Things may come to be “out of place” by being anomalous or ambiguous. Dirtiness is less a property of things than it is a contextual label attributed to them. Whilst cooking utensils are dirty within the context of the bedroom, in the kitchen they are in the right place and hence – relatively speaking – clean. Neither is dirty in an absolute sense, but is considered so due to its out-of-place-ness. Similarly, food is not necessarily dirty, “but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom” (idem: 37). Douglas illustrates these points with mundane examples: shoes, for instance, are not dirty in themselves, “but it is dirty to place them on the dining table” (idem: 44). It is a label for “all events which blur, smudge, contradict or otherwise confuse accepted classifications” (Douglas 1968: 50), and, importantly, it is a relative term – “what is clean in relation to one thing may be unclean in relation to another” (Douglas 1966: 10). “Where there is dirt there is system” (idem: 44), because dirt is not an independent, objective attribute of something, but a “residual category rejected from our normal scheme of classifications” (idem: 45). To Douglas, “there is no such thing as absolute dirt” (idem: 2), and “no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit” (idem: vii). What follows is a summary of her theorizing on dirt in these texts.ĭirt, as we know from the famous phrase, is “matter out of place,” a definition that, Douglas states, implies two important conditions: “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” (Douglas 1966: 44). Nevertheless, “matter out of place” remains the quintessential Douglassian expression and is a keystone in both of her major efforts concerning dirt: Purity and Danger (1966) and the later essay “ Pollution,” first published in the 1968 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and subsequently included in the anthology Implicit Meanings (Douglas 1975). Its exact origins are unclear, but the earliest known version appears in the record of an 1853 speech given to the Royal Agricultural Society by Lord Palmerston (who would later go on to be the fifth Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) (Fardon 2013). Noise as “sound out of place”: investigating the links between Mary Douglas’ work on dirt and sound studies research -ĭespite it becoming her most famous saying, the phrase “dirt is matter out of place” was not actually coined by Mary Douglas. It argues that far more than simply giving rise to the definition “sound out of place,” Douglas’ classic anthropological work can be used as the basis for an integrated “theory of noise,” deepening our understanding of what it means when we describe a sound as “noise” and drawing attention to the ambiguous, transgressive and dangerous qualities and potentials of noise. This article corrects this omission by undertaking a close reading of Douglas’ writing on “dirt” and linking it to contemporary sound studies research. Beyond this, however, no effort has been directed towards exploring the link between dirt and noise or seeing how far the analogy between the two extends. Where attempts have been made, many have settled on a definition of noise as “sound out of place,” a reformulation of Mary Douglas’ definition of “dirt” as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: 44). However, due in large part to the fact that judgements about what constitutes noise are highly subjective, researchers have often struggled to define it. “Noise” is an important subject in sound studies research.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |