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1
Working out Douglas’ aphorism: discarded objects,
categorisation practices, and moral inquiries
Jonathan Ablitt and Robin James Smith
School of Social Sciences
Cardiff University
This article aims to reconsider Mary Douglas’ (1984[1966]) well-known aphorism – that,
‘where there is dirt there is system’ – through the work of street-cleaning in and the
handling of detritus in the Upper Town district of Gibraltar. In ‘working out’ the aphorism,
we do not theorise urban detritus as waste and dirt, as ‘matter out of place’ indexing a
wider cultural system or cosmology. Instead, we adopt an ethnomethodological sensibility
(Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970), in recovering the practical work of seeing and categorising
objects as an occasioned activity and members’ concern
1
. The article is, then, interested in
the ‘practical objectivity’ of objects as they are handled in the everyday work of street-
cleaning. In addition to concerns with the categorisation of objects as disposable or not, the
analysis also describes how this work includes treating objects as a resource for doing moral
judgements and the allocation of blame. So, rather than explaining the practices of street-
cleaners via recourse to a notion of ‘system’, we, instead, describe the methods through
which objects come to be treated, in a situated sense, as a potential ‘inference-rich’
resource for moral reasoning relating to residual categorisations and predicates of people
and places.
There has, of course, been much academic research devoted to matters of dirt, waste, and
pollution. Recent work has understood ‘dirt’ and ‘waste’ as relational constructs, and
develops Mary Douglas’ discussion of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (see for example,
Pickering, 2010, 2019 (this collection); Hughes, et al. 2017). We briefly review some of this
work before describing our study and the ways in which it differs from this existing
literature. The bulk of the article describes the work of a single street-cleaner, Stephen,
across three substantive sections. These sections are concerned with describing overlooked
local practices, in: 1) encounters with objects as occasioning street-cleaning work; 2) the
categorisation of objects as ‘disposables’ or not; and 3) the availability of membership
categories through these objects. We conclude by outlining a sociological treatment of
waste, dirt, litter, and other debris, that finds such detritus less ‘matter out of place’, than
socially and practically accomplished in and through the way that matter and objects are
handled methodically by members.
Working out Douglas’ aphorism: waste theory and waste practice
An immediate touchstone for considerations of dirt is the work of Mary Douglas and,
specifically, her discussion of the ritual order of pollution and taboo. In introducing her
analysis, Douglas (1984[1966], p. 36–37) notes that in ‘our own’ notions of what constitutes
‘dirt’ we operate with an “omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of
ordered systems.” Here, then, dirt and pollution are the remnants of ordering practices and
1
We use ‘member’ and ‘membership’ in the ethnomethodological sense. Not simply meaning ‘belonging’, ‘membership’ refers to the
“natural mastery” of language and practical reasoning displayed and used in the accomplishment of local autochthonous social order by
‘members’ of that setting (see Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970; Garfinkel, 2002). The import is that that which is seemingly trivial and handled
through the ‘natural attitude’ of members can, through careful description, be shown to be an ongoing ‘no time-out’ accomplishment.
2
“confuse and contradict cherished classifications”. Dirt, writes Douglas, is “a relative idea”.
In this way, the very same physical substance, moved from one location to another, can
radically change in meaning: profane in one setting, polluting in another. Dirt, then, is
‘matter out of place’
2
and is produced as such through the existence of a cultural,
psychological, grid that provides for responses such as disgust and repulsion. The perception
of ‘dirt’ is “schematically determined from the start. As perceivers, we select from all the
stimuli falling on our senses only those which interest us, and our interests are governed by
a pattern-making tendency, sometimes called schema (Bartlett, 1932)” (Douglas
(1984[1966], p. 37). The teachings of Leviticus are taken as instructive in the regard that
they are organised, structurally, in relational pairings through which each category or class is
made sense of in relation to and through another. Each object has its correct place within a
taxonomic order, a cosmology, of material, action, and experience that is seen to ‘reinforce’
a social and moral order through a whole series of teachings that have to do with purity and
hygiene, danger and contamination, order and disorder. Such ‘rules’, and associated rule-
governed behaviours, are seen to be concerned with translocation and the sensibility of
matter in different ways, in different contexts. The resultant position is the suggestion that
we can learn a good deal about a whole society’s way of understanding and ordering the
world through attending to these relations. As Douglas (1984[1966], p. 36) writes: “Dirt,
then, is never a unique isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system. Dirt is the by-
product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.”
