First I establish that I am no scatologist, fetishist, or coprophagist. I don't much like toilet humor (and by now I've heard a lot of it). I don't think 2.6 billion people without a toilet is funny. Then I tailor my answers and language to the social situation—still managing to spoil many lunches—by explaining the obvious. Everyone does it. It's as natural as breathing. The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior that is as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of nicety. Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history.
It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society? Appropriateness and propriety begin with a potty. From this comes the common claim, usually from sanitation activists, that the toilet is the barometer of civilization. How a society disposes of its human excrement is an indication of how it treats its humans, too. Unlike other body-related functions like dance, drama, and songs, wrote the Indian sanitarian Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, "defecation is very lowly." Yet when discussing it, he continued, "one ends up discussing the whole spectrum of human behavior, national economy, politics, role of media, cultural preference and so forth." And that's a partial list. It is missing biology, psychology, chemistry, language. It is missing everything that touches upon understanding what the development academic William Cummings called "the lonely bewilderment of bodily functions."
If my questioner is religious, I say that all the world's great faiths instruct their followers how best to manage their excrement, because hygiene is holy. I explain that taking an interest in the culture of sanitation puts them in good company. Mohandas K. Gandhi, though he spent his life working towards ridding India of its colonial rulers, nonetheless declared that sanitation was more important than independence. The great architect Le Corbusier considered it to be "one of the most beautiful objects industry has ever invented"; and Rudyard Kipling found sewers more compelling than literature. Drains are "a great and glorious thing," he wrote in 1886, "and I study 'em and write about 'em when I can." A decent primer on sanitary engineering, he wrote, "is worth more than all the tomes of sacred smut ever produced." Anton Chekhov was moved to write about the dreadful sanitation in the far-Eastern Russian isle of Sakhalin. And Sigmund Freud thought the study of excretion essential and its neglect a stupidity. In his foreword to The Scatologic Rites of All Nations, an impressive ethnography of excrement by the amateur anthropologist—and U.S. army captain—John Bourke, Freud wrote that "to make [the role of excretions in human life] more accessible ... is not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking."
If the cultural standing of excrement doesn't convince them, I say that the material itself is as rich as oil and probably more useful. It contains nitrogen and phosphates, which can make plants grow but also suck the life from water because its nutrients absorb available oxygen. It can be both food and poison. It can contaminate and cultivate. Millions of people cook with gas made by fermenting it. I tell them I don't like to call it "waste," when it can be turned into bricks, when it can make roads or jewelry, and when, in a dried powdered form called poudrette, it was sniffed like snuff by the grandest ladies of the 18th-century French court. Medical men of not too long ago thought stool examination a vital diagnostic tool. (London's Wellcome Library holds a 150-year-old engraving of a doctor examining a bedpan and a sarcastic maid asking him whether he'd like a fork.) They were also fond of prescribing it: Excrement could be eaten, drunk, or liberally applied to the skin. Martin Luther was convinced: he reportedly ate a spoonful of his own excrement daily, and wrote that he couldn't understand the generosity of a God who freely gave such important and useful remedies.
--from
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, by Rose George
http://www.slate.com/id/2201466/entry/2201467Linkback:
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Topic: The Importance of Human Waste (Read 1541 times)