Situating disgust: negotiating contamination in an impure world

Workshop with Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, US.

Abstract

Social scientists have long been interested in social efforts to keep categories clean and distinct – what Latour refers to as ‘purification’. They have explored, for instance, purification’s central role in human social and mental ordering (Levi-Strauss 1949), expressed through separations of categories, substances, bodily fluids and living species. Social theorists have argued that perceived contamination undergirds social ordering through disgust and fear (Douglas 1966) and the socio-political and affective management of the abject (Kristeva 1982) through the expulsion of impurity. Furthermore, Norbert Elias and Matthew Wolf-Meyer emphasize that disgust itself has been treated as a marker of a civilized, modern self, thereby also defining another, less capable of disgust and thereby deemed less civilized. As Wolf-Meyer says, ‘disgust serves as a mechanism of differentiation,’ (2024: 10) emphasizing how blood, organs, and faecal matter are animated by racialized social orders. Practices of purification, involve the disciplining and defining of people’s existence, as well as their interactions with their environments (down to eating and sleeping patterns and romantic and reproductive choices). These same processes underpin practices and ideologies of discrimination and distinction, ranging from the marginalisation of individuals or groups to full-blown caste systems, apartheid and colonial regimes.

Purification, however, is always partial, never complete, and it necessarily leads to the proliferation of hybrids, which in turn require the existence of distinct categories that they simultaneously subvert and reinforce (Strathern 1996). What this means is that contamination is an omnipresent, unavoidable and often necessary aspect of existence. People may actively experiment with mixing and polluting, leading to a range of culturally established contamination practices, for instance, parenting that allows children to be in contact with microbes to increase immunological resistance, interhuman or interspecies microbial transplants, everyday food production that depends on fermentation, or the repurposing of waste. Microbes themselves constantly trouble socially constructed or imagined distinctions and firewalls, as when viruses leap across species or when multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) recolonize our hospitals.

This workshop invites speakers and participants to reflect on processes and practices of purification and its converse, contamination, as well as effects and practices of disgust, from a range of different empirical and disciplinary perspectives. Through ‘situating disgust,’ we aim to critically engage contemporary and historical modes of differentiation as well as efforts to play across social and material orderings, perhaps in the name of crafting an otherwise.

Bio

Matthew Wolf-Meyer is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life (2012), Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (2019), Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (2020), and American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within (2024). He is the editor of Proposals for a Caring Economy (2025), Mapping Medical Anthropology for the 21st Century (with Junko Kitanaka and Eugene Raikhel, 2025), and Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing (with Danielle Elliott, 2023). His research focuses on the biology of everyday life, affective approaches to subjectivity, and posthuman bioethics.