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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.
“…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.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction: Cultural and Material Forms of Urban Pollution
Rivke Jaffe and Eveline Dürr
Chapter 2. ‘Tidy Kiwis/Dirty Asians’: Cultural Pollution and Migration in Auckland, New Zealand
Eveline Dürr
Chapter 3. Private Cleanliness, Public Mess: Purity, Pollution and Space in Kottar, South India
Damaris Lüthi
Chapter 4. The Jungle and the City: Perceptions of the Urban among Indo-Fijians in Suva, Fiji
Susanna Trnka
Chapter 5. Gendered Fears of Pollution: Traversing Public Space in NeoliberalCairo
Anouk de Koning
Chapter 6. The Choice between Clean and Dirty: Discourses of Aesthetics, Morality and Progress in Post-Revolutionary Asmari, Eritrea
Magnus Treiber
Chapter 7.Using Pollution to Frame Collective Action: Urban Grassroots Mobilisations in Budapest
Szabina Kerényi
Chapter 8. Cleanness, Order and Security: The Re-emergence of Restrictive Definitions of Urbanity in Europe
Johanna Rolshoven
Chapter 9. Social Equity and Social Housing Densification in Glen Innes, New Zealand: A Political Ecology Approach
Kathryn Scott, Angela Shaw and Christina >Bava
Chapter 10. Afterword: Impure Thoughts on Messy Cities
Aidan Davison
Notes on Contributors
Index