Abstract
Disgust of specific others is a universal phenomenon. Every now and then this pops up in spoken or written, denigrating and dehumanizing comparisons of fellow human beings with excrements. Verrips' contribution deals with such a comparison (found anno 2016 on glass containers in Berlin) of a specific socio-cultural category, already despised and persecuted in Europe for ages. He argues that it is possible to reach a deeper insight in this case of comparing humans with faeces, when one uses the theory of sacrifice as formulated in 1898 by Henri Hubert & Marcel Mauss.
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Notes
- 1.
This ‘somebody’ might have been an elderly lady who is well known in Berlin for her crusades against right-wing slogans in the public realm of the city and her being arrested by the police for her cleansing activities time and again (Volkskrant 20/10/2016).
- 2.
In spite of the fact that the designation ‘Gypsies’ (as well as ‘Zigeuner’ and ‘Tsiganes’) got a negative connation -reason why the L’Union Rom Internationale (IRU) in 1971 started to officially use the term ‘Rom’- I will nevertheless use it, because I do not always know to what specific sub-category or -group they belong, such as Roma, Sinti, Ursari, Kalés, Lowara or Kalderash. Moreover, not all Gypsy groups want to be called ‘Rom.’ See Clébert (1970: 46–49) and Commission Nationale (2015: 251–261) for an overview of the various categories of Gypsies one can meet in Europe.
- 3.
On the Internet one can find a host of special sites that offer the opportunity to ventilate negative stereotypes of and/or experiences with Gypsies. Also telling in this connection is this observation by Gypsy blogger Jacques Debot: ‘La violence des propos à l’égard des Roms, Tsiganes et Gens du Voyage sur le réseaux sociaux Facebook et Twitter ne semble connaître aucune limite. Appels au meurtre, au tir à balles réelles, à l’interdiction des transports en commun, comparaisons avec les singes, les rats, la vermine, accusation de propager des maladies sont diffusés quotidiennement, repris, partagés, approuvés, applaudis’ (see his blog Romstorie: La vie des Roms et des Gens du Voyage d.d. 28/12/2015).
- 4.
Compare this with the lyrics of the outlawed German neo-Nazi rock band Landser: ‘In der Oder und in der Neisse/Nacht für Nacht die gleiche Scheisse/Im kalten Wasser Zigeunergewühl/Gelangen an’s Ufer und schreien „Asyl!“/Zigeunerpack – jagt sie alle weg – ich hasse/diesen Dreck!’
- 5.
See Verrips (2001: 343/344). In a sense the idea of the limited good, as described by Foster (1965) for so-called peasant societies, plays an important role here.
- 6.
This is deeply rooted in enlightenment philosophy. Kant, for instance, distinguished in the introduction of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft also a nomadic reason -nomadische Vernunft or as Röttgers calls it vagabundierende Vernunft. This type of reason Kant disliked very much, because nomads like Gypsies ‘despise all kinds of constant cultivation of the soil,’ married among one another, spoke a kind of secret language and refused to allow themselves to be incorporated in a civilized and sedentary world, reason why they formed a serious threat to societal order (Röttgers 1993; Verrips 2011). A striking example of a well-known Dutch politician -at the beginning of the last century even the prime minister of the Netherlands- who despised Gypsies (as well as Jews) and wished them to disappear, was Abraham Kuyper.
- 7.
I traced two ethnological journals that published special issues on disgust: ‘Anatomie du dégoût.’ Ethnologie Française 2011/1 (Vol. 41) and ‘Igitt. Ekel als Kultur.’ Innsbrucker Zeitschrift für Europäische Ethnologie 2015. Though Mary Douglas does not explicitly deal with the phenomenon in her study on purity and danger (1966, see Miller 1997: 43–45), it is clearly implied in her notions pollution and impurity.
- 8.
Compare this with what the philosopher Daniel Kelly wrote: ‘Ethnic boundary markers are often highly emotionally charged, and attitudes and behaviors associated with ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and prejudice often follow the logic of disgust, depicting out-group members not just as wrong or different, but as tainted, contaminating, even subhuman’ (2011: 7).
- 9.
During the reign of the Nazis the reduction of certain categories of people, such as the Jews and Gypsies, to excrements reached a tragic height in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, sometimes described as a kind of anus mundi (Werner 2011: 180–184). See for the persecution of the Gypsies by the Nazis, for example, Kenrick and Puxon (1972), Geiges and Wette (1979), Lucassen (1990) and Lewy (2000).
- 10.
See in this connection the revealing study of Alan Dundes (1984) on the inclination of Germans -in spite of their obsession with immaculacy or cleanliness- to use a wide range of scatological words and expressions in almost every sphere of life (cf. Werner 2011: 24/25; Breuer and Vidulić 2018: 6; Havryliv 2018: 28). See Inglis for an illuminating theory about ‘the conditions of possibility for the mobilisation of resources of faecal and other forms of corporeal symbolism by one group against another’ (2002: 219).
