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Disgust and the Anthropological Imagination

Deborah DurhamDepartment of Anthropology and Archaeology, Sweet Briar College, VA, USA

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 under-developed 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

Imagine, if you will, a group of anthropologists sitting down to an elegant

meal of tapas during one of their many annual professional meetings. Asthe dishes arrive at the table, the anthropologists begin to exchange stories

of the foods served to them in the field. Disgusting foods, foods that repelled

them or that their bodies eventually rejected – huge sheep eyes offered to an

honored guest, rotted goat’s knees produced generously by residents of the

most impoverished hut, dried fat and furry caterpillars that crunch likecheetos urged by an obese man with several hanging out of his mouth, a

massive chunk of meatless fat from the tail of a fat-tailed sheep cooked andconsumed with greedy delight by married women at the end of a wedding.

(These married women happily gorge, knowing they will very likely vomit

later that night, and suffer violent diarrhea.) To these the anthropologists

added stories about the disgust evinced by non-western people they would

known about eating lobsters, being offered food or a cigarette in a left hand,

using a ‘French’ (or western) toilet, or seeing dogs inside a home and on the

beds. I doubt many readers of this journal have troubles imagining such a

discussion, nor that they would doubt that it really took place, and led to a


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panel at the American Anthropological Association meetings on anthropologi-

cal studies of disgust.

I start this introductory essay with this vignette, including its appeal to the

imagination of readers, because embedded in it are so many of the issues that

an anthropology of disgust opens up for the practice of anthropology, including the mind–body ‘problem’, the nature of selfhood, ideas about the senses, inti-macy and emotion, and the nature of imagination. Because disgust opens up

so many anthropological questions, it is surprising that it has not been

studied more extensively before. Or perhaps it is not surprising that disgust

has been confined to the off-hours of drinks and dinner at anthropological con-

ventions. On the surface, such private exchanges of field stories are a convivial

indulgence for most anthropologists, and an affirmation of our field credentials.

Stories in our field notes are often thought to be a more serious measure of our scientific competence. As such they arouse, variously, sentiments of pride,

shame, or anxiety (Jackson 1990). The informal field stories we exchange of ill-nesses that almost brought us down, comic misunderstandings, and disgusting

foods ventured or not bring us into a more intimate and human community of

practitioners. But they are a guilty pleasure. That we tell these stories, which

poke fun at both other people’s practices and at ourselves, makes me, at least,

a bit uneasy.

The stories hang on a dialectic – self-conscious and hence to us wrylyhumorous – between ‘othering’ and our anthropological goals of understanding

others and ourselves, which is at the heart of anthropology. We use stories likethese to capture the imaginations of bored undergraduates in our classrooms, or

to shake them from the easy complacency of multiculturalism. Against the well-learned and easily swallowed lesson of ‘different cultures, different ways’, we talk

about drinking warm milk with animal feces floating in it, ingesting corpses or

corpse liquids (Conklin 2001), stuffing young girls’ mouths full to bursting with

fattening foods in search of pleasing jiggly stretch-marked fat (Popenoe 2004),

injecting industrial silicone into buttocks and thighs (Kulick 1998), and pulling

long stretches of intestines from a dead person and going over them closely

in search for signs of inherited witchcraft (Evans-Pritchard 1937 ). In recounting

these ethnographic bits we hope that students will confront the disjuncturebetween their ‘different peoples’ explanations and their liberal Western sense

that there is a universal humanity based on shared human experience andfeeling. We hope to prompt them to imagine themselves doing these things,

and to wonder more deeply why and how others do them. The uneasiness

that I, and others, feel about having told these stories of disgusting foods or

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practices probably derives from tensions within our lessons of cultural differ-

ence and human sameness: however, accounts of disgust involve tensions and

contradictions on many levels for anthropology. Much as the jokes between

Tonga sisters’ sons and mothers’ brothers reveal contradictions in Tonga

society (Radcliffe-Brown 1952), surely such uneasiness, and perhaps the amuse-ment they provide off center stage, reveals unresolved questions at the heart of anthropology.

Even as they admit the limits of participatory fieldwork and of naively empa-

thetic understanding, these heroic narratives (for even if we do not eat the dis-

gusting foods, we triumph through explaining their meaning and their

desirability to others) use to exaggerated effect some of the same narrative

devices that we put to work in our ethnographies, sometimes focusing on the

most exotic practices, but also domesticating them with our narrative presence. These ‘casual ethnographies’, if we can call them that, combine well-remarked

upon trends of ethnographic representation ranging from unself-consciousclaims to authority, to self-conscious reflexivity. But accounts of disgust have

the potential to go beyond revealing the professional contradictions of fieldwork,

teaching, and cultural representation, significant as these all are. They may also

be important in revealing underdeveloped elements in our analytical frame-

works, especially the way we think about the relationships between mind and

bodiliness, the senses, sentiment/emotion, intimacy and something we nowcall the imagination in social process. All of these are problematics increasingly

invoked in contemporary ethnography, and are part of the experience of disgustand its related sentiments. It is time, then, to start a more serious discussion of

disgust, not only the disgust that features in stories we tell about ourselves, butan investigation of the operation of disgust in social life at large.

The Sensibility of Disgust

Disgust is, of course, a culturally and historically specific term. Just as my stu-dents are torn between the ideas that people can be both humanistically the

same, and yet culturally very different, we need to balance our own ideas of

disgust (and their history) with what it is we observe elsewhere. To my mind,

we want to retain a focus on a sentiment that unites physical experience with

emotional force and moral evaluation, features identified by Aurel Kolnai in

his pioneering 1927 essay on disgust (Kolnai 2004). To call disgust a ‘feeling’, as

does Miller ( 1997 :2), brings out its linking of the sensory with the sensible, of

the physical with the affective, and with the judgmental. The English word

‘disgust’, shared etymologically among Latinate languages, literally signals an

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upheaval of taste or digestion: our dinner stories in that sense got to the heart – or

stomach – of the matter. One of the earliest usages of the English word disgust

given by the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press 1971) is from 1611:‘a queasiness, or disgust of the stomach’. Disgust is a physical experience,

whether in the stomach or another part of the body. Our own particular inges-tion-based understanding of disgust allowed the taste and smell and sight of those tapas to prompt our stories of disgust, leaping from the delicious to thedisgusting. Even as the stomach and throat serve as the prototype for disgust

to us, disgust implies a mode of rejection that can engage the entire body.

