BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness

8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness

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ETHICS& THE ENVIRONMENT, 15(1) 2010 ISSN: 1085-6633

TIdy WHITENESSA GeneAloGy of RAce, PuRity, And

HyGiene

daNa BERTHOld

While ideals o racial purity may be out o ashion, other sorts o purity

ideals are increasingly popular in the United States today. The theme

o purity is noticeable everywhere, but it is especially prominent in our

contemporary xation on health and hygiene. This may seem totally un-

related to issues o racism and classism, but in act, the purveyors o

purity draw upon the same themes o physical and moral purity that

have helped produce white identity and dominance in the US. Histori-cally, this is where the purity rhetoric gets its power. To invoke purity

ideals in the US is to mobilize this genealogy o racialized associations.

Todays zealous preoccupation with hygiene is part o our living heritage

in a racist culture.

Just as ideas o race and racial purity were debunked by biologists

long beore the public would begin to question them, ideals o extreme

hygienic purity linger with us, even fourish, despite scientic evidence

o their utility and harm. Why are we still so enamored with purity?

Because, to some extent, our very sel-conceptions are at stake. Other

scholars have described how our process o sel individuation is based

upon exclusion. The unique contribution o a genealogical approach to

this issue is that, instead o merely locating the problem in ideologies

held by others, it can evoke sel-recognition and sel-transormation. We

will tend to assume the problem lies elsewhere until we learn to recog-


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nize ourselves in practices that reproduce cultural ideals. As inheritors o

this racist culture, we are all lovers o purity, and we are all responsible

or rethinking this value.

Critical race theorists have done much in recent years to show that

contrived and repressive notions o racial purity have been central to the

social identity o whiteness in the US. Similarly, eminists know that con-

trived and repressive notions o sexual purity (that is, chastity) have been

central to the social construction o emininity, especially white eminin-

ity. While it may be clear that these abstract purity ideals have privileged

certain subjects over others, what is even more interesting, and less doc-

umented, are the ways in which everyday purity ideals bite their own

tails, that is, they undermine their proessed purpose in concrete ways.Thus, even the privileged subjects suer. Looking around, we can see

that Americans1 today are still preoccupied with purity ideals in various

ormsnotably, physical hygiene. Purity ideals, ostensibly so healthy and

clean, pervade many contemporary American practices, wherein they be-

tray themselves by making us sick.

One way that purity ideals can make us sick is in a physical sense. Our

most common and seemingly prudent o purity ideals, extreme hygiene,

is ultimately unhealthy. We are encouraged to be overly anxious about

germs and other contaminants, and marketers present us with productsdeemed pure or our consumption. Today, we are sold purity by way o

bottled water and antibacterial soap. Judging by the overwhelming suc-

cess o such products, we are all lovers o purity. But many o these prod-

ucts are actually making us less healthy, in some cases by weakening ourimmune systems, in others by adding toxins to the environment. Then

why do we still hold on to exaggerated ideals o hygienic purity?

Motivations or such purity ideals may be more obvious to us when

we look into our past. In the early US, cleanliness was associated explicitlywith civility, high class, and whiteness. Whiteness, as it has come down to

us, is conceived in part as a sort o physical hygienethe lack o a mark

o pollution. The lack o a mark physically has symbolized the lack o a

mark morally, and this, in turn, has helped bolster a dominant identity.

When we look at purity ideals as having not only physical but also moral

aspects, we can see how easily slippage takes place between the exclusion

o dirt and the exclusion o dirty people. The unction o purity ideals

is rarely just about physical dirtit is about wielding power over im-


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pure others. The slippage is not to be unexpected, nor can it be avoided

entirely. As we will see, usage o the word pure in the normative sense

(i.e. conerring value) actually preceded, and remains embedded within,

usage o the word pure in a descriptive sense. But because purity idealsare usually presented as merely descriptive, the slippage, and the ethical

sickness o hierarchical exclusion gets concealed.

There are vast bodies o literature criticizing historical notions o ra-

cial purity (e.g. the one-drop rule2) and eminine sexual purity. That work

has been the inspiration and oundation o the present inquiry. My project

advances the discussion by addressing the connection to purity ideals that

are more common today. One purpose o this article is to demonstrate

that our cultures association between whiteness and purity is alive and

well. More signicantly, however, this article aims to show that the reasonthose ideals still manage to fourishdespite ample evidence that purity

ideals are unhealthy or our bodies and our environmentis because they

reinorce our still-racialized socio-economic hierarchy. Even those o us

who readily admit a strong historical link between hygiene and racismnd ourselves resistant to the idea that our own preoccupation with hy-giene has some racist roots. The widespread popularity o purity ideals

in the US means that all o us, not just elites, routinely reproduce our

cultures love o purity. Purity ideals fourish because o their exceptional

ability to masquerade as the most healthy and innocent o ideals, even

while they conjure up and revitalize our racist heritage.

Other scholars have examined purity ideals as organizing principles

behind both social order and sel-conception. While this approach gives us

valuable insight into the tenacity o purity ideals, in doing so it has oten

relied upon an abstract analysis o the logic o purity. My intention here

is to show that another approach, a genealogical approach, can provide

a critique that is more radical by virtue o its practicality. Genealogy can

have a proound infuence on purity ideals precisely because o its con-creteness. It helps us use our own practical experience to ask ourselves,

what are our values up to? Are they causing insidious side eects, morally

and physically? My examples will show how, because o their genealogi-

cal tie to purity discourses in our white supremacist history, todays purity

ideals can unction subtly to reproduce the status quo when it comes to

race, class, and the environment.


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Lugones and The Lover of PuriTy

Mary Douglas (1970) and Mara Lugones (1994) have both written

important accounts o how purity ideals acilitate the ordering o social

lie in ways that benet dominant groups. Douglas, rom an anthropo-logical perspective, recounts (but does not so much criticize) the unc-

tioning o specic purity rituals in various cultures. Lugones, in Purity,

Impurity, and Separation, sets her own analysis apart: it is not [Doug-

lass] purpose to distinguish between oppressive and non-oppressive

structuring. My purpose here is precisely to understand the particular

oppressive character o the modern construction o social lie, and the

power o impurity in resisting and threatening this oppressive structur-

ing (1994, 285). Lugones then goes on to demystiy that oppressive

structuring via an abstract analysis o logic o purity. I Douglass ap-

proach is concrete without criticism, Lugoness approach achieves criti-

cism, but primarily at a conceptual level. My approach oers a missing

piece o this discussion by providing criticism o purity ideals at a con-

crete level.

