Dirtland: the explanation

So, you're probably wondering... why call a blog Dirtland? Is it like Ghostworld, a misanthropic lens of life? No, actually the opposite, but first let me explain. 

I chose the name after a concept that an absolute baddie, Mary Douglas, created. Douglas was an anthropologist who wrote about human culture, symbolism and risk. 

Douglas wrote a lot about things that cross borders that have a limbic quality about them. 

She defines dirt as 'matter out of place.' This is really cool because anything can be dirt. Simply redrawing a border can make something appear out of place in a society. 

She writes, 

"Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements." -Mary Douglas

So impurity is also subjective. Douglas writes that rituals cleanse impurity. Anything can be impure in a society - germs are a social construct. The rituals we do in culture don't have to align with modern antibacterial practices. 

This concept works for real dirt too! For instance, after working outside all day, I'm starving. If someone hands me a snack, I'm going to plop down on the grass and eat it right then and there. I'm probably not going to wash my hands because my hunger is urgent. I don't want to walk inside to wash them. Risk and danger are relative to where you are. If I'm outside, my risk assessment will be different from when I'm somewhere else -like when I'm near a sink with soap. 

However, Douglas sees beyond this. Writing, 

"If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place." 

So, dirt is a concept. Also, borders entail a lot more than just physical things. There's a whole human rights portion of Douglas's theory. People who live on the border of a system have precarious lives. 

A border between countries creates the concept of immigration. Immigration- the rights, the controversy, the prejudice all come from a made up border that a society creates. A system can push people out of place, denying them certain rights and protections. 

So dirt is a tool that can allow anthropologists - or anyone - to understand how people are categorized and organized and illuminate the harsh, rigid borders that are imposed on groups of people. 

Dirt is interesting to me particularly because it simultaneously flags and explains a concept of in a culture without you having to insert your own bias (and culture) in it. Anthropologists call this an ethnocentric bias and try to avoid it at all costs. 

Noticing something is on a boundary makes it interesting. You can ask a lot of other questions about why the boundary is there and how did it get there and get a wealth of information about a culture. 

For this blog, I'm interested on how Americans classify things, where is there dirt. Can I make something dirt by inverting it? Why do we have border or classifications, who benefits from this? 

I love a good inversion, it allows people to see things that are portrayed as objective -as subjective. Why not flip stuff on it's head? Because nothing is truly objective with culture. As Althusser pointed out, ideology will never tell you it is ideology, it will say it's reality.

And as a final thought, 

I don't plan to solve the world's problems on this blog and get super specific, it's the idea and the generalization I'm trying to get at. The notion of something, the invisibility of a system we don't know we participate in that needs to be illuminated. 

Okay, let's make some dirt y'all!