ABSTRACT
We are accustomed to viewing washing and bathing as essentially mundane
actions, so obvious and ordinary that they require no explanation or analysis. They
are part of corporeal existence that we take for granted and that exists at a level
below articulation or thought. Though social life rests on such bodily activities, we
ignore this in accounts of ourselves and wider society. Bodily life has indeed been
something that has been progressively downplayed in the process of modernity,
and to emphasise it in social life is to breach taboo: to risk vulgarity, to make a joke,
to assert equality, or claim intimacy.
