Ashplant

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Filthy Rites." Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 1–16.

Related topics:

Bodies
Ingestion and Excretion
Medicine
Race and Ethnicity
Waste

Link to citation page: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024799

Link to full text: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20024799.pdf?acceptTC=true

Greenblatt focuses on the social construction of disgust and the power it holds as a repressive social tool. Greenblatt argues that disgust represses by transforming natural processes into unclean and shameful acts. Although these acts "have little or nothing to do with hygiene," the policing of bodily functions imposes a hierarchy of privilege and furthers a sense of othering (Greenblatt 3). In Bourke's 1891 encounters with the Zunis, Greenblatt shows that ethnography, or one culture's study of another's rules, reveals the social conditioning of disgust. As neither the examiner or examined can separate themselves from their own cultural norms, disgust becomes a tool of suppression.

Greenblatt suggests that disgust can also function as a tool for the oppressed. Using Bahktin's conception of the grotesque body, Greenblatt argues that disgust becomes a release valve for oppressed peoples. Using Rabelais' 1968 text, Gargantua and Pantagruel, he demonstrates how bodily humor attempts to reconnect the lower body stratum, and all its implications of filth and excrement, with the sterilized spirituality valued by the upper class. This separation of body and spirit results from a suppression of bodily functions through shame and guilt.

Greenblatt ends with an inversion of disgust and humor, as the seventeenth century Diggers - a society attempting to avoid constricting social rules - are attacked by enemies dressed in a mockery of medieval carnival. Thus carnival, which had previously been a space for the lower class to fight against the rigid structures of their society, now becomes a weapon of the privileged. This moment reveals the double edged nature of disgusting humor, for "the satiric humor of the oppressed, no matter how telling it may be, always assumes the condition of oppression...both by releasing aggression nonviolently through laughter and by confirming in the minds of the conquerors the impotence of the conquered" (Greenblatt 5).

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