An Instance of Dirt or Pollution in Life - Essay Example

Instance of Dirt or Pollution in my Life Diarrhea – How and why it is polluting? Diarrhea is something that always bothers me. Aside from more frequent trips to the toilet, it aches and makes me a think that something dirty, polluting, and destructive invaded my body. Moreover, the increase in stool frequency and liquidity increases my anxiety and feeling of filthiness. For this reason, I never tell anybody about it and stay at home until the symptoms recedes. According to Ashforth (2005, p.167) diarrhea is caused by least evident or undetectable form of dirt or pollution impairing the system of the body. It is a disorder of the mechanism that control intestinal fluid and electrolyte transport due to the invasion of micro-organisms, carbohydrate excess and pharmacologic agents (Selbst & Cronan 2000, p.51). However, viruses are the most common causes of acute diarrhea (Hay et al. 2002, p.630) and it is closely linked to personal hygiene practices (Nelson & Williams 2005, p.510). The Notion of Dirt and Pollution Dirt and pollution according to Wilson (1996, p.49) is simply anomalous matters and matters produced or emitted from the body such as phlegm, snot, earwax, saliva, urine, and excrement are considered dirty or polluting because they transgress the boundaries of the body. This is also concern with substances that breach the integrity of the body such as defecating, ejaculating, eating, and sneezing and it should be cleaned with water, earth, or other purifying agents. For instance, the Hindus requires a ritual bath for a person who has, through vomiting or diarrhea, violently spewed the contents of his or her body from either end of the digestive tube (Wilson 1996, p.49). According to Douglas (1984, p.7), the thought of dirt is composed of two things, care for hygiene and value for custom. Reflection on dirt involves according to (Bowie 2000, p.46) relation of order and disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. For (Gamsey 1999, p.93), dirt is the consequence of a methodical ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves eradicating incompatible elements. “Dirt is a matter out of place” (Douglas 1999, p.109), that implies a collection of ordered relations and a breach of that order. Drawing from these interpretations, dirt appears to be a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, stain, oppose, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The fundamental feeling is that a system of values which is customarily articulated in a given arrangement of things has been desecrated. For instance, shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining table. In other words, our dirt or pollution behaviour is the reaction which denounces anything or thought likely to perplex or challenge cherished classifications (Dunn 1988, p.25). Dirt and Social and Cultural Implications People are branded as unclean because their behaviour is somehow in conflict with the order that the majority is accustomed to viewing as the only correct one. It appears that impurity or dirt results from the overstepping of a boundary. In other words, for as long as everything is in its place, every person where he or she should be, there is little probability that will start thinking in categories of dirt. By classifying the world, organizing it according to the system one has learned, one sorts out the things that do not fit. Dirt is consequently the by-product of this systematic arrangement. Every act of ordering involves some things falling outside the system (Frykman, Lofgren, & Crozier. 1997, p.165). Understanding dirt enables us to learn a lot about the system, the society, or the culture that ascribes the property of impurity to certain acts, persons, or things (Frykman, Lofgren, & Crozier 1987, p.165). Sex is interpreted negatively because of its connection with dirt, a linkage manifested in the word ‘obscene’ (Plummer 2002, p.259). Dirt was not just pollution in the environment, it was thought to emanate from unhygienic or immoral bodies and pollute the surrounding environment (Duncan 2007, p.127). Having a diarrhea therefore is dirty and immoral because disease is a consequence of poor hygiene and dirt (Valeri 2000, p.73). Impurity and Sin The notions of pollution and purity are only partially concomitant with the notion of sin (Johnston 2004, p.500). For instance, someone guilty of murder is polluted with blood, and condition of guilt, more generally speaking, entails a state of impurity. Sins, although acts are conceived of as stains that need to be purged. The principal idea that informs the notion of purity, however, does not come from the realm of ethics because purity stands for perfection and integrity – “moral, physical, spiritual, and social” (Johnston 2004, p.500). The predominant aspect of purity is physical and cleanliness is the first prerequisite of purity. Such impurity is impaired by pollution in the