Is cleanliness health?

This question was my response to an image depicting about fifty boys scrubbing their closely packed bodies in a communal shower at the New York Juvenile Asylum. From an article in the 1891 Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette titled “A Plea for Public Baths, Together with an Inexpensive Method for Their Hygienic Utilization,” Baruch made an argument for the use of showers by conveying the ways both individuals and society benefit from their economy. On the left side of the image, a concierge stands with a box of soap, looking at the mass of boys behind the half wall. This voyeuristic gaze of the man caused me to question who and what determines cleanliness and examine use of cleanliness to “other” colonized peoples and exert power to maintain control of day-to-day life.

So what is cleanliness?

Conceptualizing cleanliness depends on framing. It can be a physical, spiritual, moral, or environmental description. For Muslims, these concepts have been closely tied together, whereas for Christians, they have been at odds during several points in history. Cleanliness isn’t only a matter of personal hygiene, but also a social one. Being unclean carried social ramifications, separating social classes. Across social and cultural boundaries, the means and motivation of cleansing took different forms. Body work, or the actions taken to care for the body, reflected resource availability and cultural practices. While the biological and medical benefits of body work were often recognized, the moral implications tended to hold more value because of their association with power. Determinants of cleanliness and health practices often stemmed from this same power.

What did cleanliness look like in other cultures, and how was it used as a tool for power?

A great example of alternative body work comes from parts of precolonial Africa, where mixtures of soil and fat or oil were used to coat the body in a paste, which cleansed the skin while also protecting it from the sun. Variations of this smearing as it was called, took form to fit the culture of each tribe. Washing with water was also common, and products of plants like ruredzo, chitupatupa, and soap dogwood were used like soap to wash the hands, feet, and genitals.

In Zimbabwe, these clearly defined hygienic rules and codes were completely ignored as European colonizers imposed their standards of cleanliness in order to name the people they sought to oppress unclean, primitive and savage. Dirt was no longer a cleaning agent, but a source of filth. Despite this filthy view of Africans, the voyeuristic gaze persisted. The same bodies othered and deemed dirty were also admired for their natural beauty and hypersexualized for their aesthetic pleasure. Europeans used othering to set these Black bodies apart, holding the people of Zimbabwe underneath them to maintain their personal superiority while also gleaning pleasure from casting their eyes upon them. Teachers and missionaries used body work as a colonial tool, emphasizing both personal and public hygiene and explicitly linking cleanliness to Christian godliness and spirituality. By moving beyond the physical, cleanliness was weaponized against the subaltern by renaming differences as superiorities by those in control to maintain power, and in some ways, paternity.

This same concept of filthy yet exotic manifested in the American colonial view of the Philippines. Filipino marketplaces became a prime example for this, where Americans felt enchanted by its exoticism yet disgusted by its conditions like the common presence of excrement. Through brownwashing, or generalizing germs and filth across environments, the Americans wanted to radically transform Filipino bodies and spaces. In order to justify colonial control, Americans expanded their frame of cleanliness past the physical, associating filth with moral promiscuity and the need for medical reformation. This medical approach resulted in medically produced colonial spaces like laboratories and toilets, which further widened the gap between the subaltern and those in power. To them, the Filipino body was “little more than a gaping anus and two soiled hands.” However, Americans were also fascinated by their disgust, making them sort of a mouth––full of non-physical shit. This voyeuristic gaze resulted in scientific experimentation of the excrement they so desperately wanted to remove.

Colonialism in Zimbabwe and the Philippines demonstrates the imposition of western hygienic concepts on populations with their own concepts of cleanliness. By creating a perceived objectivity through power, othering traditional cleanliness led to changes in culture. While the physical health of the subaltern did increase with these changes, colonial powers continued to transcend and strengthen their hold over colonial societies because the subaltern inevitably embodied the unclean.
The image of the boys showering came from an article talking about the economic advantages of showers. But whose advantage did it really establish?

 

References:
Al-Soliman, Tarik. “Environmental purity and cleanliness: Applications and practices in the early Muslim society.” Islamic Perspective, JIMA, v. 20. 1988.
Anderson, Warwick. “Excremental colonialism: Public health and the poetics of pollution.”
Critical Inquiry 21, no. 3, 1995. 640-669.
Baruch, Simon. “A plea for public baths, together with an inexpensive method for their hygienic utilization.” Dietetic and hygienic gazette. New York: The Gazette Publishing Company. May 1891 v. 7.
Brown, Kathleen M. Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America. Yale University Press, 2009.
Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: commodification, consumption, and cleanliness in modern Zimbabwe. Duke University Press, 1996.