Disgust can be and often is synaesthetic – it expresses one sense in terms of or

in association with another, such that disgusting smells, or ugly sights, slimy sur-

faces, or ‘indelicate’ language and offensive manners, may be felt to ‘roil the

stomach’, or pain the eyes, tighten the chest, throw one off-balance, or do alltogether. Although we often think of western culture as privileging the visual,

studying disgust alerts us to the importance of other fields of knowing andsensing even in our own culture, especially (for us) in the complex of senses,

from smell to sound to balance, connected with our stomachs.1

We should anticipate that something like disgust might anchor itself in other

sensory fields in other cultures, whether visual, motile, tactile, auditory, or in an

intersubjective instead of personal field. For Kapsiki of Cameroon, for example,

smell anchors in primary ways at least some sensory fields (van Beek 1992; seealso Almagor 1987 ). We could use an anthropology of disgust to explore

further different cultural constructions of the senses and to link a cultural anthro-pology of the senses to a cultural anthropology of affect.2 There is a rich and

growing literature on the senses in our own and other cultures. 3 Geurts ( 2002)has described a sensorium for Anlo-Ewe of Ghana in which key terms (and

the experiences they describe) simply do not match up with the American sen-

sorium: basic senses include balance, as well as smell and hearing, and a kind of

feeling-within. How might disgust – at the taste of a food, at repulsive sights, at

other people’s behavior – be experienced as a loss of balance, a change in thequality of hearing, a shift in visual acuity, or through a sense of smell that is

not felt as a dimension of taste? How might looking at disgust in these other sensoriums help us understand the moral dimensions of sensing, and the phys-

ical bases of emotion, and how moral judgment is, in one way or another, ‘felt’?

Dassanetch pastoralists say that the smell of fish is distasteful, but they do eat

the fish – even as they find themselves pinching their noses or turning their

heads away from the fishermen (Almagor 1987 ; p. 8, /l. 280). Should we distinguish

disgust from mere distaste, dislike, or disapproval? One question theorists of

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disgust working even in their own cultures tackle is what range of feelings should

be analyzed under the term disgust, or how to think about the range that inevi-

tably falls into that feeling. (Kolnai’s German ekel included a sense of fear and stu-dents of disgust in Germany might include fear in their studies, whereas those in

America probably would not make fear central.) In the sense that disgust is phys-ically experienced, disgust goes beyond mere distaste or dislike, although boththese terms are often used to explain disgust (as they are in the OED ), and areclearly part of its complex and wide-ranging semantic bundle. Like such anthro-

pological terms as kinship or marriage, ‘disgust’ should serve as a heuristic, some-

thing to prompt us to ask questions, not an object in and of itself. Considering

whether to single out disgust, or to bundle it with the range of sentiments that

include dislike or fear, should involve not only a reflection on how disgust

differs from place to place, but a consideration of what is at stake in linking or distinguishing various feelings for our own analytical projects, and what differ-

ences and stakes are recognized in the societies we study. The experience of bodily response or rejection, whether in nausea, a shiver, a feeling of being evis-

cerated or thrown off-balance, or an involuntary closing or turning away of eyes,

is, to my analysis, an important element of disgust – when Mr Darcy’s proud

manners ‘disgust’ the residents of Longbourne and its environs, in the novel

Pride and Prejudice , that it is disgust and not something else suggests a deeply

felt impulse to draw away from him is being invoked, an impulse that is, later in the novel, difficult for people to overcome. I have chosen here to focus on a

disgust that has this corporal dimension of rejection, because it seems key tothe core western concept, and also because it steers us to bridge in new ways

the mind–body dualism that anthropologists regularly find so problematic.By contrast with disgust, distaste sounds almost effete, a sensibility more

than a sensation, expressed in words not the body, by those who maintain

their distance from the object. (The bridging of distance is an important dimen-

sion I discuss below.) We experience disgust, not distaste, for objects that are

‘baser’, more associated with ‘nature’. When applied across social classes,

disgust is often directed against lower classes in a social hierarchy to suggest

baser, coarser, more animalistic characteristics, instead of mere distaste, reserved

for more middling class practices: one is disgusted by rank sweaty smells,perhaps, but finds cheap wine merely distasteful.

Nonetheless, we can draw disgust and distaste back together: both operateat the level of senses and feelings to produce or naturalize class distinctions.

Bourdieu’s ( 1984) study of how finely tuned class distinctions are felt and

realized in music, furnishing, and other aesthetics, is not all that different



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from the complaints by white officials in South Africa about the rank smell and

crowded disorder of ‘Colored’ households in the Cape Flats (Jensen 2008). The

tastes in wine or art that make distinctions among the middle classes are built up

as habitus , ingrained into unreflective if profoundly meaningful bodily practices

and orientations.4 The sweaty body of a workman or the strong smell of cooking in a lower-class house is not really naturally disgusting, it onlybecomes so through training; meanwhile that cheap wine could become phys-

ically undrinkable (disgusting) to someone with a supertrained palate, or a deep

rejection of the comestibles of low classes.

An early use of the word disgust given by the OED (the earliest usage it cites)refers to ‘opinion’, ‘a disgust or unkindness’, and invokes the sense both of finely

tuned social interactions, of social ruptures, linked with moral revulsion, and

response to behaviors or situations that seem beyond the stomach’s sensibilities. This citation suggests that disgust has long been a feature of social, not natural,

discriminations (witness Thomas Jefferson’s comment, cited in the OED , aboutsomeone’s ‘gay apparel’ arousing a ‘general disgust against him’). Nowhere is

this aspect of disgust more fun to read about than in Elias’s ( 1978) The Civilizing Process , which looks at books of manners from the medieval to the modernperiod in Europe advising when and where it is appropriate to spit, vomit,

pee, fart, blow one’s nose, and point out worrisome matter on the sheets to

someone sharing the bed at an inn. In earlier periods, offenses in these areas were defined by the relationship between offender and his audience: spitting

was not ‘nauseating’ in itself or to the spitter, but to those who saw it (Elias

1978:131); looking at snot in a handkerchief was wrong insofar as it showed ‘a

lack of respect towards the people you are with’ (Elias 1978:125). These acts were disgusting only when social rank was involved: a servant or person of

lower class could be witness to the odd matter in the bedclothes, the snot, or

the vomit; a person of equal or higher class most certainly could not.