So, for Douglas and those that follow, dirt is a by-product of the negotiation of order, as
anomalous or ambiguous matter that must be dealt with, either by exclusion or by
resolution in relation to the taxonomic system. Douglas (1984[1966], p. 39) refers to
‘ambiguity’ and ‘anomaly’ as categorial problems resolved through certain ideals and rituals
of culturalism. ‘Culture’ rigidifies and structuralises categories which, in turn, are ‘public
matters’ insofar as they form the foundations of a shared moral and social system and are
thus stubborn in their resistance to revision (p. 41). In this sense, ‘culture’ maintains order.
Indeed, “…if uncleanness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order.
Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained” (p.
42). And, so, the ‘maintenance’ of social patterning is understood in terms of the provision
for the objective order of the world, as well as for the values of a community and the
experience of individuals; against which, ambiguity, anomaly and, thus, ‘dirt’ appear.
To be clear, we are not saying that Douglas simplistically offers a rigid
conceptualisation of what is or is not dirt. It is, as we have already noted, a relational
approach in which such understandings of categorisation and boundary are recognised to
be fluid, negotiated, and contested in locally and culturally specific ways. This relational
approach has been fruitful for a range of work discussing different forms of waste and
disposal. Indeed, as noted by Evans (2014; see also, Munro, 2013) the social sciences have
long been concerned with various kinds of residual categories and identities and, indeed,
‘rubbish theory’ (Thompson, 1979). Humans, too have, been considered as ‘waste’ in
various contexts (e.g. Latimer, 1999). Pickering (2010), for example, develops the relational
approach to dirt in and through a discussion of defecation and toilet practices in which, she
suggests, we might consider dirt not as ‘matter out of place’ but as relations out of place. In
a convincing analysis, she suggests that toilet practices and the technologies thereof (for
2
This quote is sometimes attributed to Douglas herself. Douglas attributes it to Lord Chesterfield but this is also contested (see Fardon,
2013)
3
example, those described in Oakley’s (1983) study of Gypsies) are best understood not as
bounded cultural systems but as producing boundary relations in and through which toilets
can produce ‘wrong’ connections between people and State or their more immediate
surroundings (p. 52).
Moving from the general discussion of dirt and waste, to the treatment and presence of
‘waste’ in public space, ‘waste’, although not necessarily ‘dirt’, is similarly conceived of as
leftover or unwanted or discarded matter from a whole range of practices and consumptive
activities. For example, waste in public has been theorised as indicative of systems of status,
of power, and stable categories of private and public space (e.g. Lagae, Çelik, Cuyvers, 2006,
p. 34, Campkin, 2013; Bearman, 2005). Such work has also considered other forms of urban
‘pollution’; for example, ‘sound out of place’ discussed and developed further into a ‘theory
of noise’ (Pickering and Rice, 2017). In regard to street-cleaning, we note that ‘dirt’ in
Douglas’ sense does not straightforwardly translate to a consideration of the whole range of
objects encountered in street-cleaning – all waste is not dirty, and all objects encountered
are not ‘out of place’ – but our concern is not with conceptual definition in the usual sense.
In a way that runs counter to this literature and, indeed, the recent work of Hughes, et al.
(2017) – who employ the (formal analytic) taxonomy of Hardy and Thomas (2005) in
discussing ‘dirty work’ – what we are concerned with is categorisation-practices-in-action
(Hester and Eglin, 1997).
The analysis thus describes what might be called the situated practical and occasioned
taxonomy of street-cleaners. As described above, it is also concerned with the occasioned
availability of categories through encounters with objects. There exists a small body of
literature concerned with the categorisation of detritus as making available ‘residual
categories’, for example in crime scene investigation (Williams, 2003). A recent example
that overlaps, at least in substance, with our case is the discussion of the residual
categorisation of departed hotel guests through the state of the room and the objects left
behind (Schneider and Turner, 2017). Unfortunately – and in a way that is indicative of the
kinds of ways of studying waste and doing sociology that we propose to move away from
here – the analysis results in the construction of an ideal typical taxonomy that provides for
the ‘types’ of individual that leave their hotel rooms in particular ways. This gets done quite
without consideration of how said rooms and guests are categorised in action by the
cleaning staff of the hotel.
