Disgust and the Anthropological Imagination

Abstract

Although disgust often features in anthropological shop talk and teaching, it has not been explored as a heuristic in formal anthropological studies. I suggest that studying disgust would contribute to understanding the tensions and revealing underdeveloped elements in some common analytical frameworks, including the mind–body relationship, the nature of the self, anthropological approaches to the senses and to emotion, recent interest in intimacy, and the invocation of the imagination as part of social and cultural process, as well as the ways we think about fieldwork and write ethnographies.

Keywords:

• Disgust
• emotions
• body
• imagination

Notes

See Connor (1997) for discussion of subjectivity based on non-visual senses. Miller (1997) discusses various sensory forms of disgust in the west.

This is in part the goal of such seminal works as Stoller's (1989) The Taste of Ethnographic Things, but Stoller does not do the kind of rich ethnography of the senses that Geurts (2002) accomplishes, and sometimes seems to subordinate such things as taste (of a wife's sauce) to social manipulations and signals, instead of examining the integration of sense and affect. Conversely Geurts' study of a sensorium does not explore that sensorium as part of contested and dynamic social life.

See, for a start, Howes (2005). This book is part of a series published by Berg Publishers on ‘sense cultures’.

Kolnai, in his 1927 essay on disgust, also uses the term habitus.

John Leavitt describes the western dichotomy between mind and body, inward emotion and rational (outward) speech, as a ‘radical distinction between a realm of expressive freedom characteristic of our minds and one of determinism characteristic of our bodies and the physical world’ (Leavitt 1996:515). Leavitt notes that emotion, much as disgust as I discuss it here, is both good and ‘hard to think’ (p. 517) precisely because it combines these realms.

Douglas's idea of the body as a ‘natural symbol’ still subordinates the body to maps generated by the mind, and by the mind as mediator of social experience (Douglas 1996 [1973]).

It is interesting to think about the relationship between empathy and sympathy, in this case.

My own work was among Herero; other work I reference here was among Tswana or Kgalagadi people. While specific ideas about sentiment varies even among or within Tswana populations, a general sense of the intersubjective nature of sentiment is shared among these groups.

I think here of Hollan and Throop's reference to Anthony Wallace's observation that ‘much of social life goes on without intimate knowledge of others’ motives and intentions – through habit, routine, common expectation, and widely shared rules of social engagement' (Hollan & Throop 2008:385–6).

Note how William Jankowiak and Thomas Paladino refer to (various forms of) love as ‘emotional bonds’ (Jankowiak & Palladino 2008:27, my italics). However, love as a historically constituted sentimental form is also, as Thomas and Cole argue, part of struggles over ‘difference and … political inclusion’ (Thomas & Cole 2009:29). Like disgust, one might say.

This picture – common in literature on disgust – focuses on a particular urban class's sentiments, and subordinates the sentiment of disgust to class formation – making it a tool of social engineering and ignoring its broader cultural history. The poor rural peasant, in fact, did live in proximity with other classes in the countryside.

Anderson (1991) and Appadurai's (1996) work are the main works that have prompted the use of the term. See Axel (2003) and Sneath et al. (2009) for some important critiques and suggestions. Strauss (2006) critiques the way the terms ‘imaginary’ and ‘imagination’ often refer to generalized, reified, cultural schemas, and calls for a more person-centered approach. I read ‘imaginary’ as having somewhat different reference than imagination, and is indeed schematic, and work here to challenge thought on the ‘imagination’.

Wilson (2002) has also called for increased attention to disgust as an imaginative practice, but tends to consider that imagination in ‘visual’ and narrative terms – like a film in the mind, even as he appreciates the complex layering of sense and experience that make general theories of disgust elusive.