The idea of disgust as a means of moral distinction, anchored in the social

sphere, sits well in anthropology. Probably the most common theme in

studies of disgust is that it marks boundaries, or creates them, both in the

material and in the social world. Disgust is extremely effective at doing so pre-

cisely because it naturalizes differences and distinctions through its physicality.Lawler ( 2005), for example, follows Bourdieu’s approach to taste and distinction

to look at disgust and distinction. She notes how descriptions of working classBritish often invoke images of unkempt hair, dirty tattoos and piercings, and

tight t-shirts on flaccid bodies to convey both disgust and class difference:

the dirty fleshy unkempt poor are naturalized as lower class both in their

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own bodies and in the bodies of those disgusted by them. Nussbaum ( 2010)describes how the Family Research Institute in the USA uses deliberately phys-

ically evocative language to produce a sense of disgust at gay sex and to dehu-

manize gays in general. This is more than a matter of producing negative

stereotypes. By anchoring that moral revulsion in the body and senses, bothin bodies of others as well as in the sense of disgust evoked for the ‘feeler’,social distinctions are naturalized even as they are moralized. An analytical

emphasis on creating and maintaining felt boundaries and distinctions,

however, risks reifying the individual or self as the subject of disgust, and over-

looking its transcendent possibilities, subjects I return to below.

Body and Mind

Feeling both natural and moral, disgust complicates our analyses of body andmind. The guilty stories we told over tapas turned on a conflict between our physical experience and our mental or intellectual one, between our knowing

caterpillars are delicious, nutritious, and even a local seasonal specialty, and

an inability to make our bodies eat them. Disgust can seem more to be

beyond rational management or control of the disgusted person, less an

element of choice or possible affectation than mere distaste: in this sense,

disgust is of the ‘body’ and distaste of the ‘mind’.5 Insofar as American

notions of disgust center on the stomach (even when the subject of disgust isnot food), disgust is part of an array of sensations that are seen to be beyondreason and rationality. To ‘feel something in one’s gut’ or ‘know something

in one’s gut’ is to know it both without information or without having reasoned

it through, and also to know it surely and incontrovertibly: like gut-knowledge,

disgust in American is both non-rational, yet also a form of knowledge.

There is a long history in anthropology and in other intellectual fields of productive critique of mind–body dualism in western thought. That critique

tends to explore the dualism as an intellectual history stretching back throughChristianity and the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment, to the Greek

philosophers, and tends to respond to that intellectual history by showing

how bodiliness is not, in fact, distinct from mindfulness. When examining the

dualistic model, discussions sometimes focus on philosophical traditions and

intellectual histories; when exploring embodiment as a mindful activity or

thought as integrated with physicality, many accounts turn towards people’s

lived lives. In studying disgust we will have to explore both processes – the

integration of bodiliness and mindfulness, and the experience in people’s lived

lives of body and mind as distinct.



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Anthropologists have dealt with the mind–body relationship in different

ways. It is not the project of this essay to review them, but to suggest how

looking at disgust may contribute. Douglas’s ( 1966) work Purity and Danger isa common reference point for many studies of disgust. Douglas opens her

book with a story (as we so often do!) about her physical discomfort in using a bathroom that had been put into a room housing garden tools and gumboots.She analyzes her discomfort as arising from the room’s confounding two spaces

that are conceptually distinct – hygienic bathrooms and grubby garden sheds.

Disgust, revulsion, and fear of dirt and pollution, she argues, serve to maintain

the boundaries of conceptual categories, such as sterile human hygiene and

garden growth, or the domestic and the natural worlds, that are the very struc-

ture of a culture or society. Douglas’s insight that a sense of danger – and power

– haunts those spaces and items that violate categorial distinction is an impor-tant touchstone for contemporary theorizing of disgust (Miller 1997 ; Nussbaum

2010). Disgusting objects and acts are often those that violate boundaries,especially boundaries between what we consider human and non-human,

sacred and profane, and between our selves and non-selves (where feces,

snot, and corpses are situated). Important social categories, including race,

class, and gendered categories, are also, in this vein, ‘policed’ by our sense of

revulsion, disgust, and fear of what Douglas ( 1966) calls ‘matter out of place’

(p. 48). Insofar as Douglas brings body and mind together in this act of policing categories, she brings them into a partnership more than a merging: the body

follows and supports a mental ordering of the world. Douglas’ body isaroused when mental categories are violated, and it can serve itself as a kind

of map for categories.6 Her model differs from that of Bourdieu ( 1977 ), whoseidea of habitus makes the body a constitutive site of cultural practice, consonant

with instead of in some kind of tension with the (mentally) cognized world.

Although Bourdieu may seem the more sophisticated thinker today, Douglas,

in not making the body entirely consonant with mindfulness, left open an ana-

lytically interesting space of decidedly messy creativity and power. The body, and its physical and at some level inchoate reactions, its lack of

clear boundaries, and resistance to conceptual, categorial mastery, has, or may be felt to have, its own life and input into social and cultural processes

of transgression, as work by Stallybrass and White ( 1986), Masquelier ( 2005),

and Cohen ( 2005) illustrate so well. Bakhtin, too, provides a messier model of

disgusting bodily exuberance at odds with the regularities and regulations of

social order. In his study of Rabelais (Bakhtin 1968), bold offensive physicality

is a mode of expression in itself used by the populace in the face of elites,

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both parodying elite excess, but transforming it into something that exceeds

clear discursive meaning, emotionally intense, socially critical – and funny.

As this populace is captured into a market economy, that economy is then

charged by the physical expressions of its source, a physicality that cannot be

reduced simply by deriving its meaning from social structures or culturallaws, nor should it, in my opinion, simply be treated as a source of rawenergy from man’s physical nature.

Without abandoning important anthropological insights into the construct-

edness of bodily experience – it is clear that the very experience of disgust is

formed and formed differently in cultural contexts, as the above discussion of

the senses indicates – disgust draws our attention to gaps between bodily

knowledge and experience, and the kind of meaning that is shaped through

more formal symbolic processes. (It is no accident that the unease thatDouglas feels in that garden shed-bathroom comes at the breakdown of

formal symbolism.) Maurice Bloch, for one, has asked us to explore thenature of inarticulate meaning, different from articulate forms of meaning

which have structures, categories, and logic (Bloch 1991). Inarticulate meanings

are often found in bodily experience: for example, I found for Herero dress in

Botswana that embodied sensibilities contrasted with the meanings Herero

invoked verbally, which often referred to distinctions in social categories

(men, women, Herero, Tswana) (Durham 1999). The worn dress shaped sensi-bilities of social connectedness, strength, skill, attractiveness, and command of

space and labor; the verbally discussed dress was restrictive, burdensome, andoften represented as alienating Herero from Botswana’s civic life. Because of

its multiple fields of meaning, the dress was all the more powerful, doing meaning work in different registers at the same time, and in doing so setting

the stage for a dynamic politics of meaning that would always, ultimately, be

unresolved. Disgust, too, is a way of physical knowing that can be at odds

with discursive or rational knowing, with a result that, in Miller’s words

( 1997 :201), ‘[o]ur moral world is thus as odds with itself’.

