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The Ground of Being: The Drama of Dirt in Genesis 2:4b–3:24

William P. Brown

in The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder

The topic is the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2:4b-3:24, the Yahwist account of creation. In contrast to the God of Genesis 1, the God of the Garden is a down-to-earth deity who improvises and sometimes ... More

The topic is the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2:4b-3:24, the Yahwist account of creation. In contrast to the God of Genesis 1, the God of the Garden is a down-to-earth deity who improvises and sometimes fails in the act of creating. This “low” view of God is matched by humankind’s portrayal as a “groundling,” a product of God’s work with dirt, in contrast to the “image of God” portrayal in Genesis 1. Written in view of ancient Israel’s mixed experience with monarchy, the Garden narrative focuses on the human family and its rise to power. As such, it invites dialogue with the anthropological account of human evolution, the human tree of life. Both accounts affirm the common ground of biological life and the challenging transitions that have shaped humanity’s development and ascendancy in creation. Evolutionary science reinterprets the account of the “Fall” of humanity in powerfully ecological ways.Less

Gothic Novelties

Dominic Janes

in Victorian Reformation: The Fight Over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840-1860

This chapter examines the notion of dirt and abjection in more detail before exploring the ways in which these phenomena were accommodated within Victorian society. The key mechanism is understood to ... More

This chapter examines the notion of dirt and abjection in more detail before exploring the ways in which these phenomena were accommodated within Victorian society. The key mechanism is understood to be that underpinning Gothic literature in which transgression is harnessed as entertainment. By exploring a case study of critique of the Anglo-Catholic confessional, the chapter explains how pleasure was generated via the invention of a sexualised and scandalous Catholicism in the minds of Protestant viewers. It is then explained how this is associated with a boom in the production of the sale of Gothic narratives in the form not only of fiction, but also of tracts and journalism. In this way the anomalous position of ritualism was rendered into financially profitable form for wider elements in society.Less

Scruggs without Flatt: A Period of Transition

Thomas Goldsmith

in Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic

When Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs split up in 1969, it freed Scruggs to play music that was more to his taste and even to express political opinions, as he did when playing at a massive protest of ... More

When Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs split up in 1969, it freed Scruggs to play music that was more to his taste and even to express political opinions, as he did when playing at a massive protest of the war in Vietnam during the same year. He started his own group, the Earl Scruggs Revue, in which he performed with his sons, supplemented by additional musicians including future Southern rock star Charlie Daniels. Flatt also started his own group, using several musicians who had played in the Foggy Mountain Boys and sticking with a traditional bluegrass direction. Meanwhile, Scruggs was collaborating with musicians such as Bob Dylan and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. These ventures echoed an earlier jam with jazz/r&b saxophonist King Curtis, an encounter Scruggs said influenced him profoundly.Less

The Imperfect Contours of Outsourced Domestic Cleaning as Dirty Work

Lotika Singha

in Work, Labour and Cleaning: The Social Contexts of Outsourcing Housework

This chapter considers the symbolic construction of domestic cleaning as dirty work and the real, physical work of dealing with dirt. Through the lens of outsourced domestic cleaning – how much ... More

This chapter considers the symbolic construction of domestic cleaning as dirty work and the real, physical work of dealing with dirt. Through the lens of outsourced domestic cleaning – how much cleaning is necessary and what can be outsourced – the chapter shows that an ‘objective’ analysis of human experiences of dealing with real physical dirt is not possible without reference to dirt’s moral meanings for the researched as well as the researcher. The chapter concludes that the dirty work approach offers an incomplete understanding of paid domestic work and that an alternative paradigm is required.Less

Sources of the Military Metaphors of Medicine

Abraham Fuks

in The Language of Medicine

Chapter 5 traces the historical origins of military metaphors and seeks to understand their cultural roots. Some scholars point to Pasteur’s germ theory and the development of immunology in the late ... More

Chapter 5 traces the historical origins of military metaphors and seeks to understand their cultural roots. Some scholars point to Pasteur’s germ theory and the development of immunology in the late nineteenth century as the beginnings of the linguistic wars against bacteria and disease. Yet, physicians of an earlier era prior to any knowledge of bacteria postulated a human body engaged in life-and-death battles, and the earliest depiction of fever as evidence of a war within the body appears in the work of an Italian friar in 1635. The chapter postulates an earlier cultural origin for these metaphoric battles in ancient theological sources in which disease is understood as retribution for sins and an evil that must be fought with contrition and prayer. The Psychomachia, an allegorical work of the fifth century, relates the mythic battles between good and evil that are later readily evident in Puritan writings of England and early America.Less

