ABSTRACT
This chapter participates in a conversation increasingly focused on filth, rubbish, garbage, and litter: the field of waste studies. There is a veritable canon of anthropological, archaeological, and sociological theoretical works that address waste as a category, such as Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory, and John Scanlan’s On Garbage, all of which argue that, in varying ways, we have disciplined ourselves with regard to dirt. Anthropological approaches, such as that of Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, along with Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, and William Ian Miller in The Anatomy of Disgust, influentially set up the category of dirt and its relationship to order and boundaries. Douglas famously reads dirt as “matter out of place.”1 Dirt remains integral to order, purity, and system; controlling it reflects “a positive effort to organize the environment.”2 Peggy McCracken points out that Douglas suggests that the body both symbolizes society and contains “social anxieties.”3 The body, then, is simultaneously the focus of positive cultural values and the cause of fears and problems.