- 11.
Mary Douglas, for instance, formulated the ambiguity of the word sacer as follows: ‘…in some cases it may apply to desecration as well as to consecration’ (1966: 8).
- 12.
I grew up with this translation that is still in use in a number of orthodox Calvinist churches in the Bible Belt of the Netherlands.
- 13.
A comparison of the passages in the Dutch ‘Statenvertaling’ wherein disgust (‘walging’) was used with the same passages in several German and English translations taught me that in the first the following words were used: ‘Abscheu,’ ‘(sich) ekeln (vor),’ ‘verabscheuen’ (synonyms ‘sich ekeln,’ ‘hassen’) and ‘Abneigung haben,’ and in the latter that the word disgust does not occur as such. Instead, the following words are used: ‘loathe oneself,’ ‘abhor,’ ‘reject’ and ‘loathsome.’
- 14.
In the ‘Statenvertaling’ the word ‘drekgoden’ or ‘shit-gods’ occurs 48 times.
- 15.
The Biblia Pentapla is a unique work, for it presents the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant, Hebrew and Dutch translations of the Bible next to each other, so that one is able to compare them. The term ‘Dreckgötter’ is only used in the Protestant translation of the Old Testament, not in the other ones. Luther spoke in his translation of ‘Götzen’ in the sense of ‘Abgott’ (or ‘idol’). The popping up of ‘Dreckgötter’ in later editions of the Bible might be a direct consequence of a more precise translation of the word used in the original texts. According to Bergmann & Schart it concerns the noun šiqûș meaning, amongst other things, ‘Dreckszeug’ (‘shitty things’) as designation for idols (2012).
- 16.
In the French translation of 1744 of the Luther Bible one finds the expression ‘dieux de fiente’ (‘shit-gods’).
- 17.
The English scholar of biblical literature Yvonne Sherwood extensively sketched in great detail the blasphemous iconoclasm of the God of Israel as it occurs in Ezekiel in her brilliant study ‘Biblical Blaspheming’ (2012).
- 18.
The pernicious perception of Gypsies as being impure and shitty people polluting each and every environment they enter is nowadays as widespread as it used to be in the past. See, for example, https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/romandie/story/Roma-lassen-Abfall-zurueck-Volksseele-kocht%2D%2D-12711549. However, it is important to know that Gypsies perceive non-Gypsies in a similar way and that they have their own complex ideas of purity and cleanliness the latter do not know anything about (see Sutherland 1975: Chap. 8; Rao 1975: 149–155, Okely 1983: Chap. 6 and Mroz 1984).
- 19.
Recent examples of places where walls were built to separate Gypsy camps or settlements from non-Gypsy neighbourhoods are Usti Nad Labem in the Czech Republic (1999), Berehove in the Ukraine (2012) and Wattrelos in France (2015).
- 20.
Agamben refers two times to the killing of Gypsies by the Nazis (1998: 155, 179).
- 21.
The chapter on the ambivalence of the sacred in Part Two (Agamben 1998: 75–81) is both scientifically and technically weak. Not only the lack of presenting convincing arguments for the blunt rejection of their approaches, except that they are not based on the meaning Agamben gives to the term sacred as formulated in the quote from a classical juridical text, is striking, but also the fact that there are mistakes in the quotes from Robertson Smith’s work and lacking references to the literature mentioned as relevant for a better understanding of the phenomenon of the homo sacer.
- 22.
Another topic that escapes Agamben’s attention by rejecting the work of Durkheim on the sacred is that of the ‘sacrality of the person’ (introduced by him in 1898, see Joas 2015: 81–86), in a sense the positive conceptual counterpart of the banned homo sacer.
- 23.
In the case of expelling pollution and impurity the victim is often a real or symbolic scapegoat, a sacrificial being Agamben refuses to associate –in my view erroneously- with his homo sacer, because it is forbidden to sacrifice it. See in this connection Brittnacher (2012: 218–222) who follows Agamben’s line of argumentation with regard to Gypsies in a way I find inconsistent and therefore unsatisfactory.
- 24.
Clear cases wherein religious justifications of gruesome and terrifying cleansing practices are presented are the so-called Islamic State and Boko Haram.
- 25.
Cf. Bauman (2004) who speaks about the outcasts of modernity as ‘wasted lives.’
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Thanks to Birgit Meyer, Johannes Fabian and the editors of this volume for their critical, but constructive, comments on earlier versions of this essay.
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Verrips, J. (2020). Disgust and Difference: Conflicting Sensations of the Sacred. In: Balkenhol, M., van den Hemel, E., Stengs, I. (eds) The Secular Sacred. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_12
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