While disgust is a moral sentiment, it can be at odds with other ways in

which we experience and exercise morality. Both Bloch’s essay and my

article on dress looked at embodied and inarticulate meanings in a fairly positivelight contrasted with the divisive field of articulate meanings (as does post-

Freudian feminist literature). We found fields of intimacy, connectedness, andshared imaginations in inarticulate meaning. But disgust as an inarticulate

locus of meaning reveals the gap where morality at odds with itself is full of

complex tensions. In 2010, major on-line American newspapers often featured



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an advertisement in the margins for ‘Operation Smile’, a charity that provides

corrective surgery for children with cleft palates. A small non-European-

looking child with a pronounced cleft palate looked out from the ad: the

sense of pity, and motivation to contribute that the charity hoped to inspire,

drew power from that space between physical repulsion, or disgust, at theOther, and the more articulate moral request that the wealthy help the poor,the older the younger, and the West the rest. The ad drew also on the sense

of compassion that comes with ‘feeling’ the physical deformity oneself, and

the Western lessons of common humanity. There has been a recent efflores-

cence of literature on the anthropology of sentiments like love, sentiments

that serve to link people together in the context of globalization. But there

are other powerful sentiments at work, such as disgust, with less salutary

effects. Christopher Taylor’s paper in this issue indicates how this gap can bemore powerful than just two ways of knowing at direct odds with one

another. Taylor looks at the often-forgotten people in Rwanda’s history of ethnic conflict: Twa, whose smell and diet, economic activities and saliva

arouse disgust in their neighbors. Taylor suggests that the physical repulsion

expressed toward Twa fostered a sense of physical difference that allowed

earlier political or social distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi to gain the

force that eventually led to genocide. And what does it mean today, in a recup-

erating Rwanda, that someone knows that Twa should be given respect aspeople, and even so shudders at sharing with a Twa person a drinking vessel

he would share with others?Nussbaum ( 2010), studying how disgust operates in legal debates over same-

sex and interracial sexuality in the USA, puts disgust at direct odds with a reasoned morality, calling it ‘an unreliable force that masks many forms of

stigma and hierarchy’ (p. 199). Nussbaum pits embodied knowledge against a

seemingly clean-cut and morally better rationality originating in the Enlighten-

ment, but there is more at work in the dynamic space where the body seems to

be at odds with the mind than unreasonable oppression. Laura Bellows’ article

in this issue describes how in Indonesia, generating disgust at sexual practices

stamped ‘foreign’ and ‘pornographic’ extends to finding cultural practices of

the body, such as forms of bathing or dress, as pornographic and henceOther. Liberalization has brought both new technology and new media into

Indonesia: now people can watch pornographic performances on their compu-ters, televisions, and cellphones – or make pornographic recordings themselves

and send them rapidly to a large audience. People readily identify the sexual acts

they see with different nationalities (Arab sex, Japanese sex, or American sex),

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or, when Indonesians are involved, with ethnic identifiers that ‘other’ sexual

acts. New anti-pornography laws, however, target more than the sexual act:

they target a range of bodily practices which could include forms of dress,

dance, and movement that fall into the Indonesian category of adat or tradition.

Balinese become both alien and disgusting as they bathe, dance or dress in localfashions, even as bestiality, anal and oral sex, other sexual practices flourish inpeople’s computer, television, and cellphone screens, and perhaps in their

own bodily practices where they experiment with, or become, something

other than Indonesian.

Even as looking at disgust takes us into a space where the body is ‘at odds

with’ the mind, we also find disgust to be fundamentally related with two pro-

cesses typically thought of as ‘mental’. One is the imagination, which I return to

in a later section. The other is, more vaguely, knowledge. Even as disgust opensup a sense of difference between mind-knowing and physical sensibilities, such

as Nussbaum works with, or even physical knowing, such as gut-knowledge,disgust does depend upon knowing. I recall eating a dish as a young teenager

in France. I had not quite caught the name when my hosts told me, but as I

ate and looked at the meat, certainly palatable but unfamiliar in taste, it

slowly dawned on me that it was rabbit. I ran to the bathroom to contain my

stomach’s revolt, a revolt only precipitated by my knowledge that the meat

was rabbit (and by my narrow eating habits and sentimental reading, as anAmerican child). A somewhat different situation, and far more interesting,

arises in Masquelier’s essay in this issue, where the question of who knows what, when, and how is integral to the sense of disgust. In her paper, she

explores the reactions of participants in a bori spirit possession ceremony inNiger, during which a young woman stood up to reveal a large menstrual

blood stain on the white wrapper she wore as an acolyte of Maria , a spiritobsessed with clean white clothing and whose tastes for sweet things are con-

nected with infertility. Expressions of disgust were varied, but notably few if any

reflected a ‘natural abhorrence’ of menstrual blood in and of itself. To some

extent disgust centered on the overt confusion the menstrual blood posed

between the fertile and messy young woman herself and the meticulous and

infertile Maria, two entities seen as discrete. Of particular interest, however, was the reaction of the host of the ceremony, for whom the ceremony was

an initiation. Her disgust was directed at the way the menstrual blood wasallowed to be seen, and was not hidden or restrained, and at the ways that

‘making known’ menstruation also made the transgressor the center of attention

at the ceremony and afterwards. Very like the late medieval proscriptions on



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public farting or being seen peeing in the corner of a room described by Elias,

what was disgusting was not that the young woman was menstruating, nor even

that she put herself in the way to be possessed by Maria while menstruating

(though this was wrong, it is something people do discreetly), it was that she

made it public, visibly, dramatically public, and at another woman’s initiation,that roused disgust.