I nd Lugoness account valuable in describing how we come to

inhabit dierent sorts o subjectivity based on dierential positions o

power and identity. I think she is right that an urge or control and an

assumption o unity are behind the sel-conception o the dominantsubject, who she says is a lover o purity (1994, 280). But privileged

individuals o the dominant culture do not, o course, literally begin with

anything they would consciously call an urge or control or an assump-

tion o unity. This being the case, then, my question becomes: what specic

discursive practices, what kinds o values do we actually espouse that helpconstitute such sel-conceptions? Are there concrete ways (or example,by over-using disinectants), in which this privileged subject literally lovespurity? How can these practices be explained? And do only elite individu-

als love purity, or are we all lovers o purity?Lugones does encourage us, in active resistance to the logic o purity,

to be more concrete. In closing her article, Lugones oers suggestions

o concrete ways that readers might resist the dominant logic o purity

through intentional acts o impurity. But I dont think that the only way

to resist the logic o purity is by privileging its opposite. A genealogical

analysis reveals that these purity ideals ultimately betray their own logic

in tangible ways. Such an analysis shows that a preoccupation with purity


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is unhealthy, both physically and morally. It makes our bodies and our sel

conceptions sick. We can see this through our concrete experience.

geneaLogyA genealogical approach can advance this discussion by showing how

purity ideals, such as extreme hygiene, are reproduced through popular

discursive practices. Genealogy does not proclaim in advance that certain

values, such as purity, are always or necessarily bad. Instead, it gives us

the tools to inquire about the unctioning o those values through con-

crete examples. Examples are more than just illustrations o a concept.

They are the lie o the concept. And as such, they are also the means o

its undoing. For instance, I will be considering things that our culture has

deemed pure, such as bottled water and antibacterial soap. I these thingsare not indeed pure, then what unction is served by our belie that they

are? Genealogy is more than anthropology, and more than a history o

ideas, because o its critical orce. By inquiring into the values and prac-

tices that help produce our sel-conceptions, genealogy seeks historicized

sel-understanding and transormation as part o the critical process. It

cultivates a critical orientation that aids us in the continual work o ree-

dom (Foucault 1984, 46).As Nietzsche emphasized, we should be willing

continually to revaluate our values (1989 [1887], 20).To the extent thatwe unrefectively uphold dubious values, we are less ree, and we lock

ourselves into a status quo social order.

As we take a closer look at purity ideals, we will nd that most oten

they depend upon a dubious metaphysical purity. In other words, physical

and moral purity ideals both presuppose (and aim at a return to) oun-

dational, prepolitical and metaphysically distinct categories3 that turn out,

upon investigation, to be nothing o the sort. In the next section, our ge-

nealogy will reveal that dirt is a relative concept. Bodies are not pure,

identities are not pure, and moral circumstances are not pure. A genealo-gist is then led to inquire what unction a belie in purity actually serves.Historical examples will demonstrate that purity ideals unction to create

and reinorce social identities and socio-economic hierarchies, by ration-

alizing exclusion. In other words, when we explore the genealogy o ideas

o dirt and corollary purity ideals, we most oten nd their beginnings

in political and economic power dynamics, and the dirty task o keep-

ing power or the elite. Why seek these origins? A genealogist supposes


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that when we are more refective about the unctions o our cultural prac-

tices, we are more ree to change those patterns. I we can identiy purity

ideals in many o our common interactions, we will be better prepared to

challenge the conceptual patterns and values that perpetuate hierarchicaldivisions.

To say that purity ideals are important aspects o white identity is not

to say that they are embraced consciously or explicitly by all (or only)

white people. I will be making the case, rather, that physical and moral

purity ideals orm popular discursive practices that help reproduce white

identity, which is ormulated to reinorce white dominance. I use dis-

course in the larger sense employed by Foucault (1972) and Butler (1993),

without implying a strict separation o linguistic and material realms. The

term discursive practices highlights the act that all practices have adiscursive lie, just as discourse has a practical lie. Understanding purity

ideals as discursive practices helps us recognize ourselves within them. We

consume and reproduce this ideal. In a culture preoccupied with purity,

we are all conditioned to some extent to be lovers o purity we are

shaped by purity ideals, but also we are the agents responsible or analyz-

ing and redeploying or undoing them.

CLeanLiness and seLf-ConCePTions

Since purity is primarily a negative concept, that is, dened by what

it is not, it is instructive to examine ideas o what constitutes impurity,that is, pollution, or dirt. Ater researching various cultures on this point,

Douglas nds that there is no such thing as absolute dirt (1970, 12). Dirt

is relative. In other words, peoples o dierent cultures have produced di-

erent denitions o what is to be avoided, or what constitutes a matter

out o placewhether that means clutter, germs, or some other orm o

contamination. This supports the insight that a concern or hygiene does

not always, as it purports, truly serve physical health. I this were the case,we would probably nd the same set o unhealthy things to be avoided by

all humans alike, since presumably health relates to our universally shared

physiology. Instead, we nd considerable variability between cultures.

In America today, the dirt with which we seem most concerned is

microscopic, and there is a popular obsession over hygienic purity. Amer-

icans are excessively, needlessly, even recklessly clean. Our stores carry

whole aisles ull o brightly-packaged cleaning and hygiene products. We


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are oered antibacterial writing utensils, toothbrush holders, and shop-

ping-cart wipes. We bathe more oten and consume more detergents,

disinectants, and deodorants than any other identiable group on the

planet. People who do not shower at least once a day can be considereddirtythis is outlandish by just about any other historical or cultural

standard.

It may seem contradictory to claim both that dirt is relative and that

Americans are excessively clean. However, I am not judging the impropri-

ety o cleanliness based on arbitrary standards, but based on Americans

own sense o what we desire out o our cleanlinessnamely, most oten,

good health. Our hygienic preoccupation is not making us healthier, and

yet, we are orever trying to make ourselves cleaner. This should tell us

there may be something else at work.A problem with such hyper-cleanliness is illustrated through the re-

cent craze over antibacterial soaps. Since the 1990s, antibacterial soaps

have become the most widely available liquid soaps on American grocery

and drug store shelves. While public concern about germs has been a a-

miliar part o our culture at least since germ theory developed in the late

19th century, increasing ater World War II with new developments in im-

munology,4 only recently has it reached a level where the public is willing

to believe it needs antibiotics in its handsoap. This is truly unwarrantedwhile hand-washing is a good idea, regular soap is perectly eective.

