A moveable feast

Professor Mary Douglas argues that it's more important to ask what kind of social organisation produces strong disgust responses than to argue about whether disgust is innate or learnt.

There are two different angles on the subject. The biologists adopt an evolutionary angle: they emphasise the genetic basis — humans are born with feelings of disgust. People are universally disgusted by slimy, smelly and putrefying things. The biologist’s view is highly plausible: excrement is slimy, smelly and disgusting, and there could be survival value for the organism that rejects anything that looks like it. If humans are endowed with primal disgust, it protects them from the risks of disease from infected bodies.

What's your poison?

The anthropologists respond by asking about dirt-loving babies. Very small infants pop anything into their mouths. They have to be trained to leave excrement alone. So what price instinct? The psychologist responds with research that establishes the age at which spontaneous disgust emerges. Is it by the age of two? By that age children have become cautious all round, so it's one up to the early training and says nothing about genetic influence.

Anthropologists further deny that everyone feels disgust at the same things. Some people actually like eating slimy worms and grubs. And remember Herodotus’ story about the Greeks who habitually burnt their dead on funeral pyres and who expressed utter disgust at the idea of eating their parents’ dead bodies, and the other people who customarily ate their parents and expressed horror at the idea of burning them.

Most of the anthropologists’ arguments rest on the use of disgust to enhance a ceremony. But, says the biologist, we are not talking about religions, which operate on a totally different level. Children have been trained all their lives to avoid eating certain things, then come the rites of initiation into adulthood and they are commanded to do the forbidden things. Rituals often counter-train against innate intuitions and against some original training: ‘Now you are a man, control your disgust, deal with your pain, deal with blood and vomit, be prepared to kill.’ It is hardly evidence against a universal snake phobia if many religions worship spirits in snake form. If spit is a gesture of blessing in parts of Africa it does not prove there is no universal disgust at spittle.

Survival is not enough

But what does it matter? We can agree that there may be a gene that gives a beneficial sense of primal disgust and also that culture directs and controls these feelings, and that many rituals play upon these emotions. So, where do we go from here?

The biological theory concerns some disgust, but not all. Focused on the one evolutionary benefit from avoiding faeces its model of the genetic system is untidily triggered by one-to-one reactions. If it is a question of instinct, not of reasoning, do animals feel disgust? Are carrion eaters, like jackals, hyenas and vultures, biologically equipped to deal with the lethal diseases to which their diet exposes them? Do they avoid putrefying flesh? Do hyenas eat dead hyenas? Do dirty feeders have a shorter expectation of life? If not, the biologists’ argument from survival is less convincing. Do hungry carnivorous animals eat their own dead?

What about dung? Hares eat their own droppings — instead of having several stomachs like sheep and cows, they digest in two goes: first they eat tough vegetable stuff, then they defecate; then they turn round and eat it all again, thus extracting the last element of nutrition. Does this habit expose them to the diseases from which our primal disgust is alleged to protect us?

Mind and body

Back to the psychology: I see, touch or smell something, I feel disgust, I want to throw up, my body shakes, I vomit. Revulsion involves the whole mind-body relation. Isolating ‘disgust’ as one kind of feeling seems old-fashioned theorising. Such a violent physical response needs a systemic explanation. The disgusting object is not physically dangerous. We ought to keep open the possibility that disgust responds to some comprehensive assault.

Worker bees busily remove ‘dirt’ from the hive, that is they collect and push out the excrement. Is this behaviour triggered by disgust? The grubs themselves are pretty disgusting. Do the workers sometimes push out the grubs with the dirt? If their task is just to clear a certain limited floor, they would simply be removing matter out of place. This approach does not privilege a chain of reasoning from object to intellectual recognition. It assumes that every living thing has some knowledge of its body in space and time and of the surrounding boundary markers, smells and colours, for safety and danger. Then ‘disgust’ would respond to a threat to the known, predictable, order. ‘Disgust’ protects the subject’s capacity to organise its universe. This would be the genetic infrastructure for particular phobias and universal feelings. Matter out of place is a good description of the dirt reaction. It allows for local variation as the system of possible right places for things depends on what is being organised and what classifications are being used.

Ask the right question

This turns the research agenda on its head. The learning process takes priority. To examine individuals for reactions that might be learnt or might be inherited is less interesting than seeking to know what kind of social organisation trains the individual human to respond with more or less powerful disgust reactions. Some people's eating is governed by complicated rules about what food goes with what, and what food has to come first or last, what can be offered to guests, what can be eaten on Sundays. Do such structured food environments predispose people to disgust? Or do they overcome it, like rituals that overcome innate dispositions? Do people digest better if disgust does not intervene?

Instead of looking at what is supposed to inspire disgust, the research would focus on how disgust reactions are controlled.

Mary Douglas at home

Mary Douglas when working in Africa