The Disgusted Self and Transcendent Imagination

Elias traced – rightly or wrongly – a western history in which disgustoriented around the interactions and relationships of people in public spaces

was transformed into a ‘private’ concern, focusing on home life and ideas of per-

sonal health. Most studies of disgust today start by conceptualizing it as a private, individual experience; doing so, they then both naturalize it and univer-

salize it. Disgust, located in our western stomachs and seeming resistant to

rationalization, can feel like a physiologically natural response, effectively

stamping a rejected practice, or food, or class as naturally repellant to human

or social sensibilities. Such an approach locates the origins and experience of

disgust in the individual’s body, and can lead to the idea that disgust’s

‘natural function’ is to defend the boundaries of the self, both physically

against unsuitable foods and psychologically in defense of one’s integrity. The OED uses the word ‘instinctive’ (‘profound instinctive dislike’) in its defi-nition, and some psychological analyses that think of disgust as instinctive

refer to it as an evolutionary ‘mechanism for defense against infectious

disease’, as one version puts it (Curtis & Biron 2001:18). Many accounts of

disgust, especially those in psychology, psychoanalysis, or phenomenology,

take as their starting point that some things are, in fact, naturally disgusting to humans (Miller 1997 ). But what things? Menninghaus notes that ‘[e]very study of disgust. . .runs the danger of disclosing as much about the author asabout his subject’ (Menninghaus 2003:20). Aurel Kolnai is apparently disgusted

by things that suggest sheer swarming prolific fertility and by beery singing

voices; William Miller by pubic hair, semen, and the disabled; Julia Kristeva

( 1982) by the skin on the surface of milk, as well as corpses, pus, and shit; and

many of the German artists and theorists Menninghaus studies return again

and again to the figure of the ‘ugly old woman’ to illustrate what naturally dis-

gusts all of us. They can generalize from their own sense of disgusting things,

both because they assume that disgust is a natural and universal experience,

and because they assume it takes place in the self, and is about the self.

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Freudian psychology is a common point of reference for disgust, with its sug-

gestion that learning disgust at excreta and aspects of sexuality is the necessary

first step towards a complex human psyche and civilization: without disgust we

remain undifferentiated both from our surroundings and in our inner being.

While society clearly plays a double role in such approaches – both wresting the proto-human from his animal union with disgusting nature (as logos ), andalso developing out of the sublimated energies that must be directed elsewhere

(civilization) – the individual is the locus of both disgust and its transformed

energy. We see this in those accounts that trace the creative and transgressive

uses to which disgust has or can be put, where the abjected becomes sublime

and transcendent. Menninghaus ( 2003), who cleverly refuses to define disgust

in any absolute manner, traces how various European thinkers and artists

make disgust the source of creativity and transcendence. It is a highly personalcreativity, and an individual transcendence: reaching for one’s own abjection,

one comes to understand the reality of oneself and transcend the boundariesand blinkers instilled by society, perhaps even merging one’s own self with a

transcendent reality. Other scholars who examine how ideas about dirt are

intertwined with growing class and racial distinctions may acknowledge

disgust as an emotion generated by social processes, yet also find its experience

by individuals a means of transcending social structure, realizing artistic creativ-

ity, and pursuing very personal excitement (McClintock 1995; Cohen & Johnson2005). Experiencing disgust, according to these approaches, a disgust enmeshed

with social structures, is the means not only of realizing a ‘truer’ self, but it allowsthe self to pursue novel, creative pathways, and fantasies.

Anthropology has always allowed us, through the study of other societies, toexamine our assumptions, especially our assumptions about human psychology

(Mead 1964). We can dredge up – as we did that dinner over tapas – seeminglyendless examples of other people (or even ourselves) literally embracing the

very things proposed as universally disgusting, such as corpses, about which

there is a large ethnographic corpus. While Wari’ Indians did eat the cooked

corpses of affines with some difficulty (Conklin 2001), occasionally retching,

many people embrace corpses of their relatives with affectionate care: Fadwa

El Guindi describes rushing to Egypt to wash and prepare her mother’sbody for burial herself without any sense that the body of an old woman

must be repulsive (El Guindi 2008). But what anthropology is especiallyequipped to challenge, more important than ideas about corpses, is the way

that westerners theorize disgust as essentially anchored in the self, and about

the self.



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Anthropology has been examining critically the premise of a bounded, inte-

gral self as a universal experience for a long time now. We have numerous eth-

nographies examining other ways of experiencing the self: divisible selves,

relational selves, situational selves, multiple selves, heterogeneous selves, com-

munal selves, selves that take different shapes during different life stages,abound in the world, and challenge the western premise of an individuatedself. Mauss’s ( 1985 [1938]) suggestive essay on the self and person argued

that the western sense of selfhood, with its emphasis on self-consciousness

and personalized subjectivity, is a distinctive (and fragile) feature of western

modernity. Studies of disgust can dovetail nicely with Mauss’s essay. Elias’s

study of nose-blowing and farting, for example, attempts to show a historical

move from publicly significant sentiments to privately felt, and interiorized,

ones – from shame to disgust, a contrast akin to the familiar one of shameand guilt. Similar points are made by other historians: even as an interiorized

disgust is mobilized to make new forms of distinction between races andclasses (McClintock 1995; Burke 1996; Boddy 2005), ‘the repudiation [of

human waste and decay] as filthy’ is a core feature of ‘bourgeois individuation’

(Cohen 2005:xviii) – connected in complex ways with commodification and

consumerism as a means of cultivating individuality and selfhood, as indeed

these studies of soaps and sewers show.

And yet, creeping into some theories of disgust is a sense that disgust not onlymonitors the boundaries of the self, or transforms the self into something more

sublime, but that its operational character is such that it links a person’s experi-ence with things outside himself, extending (though not necessarily transcend-

ing) the self. Disgust requires an act of imagination to put oneself into a conditionor position one is not in at the moment, and this move figures importantly in

phenomenological accounts. Disgust, as Kolnai puts it, ‘forms a bridge

between the provoking object and the subject’: its intentional nature ‘adheres

to and penetrates its objects rather than merely signaling and portending their

disquieting presence or proximity’, ‘the tip of the intention penetrates . . .

probing and analyzing . . . becoming immersed in its motions or its persistence’

(Kolnai 2004:40, 100, 39). Insofar as disgust also involves a rejection of the object,

it is not a sympathetic immersion in the object; insofar as that disgusted rejectionis physically enacted, the immersion is imagined but not sustained. Nonetheless,

disgust is a feeling that emerges as a person imagines him or herself to be ‘inti-mate’ (a term Kolnai also uses) with something else. It is, of course, this imagined

intimacy, the reaching out and fixing on an object, that we invoked both in our

tapas -induced stories, and in telling our bored or complacent undergraduates to

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think vividly and hard about corpse fluids, genital cutting, or the pleasing quiver

of loose folds of stretch-marked flesh. And we count on that drawing back, on

the limits of sympathy, to prompt a more analytical (and not merely sympath-

etic) exploration of how and why such things become desirable or doable.7

Elias’s account of a medieval disgust that operated between people (andespecially people of different ranks), depending on their mutual presence andrecognition, directs us to look at disgust as an intersubjective phenomenon,

and not simply a mechanism arising from and defending the self. Furthermore,

it alerts us to the fact that intersubjectivity can have powerful negative dimen-

sions, and to be careful about invoking intersubjectivity as a romanticized

recognition of the interdependence of human consciousness with people and

surroundings. The professions of disgust at the living quarters or bodies of

Colored South Africans uttered by white government officials, mentionedabove, are a case in point: a messy house, cooking smells, and the sweat of