Doctors and health ocials themselves oten use regular soap, because

they know that antibacterial soap can have harmul eects, akin to the

harmul eects o swallowing antibiotics or any small illness. The main

bacterialthreats to our health are E. coli and salmonella, and threateningquantities are almost always inside ood, not on our hands. So, bacteria-

killing agents in handsoap are not really helping us. Doctors do worryabout two strains o bacteria that are spread by touching suracesbut

they are only ound in hospitals. And anyway, most winter illnesses areviral, not bacterial (Kolata 2001). While doctors and scientists know bet-

ter than to think antibiotics will serve every ailment, or that it is important

or handsoap kill bacteria, the public still enthusiastically demands these

products. A lot o it is not based on science, says Dr. Jerey S. Duchin,

chie o the Communicable Disease Control, Epidemiology and Immuni-

zation Section o the public health department o Seattle. It is based on

our national psyche and what we value purity and cleanliness (Kolata


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2001). This value, then, pits us against our microscopic surroundings in

general. Despite our hostility, most o the germs and dirt that we co-

exist with are harmless (indeed, oten benecial) components o our eco-

logical system. Regardless, we go on generating and consuming all kindso toxic germ-killers, ultimately harming ourselves. The ingredients that

go into pesticides, and disinectants, and single-use packaging are causing

cancer and ecological degradation. The byproducts o chlorine bleach, or

example, are retained in atty tissue and have been linked to cancers in

humans and other animals. Further, our lack o exposure to germs can

actually inhibit robust development o our immune systems. For example,

recent studies show that children are more likely to develop asthma i they

have been generally kept rom the outdoors and live inside very clean,

disinected homes (Rowlands 2002). Finally, over-use o germ-killers cancreate unhealthy environments by killing benecial bacteria while breed-

ing resistant strains o disease-causing onessuper-germs.

I do not mean to minimize the act that basic sanitation cuts down on

the communication o certain diseasesat times we have needed meas-

ures like the Pure Foods Act o 1906 to counter real public health threats

that resulted rom lack o sanitation. Nonetheless, today we have met

that basic sanitation mark and, in many regards, gone ar beyond. The

hyperbolic excess to which Americans have taken the need or hygiene is

medically unjustied, even counterproductive. Certainly, some degree o

concern about germs derives rom a reasonable ear o disease. However,

it is dicult to make sense o all the unhealthy, excessive germ-phobia

without an understanding o the residue o associations with cleanliness

in our racist past.

On a deeper level, all this excess anxiety tells us something about our

national psyche, our popular model o sel-conception. This sel-con-

ception relies upon certain distinctions, which, because they are allible,

produce certain anxieties. In particular, we are anxious about our discrete-ness as individual selves, about the not-sel (or other), and about dirt.

These three concepts and the anxieties about maintaining them are inter-

dependent and mutually reinorcing. But generally speaking, dirt is the

derivative concept, substituting or, and thereby rationalizing, the some-

times distasteul but necessary aspect o rejecting the other. I will return

to this in the next section. For now, we must understand the dominant

sel-conception o the contemporary American. In this conception, the

proper and healthy state o the human body is a physical unmixedness,


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or purity. This entails the idea that the boundaries o our bodies are natu-

rally discrete and hostile like ortress walls. There is an important sense

in which, however, thesel does not exist as such prior to the abjection

o elements that get designated as non-sel. Julia Kristeva (1982) describesthis process as both corporeal and symbolic, erecting boundaries o both

ones body and ones subjectivity. In order to maintain the boundary, the

non-sel must be abjected continually. This means it remains a continual

threat. And strictly speaking, it can never go away completely, because,

like the pollution without which purity is incomprehensible, the abjected

elements actually constitute the clean and proper sel. Judith Butler hascalled this unction the constitutive outside, because o the productive

role it continually plays in drawing the contours o the sel (1993, 3).

In theearly history o the US, this outside was certain people deemedother. Now, germs and other kinds o dirt have become ritualized as

a constitutive outside or the contemporary American.

It is important to historicize and locate the subject we are describing

here. The subject whose sense o sel is constituted in this way could be, as

many have suggested, the subject o the modern western era. This would

be the abstract individual, puried o any dirt, any mark o specicity,

and this oten turns out to mean (as Lugones points out) any marker o a

marginalized identity. Others would locate the beginning o purity-based

sel-conceptions much earlier, or example, in the Judaic tradition as ex-

emplied in Leviticus. The dominant subject o Americas mainstream cul-

ture does o course have roots in these traditions. However, the particular

orm that our sel-understandings take in America today is unique in ways

that can only be understood in relation to our own historyparticularly,

I will be arguing, the history o American race relations. This is not to

say that America is more concerned with purity than allother cultures,but that when we evoke purity ideals here, we conjure up (and some-

times reproduce, sometimes redeploy) a particular set o relations andexclusions. This genealogy aims to demonstrate how these relations are

harming us, even those o us who are ostensibly privileged by the current

arrangement.

PhysiCaL and MoraL PuriTy: dirT and dirTy PeoPLe

Generally speaking, the concern or hygienic discipline makes sense

within a tradition that has valued mind (or spirit) over body, and culture

(or civilization) over material nature. As Freud reminds us, control over


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the orces o nature is the how civilization understands itsel (1961, 47).

In the US, with our particular history o hierarchical relations, this has

produced representations o whiteness as mind/spirit and civilization, and

non-whiteness as primitive embodiment, closer to nature.Control o the orces o nature has also meant control over those

who are closer to nature. Similarly, control o dirt slips rom the physical

to the moral realm. As Douglas points out, dirt is relative, but this should

not imply that dirt is random. Rather, she claims, dirt is always part o

a system (1970, 48). Dirt, contamination, or pollution are labels likely

to be associated with behaviors that all outside o, and thereby threaten,

our most careully guarded categories o social classication, including

races, classes, genders, and sexualities. This is why dirtiness has not only

physical but moral implications. In the US, then, it should come as no sur-prise that white people, the group with social and economic dominance,

have conceived o themselves as pure, both physically and morally. Dyer

notes the irony in this. White people are neither literally nor symboli-

cally white. We are not the colour o snow or bleached linen, nor are we

uniquely virtuous and pure (1997, 42). But because dirt is relative, we

should keep in mind that there is no distinction (as Dyer implies there is)

between literal and symbolic dirtit is all symbolic. This is exactly whythe slippage so easily occurs between what gets represented as physical

dirt and what gets represented as moral dirt. Strictly speaking, it is not

really slippage at all, i by that we mean accidental transerence to a di-

erent concept. It is only slippage in the sense o ostensibly ignoring (and

yet oten exploiting) connotations that are embedded within the concept

as its oundation.