literal sense of the term- dust, spoiled, substances, sweat, and contact with various other bodily fluids. Every substance that issues from the human body or the animal body is potentially defiling. Generally speaking, impurity follows from a lessening of integrity or wholeness and such lessening may occur on account of substance that render impure because they add foreign element. Therefore, being pure is also to be unalloyed or being without admixture. Similarly, to become polluted is to come in contact with something that is dirty or nasty (Milner 1994, p.111). Works on symbolic cultural rules about dirt and pollution according to Lupton (2003, p.152), menstrual discharge may be regarded as matter ‘out of place’ in that it breaches the boundaries of body that normally contains blood unless there is injury. The potent symbolic meanings of blood, relating to death, pain, loss of control and warfare which is general bodily and societal disorder and the regular emergence of menstrual blood form the uterus and vary, parts of the body which are themselves considered dirty and contaminating, combine to render menstrual blood as a highly meaningful and anxiety-provoking fluid. Illness and Morality “The Western culture is invested in hygiene, purity, and order” (Alexander, Anderson, & Gallegos. 2005, p.88). Dirt and pollution are incorporated in the social value systems of a variety of communities and these were reflected in and by the religious orders in these communities which at the same time developed rules of taboo which needed to be respected in order for the community’s members to remain healthy and accepted (Wilkinson 2006, p.133). Industrialization and urbanization precipitated the public health and sanitary reform and they brought the dirt and filth that were recognized as unhealthy. For instance, the Victorian culture associated order and cleanliness with purity, uncleanness with pollution. Purity and cleanliness implied morality, while pollution and uncleanness suggested its opposite, immorality (Lynaugh & Rinker 1999, p.193). In an in-depth interview study of working-class people in east London about the relationship between way of life and common sense ideas about health and illness, people revealed illness to ‘morally problematic conditions’ (Annandale 1998, p.27). It is culture, not nature, that determines what is dangerous and to shunned (Garnsey 1999, p.93). The people always made sure that they were seen to be in the right or the morally correct position – being basically healthy. The reason for this was that health was intimately bound up with moral worth since illness can incapacitate and prevent people from working. In doing so, it can threaten not only the practical basis of their lives but also their moral reputation, “a key facet of self-identity” (Annandale 1998, p.27). Ideas of dirt have been transformed in the past one hundred years or so by knowledge of pathogenicity or the existence of germs and their role in the transmission of disease. Thus, the medial materialist model and our perception of dirt is a matter of hygiene (Bowie 2000, p.47). In Japan, for instance, Japanese wash their hands when they come inside the house because they believed that the outside is categorically dirty. The accepted Japanese explanation for this behaviour is the germ theory which suggests that there are many germs outside. As illness represents an imbalance caused by outside germs, curing such illness is brought about by procedures that balance. (Rush 1996, p.147). The attribution of illness to some outside polluting force, whether is be conceived of as germs or as some malevolent supernatural being, according to Hendry (1995, p.125) may be associated with general concern with purity in Japanese religious and secular ritual since it shows the concepts of dirt and pollution universally associated with areas in which there is a breakdown of cultural order. The Feeling of Being Dirty Feeling of contamination or being dirty falls into two main categories. They are those in which person feels contaminated by contact with dirty and disgusting material, and contamination arising from actual or threatened contact with material or people capable of transmitting infectious diseases to the person. It is a persistent, intense feeling of having been polluted or infected by physical contact with, or by association with, a place or person that is soiled, impure, infectious or a combination of these. Contamination is accompanied by unpleasant emotions, among which disgust, fear, immortality, and shame are prominent. The person usually feels that the contamination can be transmitted to other people and, in these instances, will go to great lengths to avoid spreading contamination. These contaminations instigate attempts to remove the dirt, impurity, or potentially infectious material. As a secondary consequence, it leads to extensive avoidance of situations in which the person fears that there is the possibility