‘honest labor’ might not be considered disgusting outside the Cape Flats, or if shared experientially with different people. The experience has been devel-

oped through exchanges with other people (the suspicious or hostile resident

of the Cape Flats, other white officers, the foreign-born ethnographer), and

indeed with other places. Intersubjectivity has been invoked by anthropologists

in a variety of projects, ranging from its role in fieldwork and writing, to general

proposals about the ways in which personhood is constructed through socialinteractions, to studies of how emotion and feelings are understood within

particular cultures (see Hollan & Throop 2008: 386f.). Studying disgust bringsus into questions of intersubjectivity, both as a general principle of human

experience, and as a specific one within local cultures. It is especially in thelatter case that the complexity and surprising experiential tensions in disgust

– and intersubjectivity – show up.

Julie Livingston has recently published an exciting article on disgust and

botho (humanity) in Botswana, based on her work among disabled childrenand in cancer wards (Livingston 2008). Researchers have been interested in

the intersubjective nature of many emotions and experiences in Botswana for

some time now.8 I described love and jealousy as two emotions that ‘operateacross bodily space; they work in the heart of one person and in the bodies

of others’ (Durham 2002:159, see also Durham 2005) as one’s love produces

fatness and well-being in one’s object, and jealousy produces illness, misfortune,

and unhappiness. (Not all sentiment was conceived of as so fully intersubjective:

by contrast, desire/ want was thought of as a more individual, selfish, and

individuating sentiment.) Frederick Klaits describes how people, aware of



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how feelings ( maikutlo ) are both influenced by and influence others’ sensationsand sentiments, are careful about how they ‘feel’ in their blood, and ‘imagine’ the

impact of how they speak about their feelings, as they enter a house where

someone is ill or mourning (Klaits 2010:126). The ailment dikgaba , affecting

the success of projects and the well-being of offspring, is a manifestation of the anger or disappointment of senior relatives, and its removal must includecalm, cool forgiveness on the seniors’ part, as well as cooling medications

(Lambek & Solway 2001).

In this context, Livingston describes how when she interviewed people

about mopokwane (with symptoms overlapping cerebral palsy), they oftenphysically mimicked the ungainly walk and drooping wrists and struggling

speech patterns, a practice involving both an element of ridicule and one of

‘morbid curiosity’. Such mimicry fits well with Kolnai’s sense that disgustinvolves both a reaching out or intentionality towards the object at the

same time as a drawing back (a tension that, echoing Radcliffe-Brown’stheory of joking relations, also illuminates the sense of mockery/ jokiness).

Livingston also describes practices of avoidance of the saliva of the disabled

– not only the drooling saliva that people sometimes pointed to as indicative

of mopokwane , but also cups and utensils used by them or even just belonging to their families. Such avoidance and mockeries are problematic, as people

know, in the context of recent government efforts to promote botho as a national consciousness. Botho is an awareness not only of the shared humanityof all people, but especially of the impact of one’s own actions (and senti-ments, we might add) on others. Botho , as Livingston explains, has long been a part of Tswana life, although it is being put to new uses at thepresent: botho involved an awareness of the intense, intimate, on-going exchanges that constitute sociality, from handshakes to greetings, shared

foods, and gossip. Mothers and relatives who care for their disabled children,

and chiefs inviting disabled miners to public forums, work to overcome their

disgust and fear of the saliva, smells, and unsettling bodily movements of

people, and are exemplars of botho . Even more intense is the cancer ward, where patients and visitors contend with the smells and sights of open,

pus-filled, necrotic wounds and tumors, and talk about the effects of che-motherapy or mastectomies – all fraught with the intersubjective potential

for harm. One way that people manage the disruption to botho that smellsand disgusting sights provoke, or the parodies and suspicions of witchcraft

that might occupy neighbors, is to sequester the afflicted, protecting both

the ill and others. But others, and Livingston singles out the nurses on the

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cancer ward, work to overcome disgust through focusing on the positive

possibilities of care and compassion as core elements of botho .Livingston’s remarkable essay shows how complex disgust is, as an intersub-

jective phenomenon in a specific context – a complexity and richness predicted

by the general theoretical musings on disgust. Although disgust can promptsequestration and avoidance, this possibility co-exists with a range of disgust-based practices that bring people into an intimacy with the object through

physical mimicry, and with practices that develop people’s capacity for botho by bringing them into direct contact with the disabled or wounded in public

forums like the chief’s court, or in professional activities and friendly visits in

hospitals. Botho is, in many ways, especially realizable through such things asdisgust (or jealousy, or anger). Sharing a beer glass with a co-worker or a plate

with a friend at a funeral, or grasping the hand of an elegant young womanoffered in greeting are routine and, if examples of botho , are also unreflective.9

If botho is being aware of how one’s actions take effect in other people, it bothprompts some people to hide away the disabled and ill, as they imagine their

effects on others and the effects of others’ reactions on themselves. But it also

prompts some to use their disgust to help the disabled bathe before eating, to

provide perfumes for the sick ward, and to share their emotional space.

Intimacy and ImaginationIntimacy and imagination have become compelling terms in anthropology inthe last decade or so. Our interest in intimacy balances contemporary studies of

such things as globalization, colonialism, or economic inequality, showing how

large-scale processes actually take place in the smaller arenas of parent–child

relationships, love, hope, and planning for the future (Cole & Durham 2007 ). Inti-

macy refers to the ways that people in close proximity form relations to oneanother that are affective in nature and responsive to ‘larger’ social processes.

