Abstract

Re-examining Mary Douglas’ work on pollution and concepts of purity, this volume explores modern expressions of these themes in urban areas, examining the intersections of material and cultural pollution. It presents ethnographic case studies from a range of cities affected by globalization processes such as neoliberal urban policies, privatization of urban space, continued migration and spatialized ethnic tension. What has changed since the appearance of Purity and Danger? How have anthropological views on pollution changed accordingly? This volume focuses on cultural meanings and values that are attached to conceptions of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, purity and impurity, healthy and unhealthy environments, and addresses the implications of pollution with regard to discrimination, class, urban poverty, social hierarchies and ethnic segregation in cities.

Rivke Jaffe is Associate Professor at the Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam. She previously held teaching and research positions at Leiden University, the University of the West Indies and the KITLV. She has conducted fieldwork in Jamaica, Curaçao and Suriname on topics ranging from the urban environment to public-private security assemblages.

“…this volume offers a range of useful accounts of cultural construction of pollution, deployed as an idiom in the ordering and negotiating of social relations in a range of urban settings. The illustration of how assertions of pollution are racialized, gendered, and classed, and the range of debates in which pollution is deployed as a discursive as well as material form, usefully broaden the frame of urban and environmental anthropology.”  ·  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“[These essays] are of high academic quality and present often penetrating ethnographic and historical insight into the negotiation of (im)purity in a variety of cultural contexts. They offer a stimulating and engaging read."  ·  Aidan Davison, University of Tasmania

Eveline Dürr is Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig- Maximilians-University, Munich. She has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, the USA and Germany, and also in New Zealand while she was Associate Professor at the Auckland University of Technology. Her research focuses on urban anthropology, cultural identities and representations.