According to the Oxord English Dictionary, the wordpurity has twomain denotations: rst, it is the state o being unmixed; reedom rom ad-

mixture o any oreign substanceesp. reedom rom matter that contam-

inates, deles, corrupts, or debases. Notice that this denition conjoinsthe idea ooreignness with the idea odelement. The second denotationlisted under purity in the OED is said o persons: Freedom rom moralcorruption, rom ceremonial or sexual uncleanness, or pollution; stainless

condition or character; innocence, chastity (1989). Purity, then, has two

major strands o denition: purity in the sense o unmixedness and purity

in the sense o virtue. The ormer, descriptive sense (unmixedness) is today

usually understood as the concepts value-ree origin. In other words, we


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tend to believe that rst we identied an unmixed class o things, and

second, we judged that class to be valuable. However, the etymology o

the word indicates that the latter, normative sense (moral virtue) actu-

ally came rst in usage. This implies that the descriptive sense o purityas unmixed was made to appear as a natural category only ater the acto social relations. This assumption o a value-ree conceptual origin can

serve to cover over the value-laden, politically motivated basis o much

purity rhetoric. While we should be wary o the slippage between moral

and physical senses o the word, I do not believe they can be held distinct

entirely, because purity, like dirt is a symbolic concept that exists to

morally reinorce our sel-conceptions and the exclusions they entail.

The linguistic genealogy o the link between whiteness and moral

purity reaches back beore the ounding o the US. The OEDs seventhmeaning o white is morally and spiritually pure (esp. when compared

to something black). The word air means both light and right.5 A white

lie is an innocent lie. Whiteness is cleanliness, purity, the absence o a

stain or mark. Franz Fanon reminds us, In Europe Satan is black, one

talks o the shadow, when one is dirty one is blackwhether one is think-

ing o physical dirtiness or moral dirtinessblackness, darkness, shadow,

shades, night, and the labyrinths o the earths, abysmal depths, blacken

someones reputation; and on the other side, the bright look o innocence,

the white dove o peace, magical, heavenly light (Fanon 1967, 18889).

While reerences to people o a white race did not rst occur in English

until the 17th century, pale skin was already a symbol o innocence and

virtue. In Renaissance paintings o Christ and the Virgin Mary, they are

regularly depicted as paler than others, and even sometimes appear to emit

light (Dyer 1997, 6667). In the US these symbolic associations became

explicitly tied to race, helping whites to justiy it as a caste system.

This strong association between whiteness, cleanliness, and moral vir-

tue in America comes out in an appalling ad or Ivory soap that circulatedaround the end o the 19th century (gure 1). Depicted in the ad are three

Native Americans dressed in Euro-American clothing, sparkling clean and

civilized thanks to Ivory soap. The script ends with these lines: And now

were civil, kind and good; And keep the laws as people should; We wear

our linen, lawn and lace; As well as olks with paler ace; And now I take,

whereer we go; This cake o IVORY SOAP to show; What civilized my

squaw and me; And made us clean and air to see (Procter and Gamble


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1883). This ad communicates that the non-white bodies o Natives are

unclean, both morally and physically. They are impure. They are a savage

threat to the boundaries o American civilization. They must be puried,

Figure 1. Excerpt rom advertising pamphlet or Ivory Soap. (Proctor andGamble 1883)


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or civilization must puriy itsel othem. The racism in this ad is couchedin the simultaneous oppositions o purity and pollution, cleanliness and

dirt, civilization and savagery, white and dark.6 O course, today we rarely

see such oppositions spelled out so blatantly. But Ivory (among a proli-eration o other cleaning products) still markets itsel as pure. Can the

ideal o purity be cleansed o all these nastier associations? Or is there

something about the organization o the concept o purity that tends to

retain the exclusionary unction even ater the most blatant content is

removed?

An ad on the Ivory soap website calls it Pure clean. Pure IVORY

(Procter and Gamble 1998b). This reers to the slogan that still, since

1879, sells Ivory soap: 99-44/100% PURE . Pure what? The ads never

seem to say explicitlyit doesnt seem to matterpurity is an unques-tionable virtue. The emphasis upon the products physical attributes, such

as its whiteness and its ability to foat (lightness), suggest a link between

these qualities and the consumers virtue. It turns out that Ivory is 99%

pure soap, that is, alkali and lipids. The other raction o a percent isa preservative intended, as the website says, to keep the bar as white

as its name (Procter and Gamble 1998a). It is interesting to note that

Ivorys whiteness does not come naturallyit must be maintained by an

articial preservative. Purity never seems to come naturally, even though

it gets presented as oundational. In the contemporary ad, the connec-

tions between whiteness and physical and moral cleanliness are less direct,

but still present. The ideal o purity still unctions here to secure identity

through an implied gesture o exclusion.

While I do not believe that it is only whites today who participate

in the concern or cleanliness, I do believe that that concern refects the

ormation o a dominant subjectivity, which, because o our history, is

coded white. No subjectivity can emerge outside the context o a his-

torically located group identity. With whiteness, we begin by shutting outnature. The cultural and historical situatedness o the ways that we learn

to dene the sel is illustrated in the ollowing observation made by Na-

tive American philosopher Viola Cordova. Cordovas daughter and her

riend, a white woman, take their new inants outside. The white mother

lays down a clean blanket to act as a barrier between the baby and the

ground. She puts her baby in the center o the blanket, and then surrounds

him with plastic toys, in the hope that he will stay occupied and not crawl


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o the blanket. I the baby does break the boundary and start touching

(and tasting) the rocks and grass, he is told Nothat is dirty.7 The Na-

tive mother, on the other hand, encourages her baby to crawl around, to

touch, to taste the grass, to observe the sky and eel the breeze (Cordova1997, 3334).

Besides the act that these two children may develop very dierent

levels o basic immunity to natural pathogens, these children are being

taught very dierent lessons about what is the sel, and what is the proper

interaction between sel and non-sel (or world). Cordova remarks, This

is it. This is why we are dierent. This is how it is done. The white child

learns to identiy with this isolated, abstract, articial environment, and

that whatever is out there is alien and potentially dangerous. Cordovas

grandson, on the other hand, is encouraged to interact with his surround-ings in peaceul curiosity. She concludes, thereore, that his sel/world

boundaries are less acute, and he eels at home, more a part o (ratherthan apart rom) his environment (Cordova 1997, 3334).