We have become interested in intimacy in part because anthropology hasalways focused on its classic sites – domestic sites, small communities, face-

to-face interactions – and is able therefore to show how large-scale processes

become real and are in fact made up in intimate settings. We also have

become interested in intimacy because it is one of the correctives to a ‘rules

and structure’ anthropology that described normative relationships within

overall structures – that is, roles – but also avoids assuming human actions to

be the outcome of strict rational decision-making. By looking at the affective

dimensions of such relationships, we were able to see better how roles were

motivated from below, rather than simply enforced from above. Intimacy also



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draws our attention to intersubjectivity, to the ways in which roles are not roles

assumed by the individual, but are instead relational ways of being. Relationships

are the outcome of affective practices, as much as a set of laws, expected beha-

viors, individuals posturing in front of but distinct from others, or structural

rules for social reproduction. There is a tendency right now in anthropologyto explore affective intimacy as it binds people together – especially in love,desire, and caring.10 That is to say, there is a tendency to look at affect in ways

that answer the classic fundamental question of social theory: how do people

who are inherently individual become bound together into social relationships,

against those tendencies that would tear society apart? But here, I draw attention

to intimacy’s role in those ‘negative’ tendencies, as well as ask that we explore

how affect figures into the experience of individualism. Anger, jealousy, and

disgust are intimate affects with complex and ambiguous effects.Disgust is a sentiment that confounds, and it is an intimate one on many

levels. This is not to say that disgust is rooted in individuals’ contemplation of those (animal and universal) aspects of their bodies that become private,

hidden, and rejected. Disgust is intimate because it is, as others have noted,

dependent upon proximity. Miller ( 1997 ), for example, who sees disgust as a

means of defending the self and creating boundaries (and creating dynamic

and titillating fields of transgression), notes that it is only the threat of contami-

nation, or threat to self, through proximity that arouses disgust. Feces becomedisgusting when we are faced with touching them, smelling them, seeing

them; feces sent neatly away to fine flocculation tanks well out of our reachare undesirable, but not disgusting. The unwashed poor are pathetic, admirable

or disapproved, and different while living in distant fields; when they come intothe cities in masses with industrialization, they become disgusting, as people

draw up new moral and aesthetic boundaries.11 Twa in the forests, making

pottery, eating and living their own lives are just different: in Christopher

Taylor’s article on Rwanda in this issue, Twa become disgusting as they share

drinking vessels and social space.But this intimacy is too easily portrayed in spatial terms, as in my suggestion

that anthropology is well poised to study intimacy because it has traditionallystudied small communities. Intimacy can take place across space – as indeed

new anthropological studies of transnational families, on-line communities,

and the power of images of teary-eyed children in Latin America to generate

care from midwestern Americans reveal. Lawler’s ( 2005) article on the

disgust-provoking images of the working class in Britain, mentioned above,

helps us think about the specific ways in which the intimacy of disgust takes

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place across space – in particular through the imagination. The images of the

working class in print media, in television sitcoms, and in other sites bring

the poor into the living rooms of the disgusted bourgeoisie, a form of proximity,

true, but it is not just the circulation of the images into that space that effectively

creates the disgust. Disgust creates intimacy, as much as the more commonobservation that intimacy creates disgust. As Lawler notes, the disgust in thiscase is bodily based. The descriptions of unkempt hair, multiple piercings and

tattoos, crying children, and ashy cigarettes work through a felt physical reson-

ance, and simultaneous rejection – a confounding also described by Julie

Livingston in her account of Tswana people mimicking the disabled in both

curiosity and mockery. An act of imagination is necessary to bring the living,

sensible disgusting matter into the sphere of intimacy of the disgusted bourgeoi-

sie – an imagination that is as much bodily as mental, an imagination that putsone bodily into a different situation. The hair and cigarette, the drooping wrist

and stammering talk resonate into our intimate space through an act of bodilyimagination, or imaginative incorporation.

Thinking about disgust, then, prompts us to interrogate and open up the

idea of ‘the imagination’ that is so popular in anthropology today. 12 While

recent critiques argue that in anthropology ‘the imagination’ and its correlate

‘the imaginary’ have become simple synonyms for what we used to call

culture, with many of the problems of that concept slipped in (Strauss 2006;Sneath et al. 2009), disgust may direct us towards useful dimensions of theterm. I do not think ‘imagination’ is most productive as a simple substitutefor culture; instead it usefully focuses on a particular cultural act. Imagination

is applied to things one does not know – hence Anderson ( 1991) invokedimagination to talk about how people think about their relationship to

other people they have never met and never will meet as members of the

same nation, and Appadurai ( 1996) invoked how people think about distant

places in the context of globalization. While of course all knowledge is to

some extent ‘imagined’ (and this is the position implied by the Kantian pre-mises used by Sneath et al.), many people distinguish between what theyknow through common-sense knowing, what they know through accepting authoritative pronouncements, forms of knowing that are more personal,

and those that involve a degree of, well, imagining. Stafford, for example,

describes the different ways in which numbers are apprehended and used inChina, from predictable mathematical figures, to imaginative guides to life

and success (Stafford 2009). Disgust, confounding so many forms of knowl-

edge, linking both in-the-gut sureness with the intentionality towards a very



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alien unknown object, is a form that forces us to ask what is at work, or at play,

in imaginative acts.

‘Imagination’ invokes something cerebral – it refers to the creation of a picture

in the mind, a kind of abstract and schematic knowledge – and as such it often

has a reflective, reactive connotation as well. The global imagination, the nationalimagination, are primarily a kind of knowledge about something, about whatother people are doing, and anthropologists are drawn to media as transmitting

images of these doings. Insofar as these ‘images’ engage the imaginer (and of

course, they do), they allow him to be ‘part of the picture’. But we should consider

the ‘felt’ part of imagination, too, keeping in mind especially that the imagination

can be both a bodily act, and a form of action.

The imaginative impulse of disgust is effective because it is an intimate

impulse, an act of body as much as mind, not a cerebral, distanced one. To bedisgusted, one imagines oneself either as other or in other situations.13 Reports

of villagers in Sierra Leone with their hands cut off were most effective as onefelt, in one’s own body, the pain, the shock, the frustrations of their handlessness;

the idea of eating solid sheep-tail fat is disgusting as I think of the feel of the fat in

my mouth, and as my stomach sympathetically feels the diarrhea and vomiting

that some of the more greedy eaters suffer. Similarly, in Rwanda, the perceived

runny nose of the Twa is a symptom of eating mutton: it is the resonant thought

of ingesting the mutton and its felt manifestation in the runny nose that makes Twa not just different, but disgusting. I read an account of someone eating the

beating heart torn from a cobra’s body (Bourdain 2001:269); although thelanguage was vivid and the scene easily imaginable as on a movie screen (and

since then probably has appeared on TV), and I thought the whole thing disgust-ing in an abstract moral way, I was not disgusted in that I simply could notimagine myself into that situation. I had no bodily resonance. Finally, in

