.

• Many societies teach people to see their own bodies as sacred, and to keep them pure and free of pollution, although in different ways.
• Hence, people in such societies are invested in the idea that their body is integral, whole, and distinct from the world.
• But, in reality, we are all porous. Many of us simply have learned not to see this.
• We are incomplete. We must absorb elements and influences from the outside. In some situations, we act as if we are complete, or in other words, sacred, and hence pure.

Stuart Hall on difference and (inter)dependence

“I don’t want other people to be like me. I don’t know why they should be. I don’t think my experience is rich enough to embrace the existence of the rest of the world. I have to find a way of recognising that I cannot be self sufficient in myself. I am, from the moment of birth, from the moment of entry into language and culture, dependent on that which is different from me. Otherwise love is self love, love is narcissism, love is locked in solipsism, never gets out of the confines of the reflection in the mirror. It’s not enough. We are dependent on the other - to feed us, to recognise who we are, to speak a language. Our common humanity, which is what you are speaking about, is the process of reciprocity with that which is not us, which is other than us, which is different. So I hope that when we tear each other apart, we’ll find a little bit of common humanity, just so that we don’t fall into what Hobbes called the war of all against all. But humanism is not any longer quite enough for me.” (Hall 2007, 155)

• What does it mean to be “dependent on that which is different”?

Groups can be sacred too. Racism is just a dominant group worshipping itself.

Durkheim is often quoted as saying that religion is just society worshipping itself.

• Not quite, though. He does say, “If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion” (Durkheim [1912] 2008, 533).

National communities (which are at best only a majority) often strip away the pretense and worship themselves as an ethnos.

For them, other people—the rest of humanity—are matter out of place. Ugh! 🤮

References and further reading

Baxter, Weston, Marco Aurisicchio, and Peter Childs. 2017. “Contaminated Interaction: Another Barrier to Circular Material Flows.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 21 (3): 507–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12612.

Bjork-James, Sophie. 2020. “White Sexual Politics: The Patriarchal Family in White Nationalism and the Religious Right.” Transforming Anthropology 28 (1): 58–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12167.

Douglas, Mary. (1966) 2005. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. http://www.myilibrary.com?id=19533.

Durkheim, Emile. (1895) 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. Edited by Steven Lukes. London: The Macmillan Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16939-9.

———. (1912) 2008. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. Newburyport: Dover Publications. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1890174.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Living with Difference: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Bill Schwarz.” Soundings 37 (December):148–59. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266207820465570.

Nemeroff, Carol, and Paul Rozin. 2018. “Back in Touch with Contagion: Some Essential Issues.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 3 (4): 612–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/699971.

Rozin, Paul, Brent Haddad, Carol Nemeroff, and Paul Slovic. 2015. “Psychological Aspects of the Rejection of Recycled Water: Contamination, Purification and Disgust.” Judgment and Decision Making 10 (1): 50–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S193029750000317X.

Speigel, Alix, dir. 2011. “Why Cleaned Wastewater Stays Dirty In Our Minds.” Morning Edition. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/2011/08/16/139642271/why-cleaned-wastewater-stays-dirty-in-our-minds.