Wildness & Sensation

WILDNESS & SENSATION Anthropology of Sinister and Sensuous Realms ROB VAN GINKEL & ALEX STRATING (EDITORS) het spinhuis apeldoorn – antwerpen 2007 jojada-def.indd 3 31-8-2007 15:27:23 Distribution in usa, Canada, Latin-America & uk by Transaction Publishers isbn 978 90 5589 293 8 © 2007, Het Spinhuis – Apeldoorn / Antwerpen No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any informa- tion storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright owner. Lay out: Hanneke Kossen Het Spinhuis Publishers — p.o. Box 960 — 7301 be Apeldoorn — the Netherlands www.spinhuis.nl jojada-def.indd 4 31-8-2007 15:27:23 contents Introduction 7 — Rob van Ginkel & Alex Strating Method in the Madness: An Anthropologist’s Pensée Sauvage 14 — Rob van Ginkel part i — Double-Edged Swords: Wildness and Civilization – Radical Inclusion and Exclusion From Dictatorship to Empire: The State of Exception as Rule 49 — Joseba Zulaika Barbarism and Wildness in Modern Warfare 68 — Hans Vermeulen The Minutemen: Re-enacting the Frontier and the Birth of a Nation 89 — Lawrence Taylor Why Integration is a Dirty Word: Critique of a Duplicitous Concept in Times of Globalization 110 — Gerd Baumann The Muslim ‘Wildman’ and the Forging of Orderly Society: Discourses on Radicalization of Young Muslims in Europe 122 — Thijl Sunier Gangs: System or Madness? 141 — Frank van Gemert jojada-def.indd 5 31-8-2007 15:27:23 Violent Witch Finders and the Suspension of Social Order in a Suriname Maroon Society 157 — Bonno Thoden van Velzen & Ineke van Wetering Re-encoding the Primitive: Some Apocryphal Thoughts on Public Representations of Candomblé 177 — Mattijs van de Port Homo Ludens and the Wild Man: Pleasure and Aggression in Dutch Amateur Football 197 — Alex Strating part ii — Making Sense: Materiality, Embodied Experiences and Sensorial Sensations Feasts and Fireworks in Malta: A Sensory Cascade 217 — Jeremy Boissevain The Sensation of Dance Events: Ritual and Sensory Experience in Entertainment 236 — Irene Stengs Sensuous Mediations: The City in ‘Ghanaian Films’ – and Beyond 254 — Birgit Meyer From The Untouchables Towards Cool Investigation 275 — Yolanda van Ede Screening the Senses 295 — David Howes The Power of the Eyes: A Glimpse of People Staring 316 — Suzanne Kuik jojada-def.indd 6 31-8-2007 15:27:23 Longing for the Country of the True Germans: Covering Up Shared Lies by Comforting Scents 322 — Milena Veenis Buildings Don’t Breathe: Taboos Related to the Multi-Sensory Materiality of Buildings 344 — Mélanie van der Hoorn Order, Chaos and Desperation: The Hyper-materiality of Everyday Life 364 — Orvar Löfgren The Social Life of Faeces: System in the Dirt 381 — Sjaak van der Geest Touching Creatures, Sensing Nature: The Sensorial ‘Consumption’ of Cetaceans 398 — Rob van Ginkel List of Contributors 421 jojada-def.indd 7 31-8-2007 15:27:23 the social life of faeces System in the Dirt Sjaak van der Geest The anxiety and discomfort felt about excrement, combined with their attraction and fascination, represent a crucial anthropological paradox: the curious cultural taming of what appears to us as wild and uncontrolled. Like violence, cruelty, sex, abdominal desires and disobedient bodies, dirt seems to escape from the order that culture imposes; seems to… but does not.1 We should not underestimate the disciplinary power that culture pro- duces. The dirt of human excrement is a useful topic to demonstrate that cultural ambiguity. Faeces are indeed an intriguing matière à penser, which, however, has been amazingly neglected by anthropologists. Elsewhere I have attempted to explain that negligence (van der Geest 2007). One reason, I believe, is that anthropologists in the field have been unable to rid themselves of their cultural codes of propriety. Home-based discomfort and rules of etiquette have prevented them from entering the dark world of defecation. Artists are less inhibited by the cultural codes of their own society and may, therefore, be better ‘anthropologists’ (that is: ‘de-famil- iarizers’) than professional anthropologists (see Verrips n.d.; Menninghaus 2003:25-49).2 The concept of dirt offers people the opportunity to order their life. The old functionalistic view that order is the heart of culture has never been abandoned, however loudly the structural-functionalist tradition may have been criticized. The classification of dirt shows how that order is constituted and where the boundaries between good and bad, right and wrong, inside and outside lie. Mary Douglas’s concept of ‘matter out of place’ has been most influential here. Excretions of the body comprise the most strongly felt ‘matter out of place’ and therefore the most informative pointers of cultural boundaries. jojada-def.indd 381 31-8-2007 15:28:00 382 wildness & sensation The purpose of this essay is to add a social, or even sociological, dimen- sion to Douglas’s concept of (out of ) ‘place.’ The social situation, the relat- edness of people who are involved with dirt, is a stronger predictor of disgust than other types of places discussed in Douglas’s work. Faeces are an excellent example with which to make this clear.3 MARY DOUGLAS’S MATTER OUT OF PLACE Anthropological studies have something in common with poems. We love a poem just because of one line and forget the rest. In the same way we may cherish a book for just a few pages. Mary Douglas’s classic Purity and Dan- ger (1970) is a good example. Much of it may never be remembered, but her view on dirt as matter out of place, her six-page introduction, has become extremely dear to me because of its beautiful simplicity and its provoca- tion.4 Her statement that absolute dirt does not exist opened new windows on culture. Dirt is defined by its context. It is disorder and carries an invita- tion or rather an obligation to restore order: Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing trans- gressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created (ibid.:15). Red wine in a glass is fine; on a dress it becomes dirt. Shoes on the floor (Douglas’s own example) are in order, but not on the table. Kissing one’s child is a beautiful gesture, kissing a stranger in the train will cause trou- ble. What about faeces, however? How useful is Douglas’s perspective for our understanding of defecation and faeces and their ‘dys-appearance’ (Leder 1990) from the eye (and ear and nose) of others? Are faeces ever not out place? Can they be clean and orderly? Is shit not always dirty, by itself, by its nature, wherever it is: in a lavatory, in the sewer, in a nappy, in the street, on a sandwich? The examples indicate that there are degrees of dirt- iness. Faeces in the pipes of the sewerage system are just dirty, but on a sandwich that I am supposed to eat they become unspeakably disgusting.5 jojada-def.indd 382 31-8-2007 15:28:00 the social life of faeces 383 Figure 1 A night soil collector in Ghana. The problem, however, lies with the faeces in the sewers. Are they not in the right place and therefore ‘clean’? A Dutch plumber studying anthropology told me that shit in the sewer did not worry him. Dealing with it in that place had become normal prac- tice to him, but a turd in the lavatory bowl would disgust him. A night soil collector I met in Ghana had no problem scooping the faeces of his cus- tomers into his own bucket with his bare hands. Nurses – or should I say: good nurses – help defecating patients without feelings of disgust (Lawler jojada-def.indd 383 31-8-2007 15:28:01 384 wildness & sensation 1991; van Dongen 2001). Each profession develops its own subculture with specific standards of order and disorder.6 Can faeces ever be clean, however? The faeces I carry with me in my body are in the right place (as long as they do not stay there for too long) and do not worry me. They may become dirty if someone starts to draw special attention to their presence and tries to discredit the human body as ‘a sack of shit.’7 By doing so, the faeces are as it were removed from their orderly place and placed before our eyes by the mere fact of talking about them. The same is true for faeces in the lavatory. They do not disgust us (as long as they are our own). We deal with the situation daily and do not feel stressed during the activity of defecation. However, bringing them up in conversation – or writing, as I am now doing – makes them dirty because we feel that they should not be discussed in public. Shit is an intimate product. We part with it in private and there it should remain. By talking and writing about it, it becomes a matter out of place; it disturbs the order of proper behaviour. That is the reason why people in Cameroon told Ndonko (1993:209) that they would never say that so and so is in the toilet or that they are going there. Similar things have been said about countless other cultures.8 Faeces out of sight, out of conversation and out of mind are clean. Contamination does not only work physically, it also takes place in metaphoric and meto- nymic ways. That is why a wall that bears the text ‘Do not urinate here’ is as dirty as a wall against which people have actually pissed.

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