Botswana one day a group of women (and I) laughed and laughed over a descrip-

tion of one of their neighbors tending to her aging and incontinent mother,

holding her nose and running out of the house and across the yard withsoiled sheets and clothes – it was funny as a mental image, it only became

disgusting (though with the mocking humor that Livingston described) when

we took the further step of imagining ourselves as that woman.If we think of disgust as an act of an embodied imagination, and combine

that insight with the idea that disgust is both about intimacy/proximity anddistantiation, we can posit an important and underappreciated dimension of

disgust. Disgust is a form of action, not a reaction, and not simply a motivation

(although it can motivate further action, of course). The action it accomplishes

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is to bridge self and other, to imagine oneself as someone else, a process made

exceptionally clear in Laura Bellows’ article in this issue on how pornography

legislation makes of everyone in Indonesia a kind of ‘peeping Tom’. The kind of

sentiments that we group under disgust work only insofar as the disgusted indi-

vidual can imagine contact and bodily communion, being himself in the place of the other. These sentiments take place in the body – both the imaginative sen-sibility and the reaction of disgust. If we are to understand the imaginative

capacity of human beings, and even to situate it at the center of culture and

culture-making, which increasingly seems to be the trend in anthropology,

we need to consider its dual character in this respect.

Active disgust is simultaneously both transgressive, rooted in boundaries

maintained with moral force, and also transcendent, successful insofar as the

person feeling disgust is caught up in the experience of another. A momentof transcendence is required to create the moment of ‘transgression’ that is

often observed in disgust – an erasure of the distinction is part and parcel of the intimate, and imaginative, act of disgust. Transcendence, however, need

not produce truth, goodwill, or harmony, and the imagination of the other is

not the same as being or understanding the other in his terms: disgust is

about rejection even at the moment of imagined transcendence. The dance of

imagination, in which one is both other and rejects the other, captured in

Masquelier’s observation in her article in this issue that the response to theblood stain on the bori practitioner ran from ‘sympathetic revulsion to frank

disgust’, does not resolve itself into a simple pattern.

Imagining Self and Other

Let us return to the opening section of this essay. I started by asking the

reader to imagine a group of anthropologists eating tapas and telling storiesof disgusting foods. The story, I hope, was effective because most readers

could imagine themselves there: the food, the exchange of ‘field stories’ to mul-tiple purposes, and perhaps the thought of delicious and disgusting foods. If

they felt uneasy, as I did, it was in that tension between sympathy and rejection,

self and other, transcendence and transgression, and the cross-wise concurrence

of different forms of knowing. We use this tension in a variety of ways in anthro-

pology, perhaps most fundamentally in describing anthropology in our intro-

ductory undergraduate courses as a field that explores human difference and

human sameness. So when we ask our undergraduates to imagine practices

that disgust them – ritual fellatio, female circumcision, cleansing hands with

urine or rubbing oneself with cow dung – we are doing more that trying to



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grab their attention, or to show them that knowledge can conquer prejudice.

We are giving them a primary lesson in the fundamental tension in anthropol-

ogy, between feeling the shared human experience with others, even as they try

to detect and account for difference. This is not just a tension between the

revolted body and coolly analytical mind (with mind, of course, triumphant);it is at the heart of our enterprise, and so it is fitting that it be taught in thebody, as well as in words and pictures.

There is something disgusting in the idea of everything on earth becoming pasted

over with musings and broodings, or with hair-splitting calculation. The fruitlessness

of ceaseless cerebration as an end in itself, the consequent obstruction of the course of

life, and indeed also of thought must bring a feeling of shallowness that is indubitably

related to disgust. . . . in other such cases of misplaced criticism and intellectual flabbi-

ness, these will often be felt to be not only improper and absurd or pernicious, but alsoto be disgusting. And so, too, will that type of aimless and over-subtle intellectual

activity, better termed intellectual wantonness, that kind of subjective, irresponsible,

and opulent, over-refined and sometimes bombastic reveling in thought itself and

in its exhibition, which is at heart indifferent to its object: what one might call lasci-

vious intellectualism. – Aurel Kolnai

Notes

1. See Connor ( 1997 ) for discussion of subjectivity based on non-visual senses. Miller ( 1997 ) discusses various sensory forms of disgust in the west.2. This is in part the goal of such seminal works as Stoller’s ( 1989) The Taste of Ethno-

graphic Things , but Stoller does not do the kind of rich ethnography of the sensesthat Geurts ( 2002) accomplishes, and sometimes seems to subordinate suchthings 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 sensor-ium does not explore that sensorium as part of contested and dynamic social life.

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

4. Kolnai, in his 1927 essay on disgust, also uses the term habitus .5. John Leavitt describes the western dichotomy between mind and body, inwardemotion and rational (outward) speech, as a ‘radical distinction between a realmof expressive freedom characteristic of our minds and one of determinism charac-teristic of our bodies and the physical world’ (Leavitt 1996:515). Leavitt notes thatemotion, much as disgust as I discuss it here, is both good and ‘hard to think’(p. 517 ) precisely because it combines these realms.

6. Douglas’s idea of the body as a ‘natural symbol’ still subordinates the body to mapsgenerated by the mind, and by the mind as mediator of social experience (Douglas1996 [1973]).

7 . It is interesting to think about the relationship between empathy and sympathy, inthis case.

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8. 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 senti-ment is shared among these groups.

9. 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’ motivesand intentions – through habit, routine, common expectation, and widely sharedrules of social engagement’ (Hollan & Throop 2008: 385–6).

10. Note how William Jankowiak and Thomas Paladino refer to (various forms of) loveas ‘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). Likedisgust, one might say.

11. This picture – common in literature on disgust – focuses on a particular urbanclass’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 coun-tryside.

12. Anderson ( 1991) and Appadurai’s ( 1996) work are the main works that haveprompted the use of the term. See Axel ( 2003) and Sneath et al. ( 2009) for someimportant critiques and suggestions. Strauss ( 2006) critiques the way the terms ‘ima-ginary’ and ‘imagination’ often refer to generalized, reified, cultural schemas, andcalls for a more person-centered approach. I read ‘imaginary’ as having somewhatdifferent reference than imagination, and is indeed schematic, and work here tochallenge thought on the ‘imagination’.

13. Wilson ( 2002) has also called for increased attention to disgust as an imaginativepractice, 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 andexperience that make general theories of disgust elusive.

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