Synopses & Reviews
Dirt - and our rituals to eradicate it - are as much a part of our everyday lives as eating, breathing and sleeping. Yet this very fact means that we seldom question what we mean by dirt. What do our attitudes to dirt and cleanliness tell us about ourselves and the societies we live in? This innovative work exposes the interests which underlie everyday conceptions of dirt and reveals how our ideas about it are intimately bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. Exploring a wide variety of settings - domestic, urban and rural - it reveals how attitudes to dirt and cleanliness become manifest in surprisingly diverse ways, including the rituals of death and burial; architectural design aesthetics; urban infrastructure and regeneration; film symbolism; and consumer attitudes to food.A rich and challenging work that extends our understanding of the cultural manifestations of dirt and cleanliness.
Review
'Campkin and Cox have given us a fresh approach in a well thought out collection … well worth reading' - D. Jorgensen, Humanities and Social Sciences Online
About the Author
Ben Campkin is Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. With Paul Dobraszczyk he is co-editor of Architecture and Dirt, a special issue of the Journal of Architecture (2007).
Rosie Cox is Senior Lecturer in London Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of The Servant Problem: Paid Domestic Work in a Global Economy (I.B. Tauris, 2006).
Table of Contents
Figures * Acknowledgements * Introduction * Home: Domestic Dirt and Cleaning * Introduction * Linguistic Leakiness or Really Dirty? Dirt in Social Theory * Domestic Workers and Pollution in Brazil * The Visible and the Invisible: (De)regulation in Contemporary Cleaning Practices * Bring Home the Dead: Purity and Filth in Contemporary Funeral Homes * City and Suburb: Urban Dirt and Cleansing * Introduction * Degradation and Regeneration: Theories of Dirt and the Contemporary City * From the Dirty City to the Spoiled Suburb * Dangers Lurking Everywhere: The Sex Offender as Pollution * Hygiene Aesthetics on London's Gay Scene: The Stigma of AIDS * Spiritual Cleansing: Priests and Prostitutes in Early Victorian London * Mapping Sewer Spaces in mid-Victorian London * The Cinematic Sewer * Country: Constructing Rural Dirt * Introduction * Dirt and Development: Alternative Modernities inThailand * Dirty Foods, Healthy Communities? * Dirty Vegetables: Connecting Consumers to the Growing of their Food * Dirty Cows: Perceptions of BSE/vCJD * Contributors * Notes * References * Index