I asked, I imagine that the white mother would explain the precau-

tions she takes with her inant as merely hygienic. But as we have seen,

such overzealous protection against germs oten backres, and does not

really promote health. Rather, this excess anxiety about cleanliness engen-

ders a certain conception o what the sel is, a conception linked to white

privilege in our particular time. On one level, this is a sel that is alienated

rom the physical world and thereore aims to subdue the indicators o its

own physical embodiment. In this regard, the sel is anxious about bodily

boundaries because it denes itsel through what it excludes or washesaway. On another level, cleanliness is more abstract and has to do with

belie in one groups moral superiority over another group considered less

civilized and closer to nature. On both levels, the alienated other is what

makes this sel a sel. The theme o absence or exclusion converges whites

abstract subjectivity with the physical and moral purity ideals o whiteidentity. While this may grant the white sel a certain experience o unity,

it is in act alienatedit has ractured itsel, declared itsel cut o rom the

interrelations and dependencies that created it, that sustain it. Those dam-

aged relationships are not only environmental, but also socio-economic

and interracial. Our anxieties about our conceptions o sel, other, and

dirt end up damaging the sel they are meant to bolster.

Cordovas story about the white mother and her baby illustrates that


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whiteness is not just an identity that gets ascribed to particular bodies.

It is a practice, and as such, it must be reproduced in little ways every

daylike through our practices o extreme hygiene.

is exTreMe hygiene (aLways) raCisT?

It will be objected that there are many hygienic concerns in America

today that are quite reasonable and totally unrelated to our white su-

premacist history. As I pointed out in the beginning, genealogy does not

begin with an assumption that a certain value is always or necessarily bad.

The point is to examine our ideals more careully, to ask how they are

unctioning in each particular context. There are, o course, times when

we may seek out purity or very practical and unproblematic reasons.

And then there are times when the concern or purity extends beyond itspractical bounds, and the question is, what unction does it then serve?

Consider this example o the purity ideals regarding water.

It is a practical concern to know that pure, distilled H2O will pre-

vent my electric iron rom being ruined by mineral deposits. However, o

course, chemically pure H2O does not appear in nature, nor would water

be good or us to drink without naturally-occurring minerals. So, when

we demand pure water or drinking, we mean something elsethat it

should be ree rom disease-causing germs and toxins. This too appears to

be a practical concern, and yet the concern has ar exceeded any bene-

cial eect on consumer health. Recently, the market or bottled water has

exploded, and purity is by ar the biggest theme in its advertisement. The

main reasons that US consumers cite or drinking bottled water are health

and saety (the taste o the water was only cited as a concern by 7% o

American bottled-water consumers, as opposed to 45% in France) (Fer-

rier 2001, 16). And yet the very low levels (usually harmless) o impurities

in average American tap water are about the same as the levels in average

bottled water. In act, tap water is even subject to stricter regulation thanbottled water in most places. In her 2002 book, Water Wars, VandanaShiva discusses a study o 103 brands o bottled water which were ound

to be, overall, no saer than tap water. A third o the brands contained ar-

senic and E.coli and a ourth merely bottled tap water (Shiva 2002, 100).

For American consumers, the bottle itsel seems to create the reassuring

illusion o a boundary. Susan Willis has put it well: in the First World,

the package is the etishized sign o the desire or purity (1991, 3). Yet


16/28

the plastic bottle introduces its own ormidable set o environmental and

health problems, especially in terms o plastics manuacture and disposal.

It may seem that purity is a useul criterion or water. However, it appears

that in the context o contemporary American consumerism, xation onwater purity gets us bottled water (or those who can aord it) rather

than clean streams. While environmental protection standards remain lax,

we are sold bottled water with the rhetoric o purity printed all over it,

and a tamper-resistant seal.

Still, it will be objected that the worry over water purity is about

the real threat o environmental toxins, thereore unrelated to the his-

tory o concern over racial purity. While it is true that pollution is in-

creasingly a problem in general, it is also clear that bottled water is not

a solution to that problem in the ways people tend to assume (in act,it is probably making things worse). And while it is true that advertis-

ers have merely capitalized upon consumers recent ear o environ-

mental toxins, the act remains that that ear o what is out there

was already there to be manipulatedAmericans already had a history

o being excessively concerned about hygiene as a symbol o identity

and status. This arises, as I explained above, rom anxieties about dirt

that must accompany a sel-conception ounded on exclusion. And

our sel-conceptions could not be otherwise, given our violent, racist

past. These anxieties are what the advertisers cash in on when they call

things pure.8

Where no longer truly useul or health, purity ideals serve to exag-

gerate symbolic boundarieswhat is here and what is out there, what is

higher and what is lower. Most oten this is or someones gainin this

case the corporate purveyors o purity (or example Coke and Pepsi, via

Dasani and Aquana). I we believe that we value purity or health rea-

sons, we ought to inquire whether our health is actually being served by

what is called pure. This is what is meant by a revaluation o values.Consider one more example where contemporary advertising capital-

izes upon our excessive concern or purity, this time actually employing

an oblique reerence to our racialized associations with purity and pollu-

tion. A popular light bulb made by GE, Reveal, calls itsel the bulb that

uncovers pure, true light (General Electric 2002). The light is supposed

to be whiter, brighter, and less dingy, thus revealing the pure, true colors

o your world. How does the light bulb do this? The Reveal bulb has a

powder-bluish tint that lters out yellow. The packaging says, Specially


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made to lter out yellow rays that hide lies true colors, GE Reveal light

bulbs produce cleaner, whiter-looking light (General Electric 2002).

Now, while it is true that standard incandescent bulbs emit light that

alls largely within the yellow and red ranges, this does not make thelight untrue, unclean, or impure. Natural sunlight varies widely in

color temperature depending on the time o day and the cloud cover. I

am suspicious o this designation o light that is devoid o the yellow/red

portion o the spectrum as pure and natural. In act, it seems to produce

an articially contrived blue/whiteness, along with an increase in contrast

between black and white. The suggestion that whiteness is pure while yel-

low is excessive, harsh, and dirty seems to have ar-reaching implications.

This becomes disturbingly evident when a Reveal commercial shows a

white, blue-eyed baby illuminated under two dierent light bulbs (g-ure 2). Under the regular incandescent light (with yellow), the baby looks

unremarkable. But under the pure light, that babys skin becomes an

ethereal, angelic/ghostly white, and its eyes are a brighter, crisper blue.

