| Date: 28 April 2011, 06:25
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The Anatomy of Disgust
By William Ian Miller
* Publisher: Harvard University Press
* Number Of Pages: 336
* Publication Date: 1998-10-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0674031555
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780674031555
Product Description:
William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty.
Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy.
Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.
Amazon.com Review:
The title of William Ian Miller's book is a play on Robert Burton's 17th-century classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, an examination of human emotion. In his modern Anatomy, Miller narrows the focus to the function of disgust in human life. Disgust, Miller posits, is a kind of protection; just as fear causes us to flee danger or loyalty prompts us to support one another, disgust draws boundaries and insulates the individual from outside incursions--anything from the unhygienic hair in our soup to the frightening explosion of homelessness in our cities. Among his theories is one that democracy depends on the even distribution of disgust across class lines.
Mr. Miller is not afraid to explore the darker side of disgust as well--the fact that we may feel it in conjunction with contempt toward people, objects, or concepts that do not warrant it. Nevertheless, disgust serves an important role in humanity's complex emotional and social makeup, and The Anatomy of Disgust is novel in its approach to uncovering just what that role might be.
Summary: Brilliant Analysis of Disgust
Rating: 5
Law professor William Miller gives us an absorbing, fascinating treatment of the neglected topic of disgust. Though a law professor, Miller is extraordinarily widely read, and draws on an extensive knowledge of literature, psychology, history, biology, and philosophy (he even has a footnote referring to an extremely disgusting scene in the obscure cult movie Pink Flamingoes). The treatment of disgust is creative, original, sophisticated, and intellectually engaging (Miller also deftly avoids the shock value that would be all too tempting in an analysis of disgust, yet without becoming prudish). The author rightly resists the reductionist treatment of disgust that is all too common in the social and natural sciences, whether it be the Freudian dogma or the latest fad of "evolutionary psychology," yet also steers clear of trendy relativism. This is a genuinely philosophical treatment in the best sense, drawing on all areas of human wisdom and experience. One might quibble with some of his interpretations; he is a bit thin on the moral philosophy section, doesn't do enough with the carnival/rabelais/Bakhtin topic, and presents in my view a caricature of honor cultures (strangely, since that's his primary expertise). But these flaws do not take away from the overall excellence of the work. It is extremely well-written and intelligently presented, though the argument is difficult to summarize. Miller demonstrates the complexity of the disgust reaction; it cannot be reduced to mere biological instinct, but is deeply connected with religion, morality, and politics. This is a challenging work, but well worth the effort; indeed it reminds us just why there is nothing like a good book to stimulate the mind.
Summary: A valuable study of the concept of disgust
Rating: 5
The author starts by pointing out that linguistically the word "disgust" in English is linked to the word "taste" ("gustus" in Latin). It describes actions or things which are repulsive, revolting or abhorrent principally because they become polluting by being out of place. Freud's theories are efforts to overcome a deep disgust with sex which is often the cause for anxiety, neurosis and psychosis. Disgust is also a psychic need to avoid reminders of our animal origins and it is accompanied by ideas of some sort of danger like pollution, contamination or defilement. It has the function of protecting our organism from dangerous matter. And disgust is culturally and socially determined.
The author argues that disgust has powerful image-generating capacities and that it plays a part in organising and internalising many of our attitudes toward the moral, social and political domains. He also demonstrates how the conceptualisation of disgust varies by virtue of the sense doing the perceiving: touch, smell, taste or vision. The body's orifices and wastes are not forgotten either: mouth, anus, genitals, nose, ears and skin. Moving away from the visceral, Mr Miller takes up the delicate issue of the relationships of disgust to desire and desire to prohibition. He also discusses the changing styles of disgust and the disgusting through time and then moves to the issue that disgust is a moral sentiment. Finally he concentrates on disgust in the political and social realms where it confronts democracy and the idea of equality.
A fascinating study with plenty of references to famous writers like Orwell, Shakespeare, Sartre or Darwin. There is also an exhaustive bibliography which will help readers find related studies to the concept of disgust.
Summary: A Fascinating Look at an Oft-Overlooked Emotion
Rating: 5
Do not be mistaken, this book reads almost as a literature review. He covers very little Psychology of disgust; what he mentions of Paul Rozin and Jon Haidt, two of the primary "Psychology of disgust" researchers, he tends to disagree somewhat with their assessments. Most of his "Psychological" queries reflect Freud and the Psychoanalytic tradition; this makes sense because he assesses disgust more as a Philosophical issue than an experimental issue, and Freud reads better as a Philosopher than as a Psychologist. As an undergraduate (and soon to be graduate) spending a great deal of time researching disgust, I had to take this into consideration when perusing the different chapters.
However, as part Literature review, part Anthropological study, part Philosophical question, part Psychological reflection, and part Anatomy lesson, this book makes for a very fascinating read. Even though he writes for more of an academic audience, his prose flows very smoothly; someone with an advanced degree would enjoy the discussion as much as someone who doesn't have any degree. He ties his sources together very well (many of which he's spent
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