ABSTRACT
What does it mean to feel ‘utter disgust’? Why do some things seem more disgusting than others? Are we necessarily disgusted by the same things and can we recognise when another is ‘plainly disgusted’, by what they do with their bodies? In the quotation above, the complexity of disgust could not be more apparent, despite Darwin’s emphasis on the almost self-evident nature of disgust reactions. Beginning with the etymology of the word ‘disgust’ (bad taste), he draws his reader into an apparently straightforward encounter, but one that can take place only given a certain history, a history whereby the mobility of white European bodies involves the transformation of native bodies into knowledge, property and commodity. Darwin here reads the native body as being disgusted by the texture of that which he eats, while he conveys to the reader his own disgust at the mere proximity of the ‘naked savage’ to his own food. That other is not dirty, he admits. The admission is telling; the other’s hands do not ‘look dirty’ for the proximity of the other to be felt as disgusting. The other is already seen as dirt, as the carrier of dirt, which contaminates the food that has been touched. Disgust reads the objects that are felt to be disgusting: it is not just about bad objects that we are afraid to incorporate, but the very designation of ‘badness’ as a quality we assume is inherent in those objects. Darwin relates ‘badness’ to anything unusual
about food, that is, to anything that departs from ‘the ordinary palate’. This association of what is bad with what is strange or other is significant. The question of what ‘tastes bad’ is bound up with questions of familiarity and strangeness: here, the proximity of the bodies of others is read as the cause of ‘our sickness’ precisely insofar as the other is seeable and knowable as stranger-than-me and stranger-to-us in the first place.