The ad directly states that the baby is more beautiul under the whiter

light. The copy goes on to say that colors will be more true, like the

baby blue in your babys eyes (evidently, this bulb may not do much or

Figure 2. Ad rom product website. Copy reads: The amazing GE RevealLight Bulb lters out dull, yellow rays. It leaves only clean, pure light. See

or yoursel how colors look vibrant and true. Especially the baby blue in

your babys eyes. (General Electric Company 2002)


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brown-eyed, dark-skinned people). It is worth noting that a particular

spectrum o light that enhances white skin and blue eyes gets called pure

light, when there is nothing pure about it. The choice to represent it as

pure and clean draws upon (and thereby reproduces) our cultures love opurity and its historical association with a white aesthetic in general, and

white skin in particular.

The bulb example shows how a dubious overextension o the purity

ideal, masked as hygienic, is still linked to race in oblique ways, no longer

unconcealed like it was in the old Ivory ad. Hygienic concerns are not

always problematic in themselves. However, because dirt is relative and

or Americans symbolizes our own orders o social classication, then in

order to get beyond subtle racist conditioning we should be wary o the

residue: ideas about exclusion o dirt still slide quickly into ideas aboutexclusion o racialized peoples.

Whether or not one is willing to call extreme hygiene racist will

depend upon the breadth o ones denition o racism. Some believe that

we should only call racist those acts that are consciously perormed in

hatred. I believe it is more helpul to realize that we are all conditioned, in

ways sometimes very subtle, to value the values that shore up the domi-

nance o the ruling class. And as inheritors o our particular racist herit-

age, we are better o admitting that we have been conditioned, however

unconsciously, to view one another in terms o white and nonwhite, and

to value white over nonwhite. Thereore, we are all racist, whether we like

it or not. By admitting this we can begin to ask ourselves how such condi-

tioning is perpetuated, and how it might be thwarted. Extreme hygiene as

a cultural trend, given this broad denition, is racist. At the very least, it is

a oolish tendency that can only be understood in relation to the unique

anxieties generated by a color caste system.

CLeanLiness, CLass, and CoLor CasTeThe earliest etymological root o the word pure, rom Sanskrit, has

to do with cleansing. This has always meant not only physical but also

moral cleanliness. We have all heard that cleanliness is next to godliness.

The Encyclopedia o Domestic Economy stated in 1844 that Cleanli-nesshas moral as well as physical advantagesit is an emblem, i not a

characteristic, o purity o thought and propriety o conduct (Heneghan

2003, 133). Purity and propriety were linked together as classy ideals. In


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its purposive distancing rom the laborer who is conceived as dark and

dirty, a dirt-ree hygienic aesthetic coners higher status, partly because

it is expensive. Some might argue that cleanliness is an aesthetic having

much more to do with class than with race. But we can see rom the his-tory o these ideals that the two have been inseparable in America.

In the early US, not only was it the case that upper-class whites could

aordan exaggerated aesthetic o cleanliness, but high-class purity (andmoral propriety) became increasingly tied to the color white in general.

We can see this symbolized through white houses, white china, white lin-

ens, and a range o other ne white things that populated the householdso upper class whites (Heneghan 2003, xii). High class and whiteness are

still so closely linked that poor whites are not considered simply or prop-

erly whiteinstead, they are called white trash, construed as pollutingthe white ideal. That term rst came into usage around the time that the

American eugenics movement was establishing policies aimed at keeping

poor whites and people o color rom reproducing. From 18801920,

the US Eugenics Records Oce produced teen dierent Eugenic Family

Studies wherein the researchers sought to demonstrate scientically that

large numbers o rural poor whites were a dysgenic race unto them-

selves (Newitz and Wray 1997, 2). I white trash were a race unto them-

selves, that would help explain why they exhibited the same ailures as

nonwhite races in achieving the American dream o prosperity.

Sherman Alexie has spoken about growing up in extreme poverty on

the Spokane Indian Reservation. For him, one o the most distinguishing

characteristics o living under those conditions was the lack o good sani-

tation, or as he illustrates it, being orced to smell unpleasant smells. Hetells stories o the lthy outhouse his amily used. He refects that, as a re-

sult, in his adult lie he has become zealously astidious in his housekeep-

ing and personal hygiene habits. (Alexie tells this story ater complaining

that he had to sit next to a smelly hippie on the trainhere is an explicitcase where contempt or dirt extends to a distaste or dirty people)

(2004). This story brings up two points I should clariy and reiterate. First,

there are many virtues to basic sanitation, and being orced to live with-out it is a repugnant (i not lie-threatening) condition imposed upon the

poor. In this sense it is understandable that greater hygiene gets associated

with higher class. However, as I have argued, there is a point at which

concern or hygiene becomes excessive and counterproductive, and at that


20/28

point its valorization only enhances exclusive hierarchies. In this country,

the extreme preoccupation with hygiene is not just a personal aesthetic,

nor is it entirely explainable as an ahistorical desire to control ones liv-

ing conditions. This country has a history o extreme preoccupation withhygiene because racializedcleanliness (or example the one-drop ruleand segregation) has been utterly crucial to class statushigh status being

anxiously guarded by whites and truly unattainable or others because othe ways in which it was coded white. This leads to my second point o

clarication: as I have mentioned, it is not only whites who participate inthe exaggerated concern or hygiene. People o color (certain Natives, no

less) sometimes maniest this concern, perhaps precisely because they have

been systematically denied class mobility (while simultaneously being told

to clean up their act and pull themselves up by their bootstraps). Whenwe want to live in clean houses where we control our environs, we mani-

est a reasonable desire to live without poverty and disease. When we are

zealous about hygiene beyond what is practical, we maniest those unique

anxieties o color caste.

For whites, this anxiety is rooted in an actual historical concern to

protect ones class position by guarding against racialized taint. I think

it also derives rom an awareness (perhaps hazy) o the hypocrisy o en-

orcing a caste system within the bounds o America, where we are told

that all men are created equal. To orm a legitimating discourse, it has

been important or whites to believe a contradiction: that it was non-

whites own ault i they didnt clean themselves up (like in the old

Ivory ad) andthey were objectively unable to be clean, because they wereirrevocably tainted. These contradictory belies have been acilitated by

a discourse about hygiene that protects class status by slipping between

ideas o physical and moral propriety.