To re-emphasise our aims, we do not offer the case of street-cleaning as a means through
which the theoretical framing of dirt and waste might be challenged, amended, or
corrected. Our intentions are not remedial in that sense. We are, however, critical of a more
general attitude in the social sciences that leaves a good deal of the heavy analytic lifting to
concepts like ‘system’ and ‘culture’ and ‘norms’ in explaining, rather than describing, how it
is that people come to be doing the things they observably do. As Harvey Sacks (1995[I], p.
260) had it:
in the sociological and anthropological literature the focus on norms is on the
conditions under which, and the extent to which, they govern – or can be
seen by social scientists to govern – the relevant actions of those Members
whose actions they ought to control.
4
In leaving behind the notion of ‘norms’ as controlling action in, insteading, recovering them
as local occasioned resources for ‘doing’ order in context (see also Housley and Fitzgerald,
2009), we aim to respecify the perception of dirt and waste and detritus. In particular, we
‘work out’ how, in just any context, the categorisation of and categorisation through
‘waste’, ‘dirt’ and ‘disposables’ is a local, contingent, emergent, practical accomplishment of
members’ methodical means of producing and participating in social order.
Working out the aphorism
As promised by the title of the article, we aim to (begin to) work out Douglas’ aphorism.
Some readers will recognise the adaptation of the subtitle of Harold Garfinkel’s (2002)
Ethnomethodology’s Programme; a book in which Garfinkel describes ethnomethodology as
concerned with working out Durkheim’s aphorism. The aphorism (as stated by Garfinkel) is
“the objective reality of social facts is sociology’s most fundamental principle” (later,
‘principle’ is substituted with ‘phenomenon’). In other words, sociology proceeds by treating
social facts as things. The ethnomethodological working out of this aphorism is to treat
social facts as the continual, no-time-out, local, practical, situated accomplishment of
members; as the ‘vulgar work of the streets’ (Garfinkel, 2002). To return to Douglas’ words
and her sense that ‘dirt is never an isolated event’, we might begin to work out the
aphorism by asking what if we were to treat ‘dirt’ as an event? Not isolated, perhaps, but as
occasioned. This reorientation returns us to the ‘practical objectivity’ of dirt and waste, and
to members’ methods for the handling of objects more generally. The words of Garfinkel
and Sacks (1970, p. 347)
3
are useful here;
If, whenever housewives were let into a room, each one on
her own went to the same spot and started to clean it, one
might conclude that the spot surely needed cleaning. On the
other hand, one might conclude that there is something about
the spot and about the housewives that makes the encounter
of one by the other an occasion for cleaning, in which case the
fact of the cleaning, instead of being evidence of dirt would
itself be a phenomenon.
In our case, we ask what it is about a particular spot or object, and what it is about street-
cleaners, that provides for an occasion for street-cleaning?
Not all discarded objects are categorisable as ‘waste’ or, indeed, ‘dirt’. Not all objects found
in the street will be removed and disposed of. The ambiguity in the handling of ‘waste’ is
produced and resolved in activities that provide for an object’s ‘practical objectivity’ as
waste. Something of this issue is at stake in “Sacks’ gloss” (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 182). Sacks
became interested in the distinction between ‘possessables’ and ‘possessitives’; the former
being things that one could have if one wanted, and the latter being things that were
witnessably the possession of someone else. Sacks, however, did not want to settle the
matter theoretically by deciding the conditions in which objects would fall into one category
or the other. Instead, he headed out to find some work crew whose daily work was
concerned with that distinction in practice: a team attached to the LAPD whose job it was to
3
The language and example is, of course, dated. But it is also carefully chosen in the sense ‘housewife’ is a category for which ‘cleaning’
can be heard as a ‘category-bound activity’ (Sacks, 1995[I]: 169-174).