of contact with a contaminant. Intensive, meticulous, repetitive washing and cleaning compulsions are undertaken in an attempt to remove the feelings of dirtiness and or the perceived threat to one’s health. Compulsive cleaning is one of the most common, classical manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder due from dirt (De Silva & Rachman 2004, p.8). As human beings we incessantly generate patterns of meaning out of our individual and joint experience. Once a pattern is established it is often reinforced and we become blind to or consciously ignore what does not fit into it. There is an in-built filtering mechanism that human beings do not like ambiguity and anomaly, as they upset and challenge the foundations of our systems of meaning. An example of the ability of people to ignore what they dislike is the attitude of some cultures to waste products (Bowie 2000, p.48). Physical taboos represent social boundaries and systems of segregations and often centre around bodily orifices which, as the margin between the inside and the outside of the body, are luminal spaces that represent a threat to established social divisions, also producing waste products that similarly threaten corporeal and social order. Dirt and bodily waste are threatening because they have the power to confuse or contradict cherished classifications and waste products produce from the anal and genital area, particularly those concerned with bodily functions of digestion and procreation, are viewed as particularly hazardous or repellent. Genital taboos are being treated similarly with sexual behaviour in a given society particularly in societies where lines of descent are strictly controlled. In an analysis conducted by Douglas (1966) in Keown (2005, p.69), about anal and excremental taboos, she made the distinction between Western and primitive cultures, saying hat primitive cultures view pollution as religious sacrilege while in Western cultures, attitudes to dirt and bodily waste products have become secularized and are associated predominantly with sanitary conventions. Pollution in western culture is a matter of aesthetics, hygiene or etiquette, which only becomes grave in so far as it may create social embarrassment. In contrast, in a large group of human societies, the affects of pollution are much more wide ranging since a grave pollution is a religious offence. For instance, in India, religious implications of excremental pollution can go as far as being condemned and unproductive and is associated with death and decay. In fact, in one region, people reputedly associate excrement and other bodily waste products with madness and death. A polluted person is always assumed incorrect. He or she may have developed some incorrect conditions or plainly crossed some boundaries which should not have been traversed. Illness, whether caused by deities, demons, or other agents, entails a state of impurity (Johnston 2004, p.501). Human excrement for many is inherently polluting and not matter how scientifically sanitary a toilet might be, to enter such facility and certainly to use it lower one’s purity (Dundes 1997, p.81). Even food was described as “dangerous liason” (Warin 2003, p.81) as polluting and crossing bodily boundaries. The primary reaction to impurity is disgust, the emotion specifically related to dirty ingested materials. Internal pollution has its roots in the fear of oral ingestion of polluted material, including those that are transferred from the surface of the body into the mouth. Pollution of the body self are often extended to morally significant aspects of the self as mind, spirit, and character through metaphorical bridges to such “putative sources of pollution as sin and moral error” (Barfield 1997, p.384). Conclusion Diarrhea is considered dirty as it came from dirt and pollution, and it is closely linked to personal hygiene practices. Dirt and pollution is anomalous matters and excrements are considered polluting as it transgresses the boundaries of the body. Dirt is compounded by care for hygiene and respect for custom and people are branded unclean because their behaviour is in conflict with these accepted customs. Dirt emanates from unhygienic or immoral bodies that are polluting the environment. Illness always entails impurity and human excrement is inherently polluting. Diarrhea is caused by dirty and harmful micro-organisms or viruses that entered the body because of poor hygiene and neglectful food consumption. Having a diarrhea is therefore impure, dirty, and immoral as it is a consequence poor hygiene and dirt. Bibliography Annandale E. 1998. The sociology of health and medicine: a critical introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, UK Alexander B. K., Anderson G. L., & Gallegos B. P. 2005. Performance theories in education: power, pedagogy, and the politics of identity. Routledge, 2005, US Ashforth A. 2005. 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