The supposed racial taint was not just about blood content, but also

about dirtiness in general, a dirtiness conceived as dangerous or whitesto be near. Jane Staord, a white Southern woman who was raised in anearly 20th century household in which the black domestic servants ate

with separate silverware had this to say in the mid-eighties:To this day,

I cant use the silverits not silver, but the silverware the [black] servants

use. I think thats just terrible. I know its just a habit that I have to eat

out o silver, because I dont want to eat out o the servants. Isnt that ri-

diculous? The separate silverware and bathroomthat was done because


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they were a dierent race. I dont know when it was begun. I expect it was

always like that. But, o course, a lot o them had syphilis and TB, so there

was that, too, that people always mentioned as a reason. But I think it was

really a racial attitude (Tucker 1988, 177). In these comments, Staordreveals that even while whites probably understood the separation o the

races to be symbolic rather than literally about hygiene, they still carried

out the physical separation o eating utensils and bathrooms under hygi-

enic pretenses. So strong was the resulting association between physical

hygiene and racial/class status that, even late in the 20th century, even

ater refecting on her own illogical prejudices, she cannot bring hersel to

eat with the servants silverware.

The link between Janes story and the story o todays purity-preoc-

cupied consumer is germs. Not only germs, but, as we have seen, the cat-egory o invisible pathogens today extends to encompass environmental

toxins. Janes sense o dirt was explicitly tied to the other, while our ownsense o germs may ostensibly be less so. Still, these stories tap into anxiety

over dirt that takes a violent sel-other distinction as its lineage.

Race scholars have discussed the one-drop rule, segregation, and old

Ivory ads over the last several years. By now, it seems uncontroversial that

in the past, all this purity rhetoric served racist unctions barely below

(and oten above) the surace. However, people are much more reluctant

to recognize that this history has infuenced our own values and our own

sel-conceptions. What remains dicult, but I think crucial to recognize, is

that todays supposedly innocuous preoccupation with hygiene is rooted

in that racist heritage. Today when we buy bottled water or disinectants,

attracted to the rhetoric o purity and unrefective about the actual eects

o those practices, we ourselves are acting out and reproducing the anxie-

ties o this racialized genealogy, and harming ourselves.

ConCLusionBoth physical purity and moral purity ideals, in the past and today,

employ a model o cleansing to promote a sense o the good that de-

pends upon exclusion. Most oten, when we explore the genealogy o such

discursive practices, we nd their beginnings in political and economic

power structures, not in the pure origins they claim. In the cases o the seg-

regationists and eugenicists, this meant overt discrimination against poor

and non-white groups whom they deemed objectively tainted. Thus power


22/28

over these other groups was practiced as a sort o cleanliness o body,

and it was practiced with a cleanliness o conscience. Today, the power

that whites as a group continue to exercise over non-whites is acilitated

through these discourses o purity. The American love o hygienic puritytakes place via such everyday items as antibacterial soap, plastic packag-

ing, and pure light. The explicitly racist version o the purity ideal is not

accidentally but genealogically tied to these practices.

The harm comes when the concept and ideal o purity provides the

guise o innocence that acilitates xenophobic and ecologically unsound

identities and institutions. Purity tends to produce a particularly righteous,

isolated sel and a particularly hostile, hierarchical sel-other relation. This

means that white identity carries with it, rom its inception, an alienating,

alienated ethical and political orientation, while at the same time declar-ing itsel neutral and innocent. The extreme idealization o purity, even

when invoked in regard to ordinary things like hygiene, ood, and water, is

genealogically tied to repressive concepts such as racial purity. Hygiene is

not always problematic in itsel. But when it goes overboard and becomes

counterproductive, we need to ask ourselves why we still cling to it. Our

everyday valorization o purity reveals the extent to which, at bottom, we

have not gotten beyond certain racist, sexist, and other exclusionary hab-

its o thinking. This is an environmental issue because that preoccupation

refects an unhealthy sel-understanding in relation to our surroundings.

Purity ideals do not only make us sick physically, but also morally, be-

cause they reactivate the hierarchical subtexts o our American culture.

My purpose has not been to suggest that the entire history o white-

ness and race in the US can be simply and neatly reduced to purity ideals.

It is rather that the practical lie o purity as a conceptits actual mani-estation in our livesdemonstrates that purity is not the unquestionably

healthy virtue it is still presented as today. Just as ideas o race and racial

purity were debunked by biologists long beore the public would beginto question them, ideals o extreme hygienic purity linger, even fourish,

despite scientic evidence o their utility and harm. We are still enamored

with purity because, to some extent, our very sel-conceptions are at stake.

But those sel conceptions are sick. To the extent that we unrefectively up-

hold dubious values, we are less ree, and we lock ourselves into a status

quo social order. As inheritors o this racist, unhealthy culture, we are all

lovers o purity, and we are all responsible or rethinking this value.


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noTes

1. By Americans, I am reerring to the mainstream as refected in US popularculture, politics, and media. As I will explain, I take the popular notion oAmericans to be implicitly white, although I do not believe that it is onlywhites in the US who participate in the concern or puritythat is why I saywe in general seem concerned with purity. Further, while I understand thatthis popular use o the term Americans obscures that people o many colorsand cultures inhabit the two American continents, it is part o my project toanalyze that culture that takes itsel to be Americanto analyze the ideo-logical hegemony o white mainstream US American culture. Finally, whilethere are certainly other nations and other cultures with recognizable purityissues, this project analyzes what I take to be the uniquely American varietyo the contemporary concern with purity.

2. One drop is the rule that, in traditional American legal and olk practice,has disqualied rom white status anyone who was supposed to have onedrop o non-white blood. Despite the act that this rule makes no sense bio-logically speaking (like other notions o racial categories), historically, no-tions o racial purity had to be meticulously guarded when questions aroseregarding where to draw racial lines. Plessy (o the landmark 1896 case Plessyv. Ferguson), who became amous by daring to occupy a white rail car, was7/8ths white and apparently looked white by many accounts. Around theturn o the century, what is known as the one-drop rule became establishedin US law to resolve such disputes. According to the one-drop rule, not only

would Plessy count as black, but so did the woman who, as recently as 1982,was deemed black by a Louisiana court even though she was 31/32ndswhite (Dominguez 1986, 15). The idea o one drop, then, reerred to thepresence in a persons ancestral line o one person who was (identied as)black. One drop o black blood, construed as one drop o pollution, is all ittakes to taint what is supposedly pure whiteness.

3. Such origins are assumed prepolitical in the sense that they are assumed tohave preceded social structures and relationships o dominance and subor-dination. This gives them an air o objective permanence. These are whatFoucault terms pure origins.