Conclusion: A Dirty Word

in The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

Regulation of error's ambiguity is tied to narratives of risk and promise, including a reliable history of language and thought, a coherent model of subject-formation, and a rigorous critical ... More

Regulation of error's ambiguity is tied to narratives of risk and promise, including a reliable history of language and thought, a coherent model of subject-formation, and a rigorous critical philosophy. The impure rhyme that seals the fate of both Penthesilea and Achilles in Heinrich von Kleist's tragedy implies a complex interaction between dirt, error, and the production of meaning. Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger, with its analysis of pollution and taboo, offers a structuralist answer to a paradox about uncleanliness: objects that are considered “dirty” or “unclean” by a culture are sometimes revered in the holiest of rituals. This chapter examines the neutralization of dirt and its conversion into symbolic power in Purity and Danger. It also explores how an indelible dirtiness persists in the texts of Herodotus and Kleist, and argues that a similar anxiety about hygiene and waste disposal occurs in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.Less

Spaces of Abjection and a ‘Civic-Disciplining’ Model of Policing

Santana Khanikar

in State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India

This chapter examines the discursive production of some spaces as ‘filthy’ and ‘criminal’ places, and thus requiring a specific form of policing. By attaching meanings to geographical spaces and ... More

This chapter examines the discursive production of some spaces as ‘filthy’ and ‘criminal’ places, and thus requiring a specific form of policing. By attaching meanings to geographical spaces and people therein, such constructions create a division between a ‘self’ to be protected and an ‘other’ to be policed, and in the context of a postcolonial society ridden by hierarchies of various nature makes for easy accommodation and tolerance of violence. The chapter draws on texts of laws and court judgments, reports of state bodies and rights advocacy organizations, and personal interactions and ethnographic observations in the field. Focusing on everyday policing practices in contemporary Delhi, and conceptualizing categorizations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘civilized’ and ‘criminal’, ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ and ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, the chapter looks for their implications in the acceptance and understanding of the role of the state in society.Less

Dreams Collide

Jill D. Snider

in Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur

Chapter 7 describes Headen’s difficulties expanding his coalition strategy as he moved from auto manufacturing to auto racing in the mid-1920s. Documented are his reconfiguration of the Afro-American ... More

Chapter 7 describes Headen’s difficulties expanding his coalition strategy as he moved from auto manufacturing to auto racing in the mid-1920s. Documented are his reconfiguration of the Afro-American Automobile Association to focus on dirt-track racing; his career as an auto racer and race promoter; and internal rifts within his coalition based on gender, professional competition, and religious and political differences. The chapter explores defections from the coalition by women and religious figures, upset over the switch from a business model dedicated to racial advancement to a track culture steeped in profanity, alcohol, and danger; departures by political conservatives upset over the selection of a prominent black nationalist as the Association’s publicist; and Headen’s rejection by fellow race organizers competing directly with him for audiences. These internal conflicts, which eventually splintered both the Association and Headen’s marriage, ultimately revealed the limits of the “coalition economics” model.Less

“Matter out of place”: Dirt, Disorder, and Ecophobia

Anthony Pavlik

in Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna: A Children's Classic at 100

This chapter considers Pollyanna in view of recent ideas of ecophobia—an unreasonable but deeply conditioned reaction against nature—taking the idea of dirt and disorder as matter out of place. The ... More

This chapter considers Pollyanna in view of recent ideas of ecophobia—an unreasonable but deeply conditioned reaction against nature—taking the idea of dirt and disorder as matter out of place. The presence of the natural world in Pollyanna reveals contemporary perceptions of dirt as disorder and the natural world as intrusions into the domestic. Aunt Polly's desire for a well-cleaned and orderly house and her need to maintain the purity and order of the inside of her house against the outside can be considered in terms of how dirt and pollution relate to social structures and norms. The presence of dust and dirt represents a failure of control over the environment. Thus, cleanliness and good housekeeping become intrinsic to maintaining the social space of the home by instituting a cultural boundary whereby the clean and ordered house marks the difference between culture and the “other”—the natural world.Less

Interlude: Re-Turn and Dis-Integration

Sam Dubal

in Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord's Resistance Army

The interlude attends to the concept of “reintegration,” or demobilization, whereby LRA rebels leaving the frontlines were to be reformed to live in peace among civilians. It highlights the ways in ... More

