Placing “Matter Out of Place”: Purity and Danger as Evidence for Architecture and Urbanism

Ben Campkin

doi:10.1080/13264826.2013.785579

Abstract

This paper revisits Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966). A survey of this theory in architecture in the late-twentieth century reveals how it focused attention on relationships between dirt, cleanliness, and the design and organisation of space—an area previously neglected in architectural thought. Dirt remains an important focus within architectural and urban theory, with implications for practice. Yet, the intersections that scholars of the 1980s and 1990s made between Douglas' work and critical theory, feminist and psychoanalytic writings elicited problems with her structuralist approach that remain unresolved. These are apparent in considering relationships between dirt and cities—indeed, the aphorism Douglas invokes, “dirt is matter out of place”, originates in discussions of nineteenth-century urbanisation. To better understand dirt's relationships with modern and late-modern capitalist cities, Douglas' insights can be productively read alongside post-structuralist accounts, including the psychoanalytic notion of the abject and recent neo-Marxian scholarship on the production of urban nature.

Highlights

Few anthropological texts can have had so notable an impact outside of that discipline, and on the discipline of architecture in particular, as Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, first published in 1966.2 Until the late 1970s, this text by Douglas – an exploration of social and cultural systems through the evidence of the everyday, the excluded and the prohibited – was itself considered marginal within the discipline of anthropology; and later in life she revealed that she was disappointed with the immediate response.[3]
Purity and Danger went on to become an exemplar of the power of theory to cut across disciplines, methodological approaches, and intellectual positions; helping us to understand dirt in varied material and symbolic forms
In addition to anthropological perspectives, and psychoanalytic accounts, another body of work is relevant to thinking about urban dirt: that which adopts an implicit or explicit neo-Marxian theoretical position in the investigation of the production and discourses of urban dirt, degradation and stigmatised spaces within neoliberal urbanisation.[61] These scholars, rooted in a Lefebvrian tradition of thinking about order and classification in relation to the city, have emphasised the social relationships underpinning the production of different forms of urban dirt and waste matter, relating them to the material and discursive production of nature

Summary

Introduction

Few anthropological texts can have had so notable an impact outside of that discipline, and on the discipline of architecture in particular, as Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, first published in 1966.2 Until the late 1970s, this text by Douglas – an exploration of social and cultural systems through the evidence of the everyday, the excluded and the prohibited – was itself considered marginal within the discipline of anthropology; and later in life she revealed that she was disappointed with the immediate response.[3].

Results

Conclusion