4. Biologist Lisa Weasel notes that a new paradigm o the immune system, sel v.non-sel, became predominant ollowing World War II, a time period in whichthe US political climate was marked by increasing xenophobia and isolation-ism. The theory is roughly this: the body somehow learns to identiy certaintypes o molecules as sel and others as non-sel. The ormer are toleratedand the latter are characterized as dangerous oreign invaders (2001, 29).Weasel notes that since that shit, war-like metaphors have been extremelycommon in the language (both popular and textbook) used to describe im-mune unctions o the body in deense o its essential sel. Consider this


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example rom a National Geographic article: Besieged by a vast array oinvisible enemies, the human body enlists a remarkably complex corps ointernal bodyguards to battle the invaders (quoted in Weasel 2001, 30). Itseems that oreign, or even just dierent, in such a discourse comes to be

the equated with something hostilean element that should be expelled.5. The etymological root o the word air has to do with beauty. This came

to mean unblemished in terms o reedom rom moral stain, bias, or injus-tice, around 1340. The association with light-colored skin came along around1550.

6. On the fip side, we sometimes encounter the idea that civilization can bepolluting, even or those in power. The purity o domesticity is associatedwith the eminine, thereore too much civilization threatens to emasculate. Inreaction to this sort o pollution we saw Teddy Roosevelt take up his gun andget back to nature in the sense o conquering the wilderness. We have seenthis more recently with books like Robert Blys Iron John. In such a scenario,purity and pollution turn on a gender axis within the white upper classes, asopposed to turning on a class or race axis.

Sometimes the idea that civilized white culture is polluting does get ex-tended along a racial axis. In Wendell Berrys The Hidden Wound (1970),or example, whites are portrayed as disconnected, money-grubbing, violentpolluters, while Arican-Americans and Native Americans are portrayed aspure in the sense that, like noble savages, they are more connected to theland (which is a good thing according to Berrys particular brand o environ-

mentalism). Along the same lines, it is common to see Natives portrayed aspure in the sense that untouched wilderness is supposedly pure. Consider theimage o the crying Chie in the anti-pollution ad campaign, Keep AmericaBeautiul. Such a noble savage portrayal still relies on the dichotomy whichseparates groups along nature/culture lines, and does not challenge the statusquo o white dominance. The ascription o purity to the non-white groupin this case does not concede white power, perhaps because the raped land-scape and the crying Chie are eminized. As Spivak puts it, benevolent impe-rialism wishes to make room or the pure, native, authenticity o the Other,but authenticity is a notion that comes to us constructed by hegemonic

voices (1990, 61). It is constructed opposite a white subjectivity that is sup-posedly neutral and transparent. This white nostalgic lament misses that itssel-erasure comes rom a place o interest and privilege, and this xing o theothers identity secures that privilege.

7. This story also suggests a gender analysis related to the racial analysis thatis subject o this paper: our culture expects women in particular to disin-ect their homes and protect their amilies rom dirt and germs. In this sensewomen are the keepers o hygienic purity ideals.

8. Indeed, it is the same love o purity in the American psyche that the popularenvironmental movement tapped with its ocus on the word pollution to


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describe ecological problems. Many ecologists themselves, on the other hand,have not ound the discourse o purity and pollution to be particularlyuseul when it comes to our relationship with nature.

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Anzalda, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiz (2nd ed.). SanFrancisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Berry, Wendell. 1970. The Hidden Wound. Boston: Houghton Mifin.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits o Sex. NewYork: Routledge.

Cordova, Viola. 1997. ECOINDIAN: A Response to J. Baird Callicott in Ayaang-waamizin: The International Journal o Indigenous Philosophy 1: 3144.

Dominguez, Virginia. 1986. White by Denition: Social Classication in CreoleLouisiana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Douglas, Mary. 1970. Purity and Danger: An Analysis o the Concepts o Pollu-tion and Taboo. Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London and New York: Routledge.

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Ferrier, Catherine. 2001. Bottled Water: Understanding a Social Phenomenon,a report commissioned by the World Wildlie Fund. Available online at http://www.panda.org/downloads/reshwater/bottled_water.pd (accessed 13 April

2003).Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology o Knowledge, trans. Rupert Sawyer.

New York: Pantheon.

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Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Constructiono Whiteness. Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Stra-chey. New York: WW Norton.

General Electric Company, USA. 19972002.Reveal Home Page. http://www.ger-eveal.com/reveal/index.html (accessed 18 November 2002).

Greenbaum, Leonard. 1966. The Hound and Horn: The History o a LiteraryQuarterly. The Hague: Mouton.

Heneghan, Bridget. 2003. Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race inthe Antebellum Imagination.Jackson, MS: University Press o Mississippi.

hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South EndPress.

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Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers o Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Newitz, Annalee, and Matthew Wray. 1997. White Trash: Race and Class in Amer-ica. New York: Routledge.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989 [1887]. On the Genealogy o Morals, trans. WalterKaumann. New York: Vintage Books.

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Weasel, Lisa. 2001. Dismantling the Sel/Other Dichotomy in Science: Towards aFeminist Model o the Immune System. Hypatia 16(1): 2744.

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ETHICS& THE ENVIRONMENT, 15(1) 2010 ISSN: 1085-6633

NOTES ON CONTRIbuTORS

Elisa Aaltola, Ph. D., is a Lecturer in Philosophy (East Finland University).

In her research, she has ocused on animal ethics and, more generally,

animal philosophy. Besides numerous papers in international journals, she

has also written a Finnish book on animal ethics (Elinten moraalinen

arvo, 2004). E-mail: [email protected]

Dana Berthold completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University oOregon in 2005, and now lives in the Columbia River Gorge. She works

or a conservation oriented non-proft, where she is aorded plenty o op-

portunities to play in the dirt. E-mail: [email protected]

Thomas Crowley recently completed a yearlong Fulbright ellowship in

India. His research ocused on the intersection o ethics, ecology and cul-

ture in the Indian context. He has previously received research grants to

interview prominent ecophilosophers in Norway and to analyze dierent

orms o ecotourism in Costa Rica. He has written articles on the legacyo Arne Naess and on the ecological worldviews o Rabindranath Tagore

and Knut Hamsun. E-mail: [email protected]

Andrew Fiala, Ph.D. is Director o the Ethics Center and Proessor o

Philosophy at Caliornia State University, Fresno. He is the editor o Phi-

losophy in the Contemporary World and author o several books, includ-

ing Public War, Private Conscience (London: Continuum 2010). E-mail:[email protected]

Robert Kirkman is Associate Proessor o Philosophy, Science and Technol-ogy in the School o Public Policy at the Georgia Institute o Technology.

He is author oSkeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophyand Science (Indiana, 2002) and The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth:


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