The interlude attends to the concept of “reintegration,” or demobilization, whereby LRA rebels leaving the frontlines were to be reformed to live in peace among civilians. It highlights the ways in which civilians and NGO workers conceptualized rebels as animals needing to be humanized and the ways in which rebels, in turn, resisted this disciplinary process. It shows that rebels did not want or need to have their heads “repaired.” Rather, it was civilians for whom “reintegration” was ritually healing, allowing them to heal their own sicknesses by projecting them onto rebels. Whereas reintegration offered to cleanse rebels through the pure concept of “humanity,” the interlude acts as a dirtying process of dis-integration, rejecting the healing offered by “humanity.”Less

Space of Production: Postsocialist Filmmaking

Yingjin Zhang

in Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China

This chapter examines both the space of production and the production of space in Chinese cinema during the postsocialist period. It draws on Dai Jinhua's guangchang (square) to consider the changing ... More

This chapter examines both the space of production and the production of space in Chinese cinema during the postsocialist period. It draws on Dai Jinhua's guangchang (square) to consider the changing power-geometries in 1990s China, as well as Henri Lefebvre's differentiation of isotopias, utopias, and heterotopias and Michel Foucault's meditation on other spaces to illustrate the coexistence and interpenetration of underground, independent, semi-independent, and official modes of filmmaking. The chapter first presents a diagram on modes of interactions among contending players of politics, capital, art, and marginality. It then traces the early trajectories of Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan and emphasizes the importance of marginality in cultivating an alternative public sphere. It also looks at the emergence of the sixth generation by focusing on the 1994 film Dirt, along with the subcultural margins of rock music in the early 1990s. The chapter concludes by assessing changes in Chinese urban cinema from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.Less

Green Consumption in a Dangerous World

Thomas Jundt

in Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America

Organic agriculture was at the heart of an alternative, environmental vision for postwar America. J. I. Rodale led the way with his book Pay Dirt: Farming and Gardening with Composts (1945), and his ... More

Organic agriculture was at the heart of an alternative, environmental vision for postwar America. J. I. Rodale led the way with his book Pay Dirt: Farming and Gardening with Composts (1945), and his monthly journal Organic Farming and Gardening. Organic agriculture was an environmental response to the rise of corporate agribusiness, and the synthetic chemical pesticides and herbicides developed for the war and adapted to agriculture. James Rorty, a poet and journalist, and N. Philip Norman, a nutritionist and physician, took up where Rodale left off with their 1947 book, Tomorrow’s Food: The Coming Revolution in Nutrition. With government seemingly more beholden to big business than the protection of citizens and the environment, proto-environmentalists in the late 1940s urged citizens to assert agency by choosing environmentally friendly products. By decade’s end, air pollution had become a growing cause of concern after a fatal smog incident in Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948.Less

Santuario de Chimayó

Frank Graziano

in Historic Churches of New Mexico Today

After a summary of the santuario’s history, the Christ of Esquipulas is discussed in relation to the Guatemalan image by the same name and to other Black Christs in the region. The use of holy dirt ... More

After a summary of the santuario’s history, the Christ of Esquipulas is discussed in relation to the Guatemalan image by the same name and to other Black Christs in the region. The use of holy dirt at the santuario is then considered together with miracles attributed to it. The subsequent section discusses aesthetic and spiritual emotional reactions to the interior of the santuario chapel. Also described and analyzed are Holy Week events at the santuario, including the Penitentes’ participation; pilgrimage and the annual Pilgrimages for Vocations; and the murder in 2000 of two teenage pilgrims to the santuario. The chapter concludes with a visiting guide, including directions to historic churches in the area.Less

Erasure and Addition: Robert Rauschenberg 1953

George Cotkin

in Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility

Robert Rauschenberg was important for challenging traditional divisions in culture between high and low, for expanding the possibilities of what constituted a work of art. His work from 1953 was ... More

Robert Rauschenberg was important for challenging traditional divisions in culture between high and low, for expanding the possibilities of what constituted a work of art. His work from 1953 was excessive in its devotion to experiment, ranging from single-color paintings to using various objects for sculptural works, and even including a “dirt painting” that needed to be watered. He had cajoled a drawing from the major artist Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg then attempted to erase it, thereby transforming it into a new work of art called Erased de Kooning. In his work during this year he was attempting to distance himself from the establishment in art.Less