ABSTRACT
Dirt, as Mary Douglas (1966) has noted, is matter out of place. Similarly, the boundaries of society are continually redrawn to distinguish between those who belong and those who, because of some perceived cultural difference, are deemed to be out of place. The analogy with dirt goes beyond this, however. In order to legitimate their exclusion, people who are defined as ‘other’ or residual, beyond the boundaries of the acceptable, are commonly represented as less than human. In the imagery of rejection, they merge with the non-human world. Thus, indigenous minorities like the Inuit (Eskimo) and other native North Americans have been portrayed ‘at one with nature’, as a part of the natural world rather than civilization. Similarly, in racist propaganda, social groups have been dehumanized by associating them with, or representing them as, animals which are widely considered to be unclean or polluting, like rats or pigs. As Frederick Douglass, an American slave, observed in his biography, the slaves of an estate were valued together with ‘horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination’ (Boime, 1990, p. 211). Such associations effectively put the group outside society and, although mythical, the images become a part of common knowledge.
