Working out Douglas's aphorism
Discarded objects, categorisation practices, and moral inquiries
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3376676 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Ablitt (0000-0002-6182-6485, Cardiff University, corresponding author), Robin Smith (0000-0001-7457-9690, Cardiff University), Robin James Smith (Cardiff University) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 67 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 866-885 |
| Publication date | 2019-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0038026119854271 |
| OpenAlex | W2957001938 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
| References cited | 33 |
This article aims to reconsider Mary Douglas's 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 adopt an ethnomethodological approach and focus upon the description of situated categorisation practices in the treatment of waste and dirt. The article is thus concerned with the methods in and through which objects are handled in the everyday work of street-cleaning. We describe these practices across three sections concerned with: the seeing of waste as a situated accomplishment; the practical distinction between objects to be removed and those to be left in situ; and the seeing of categories through discarded objects. In this way, rather than explaining the practices of street-cleaners via recourse to a notion of 'system', we recover the ways in which objects come to be treated, in a situated sense, as a potential 'inference-rich' resource for moral reasoning relating to residual categories and predicates of people and places
Aesthetics · Aphorism · Cartography · Dirt · Epistemology · Focus (optics) · Geography · Ontology · Situated · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Homelessness and Social Issues · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy
‘Bad’ Trash
“We are from there, that’s our land”
Fashioning Dirt
A clean and civil city
Spatial Governance of the Unhoused
Conceptualising Reuse in African Households
The Greening of Environmental Criminology
Beyond fare evasion
Fly-tipping and the sociology of abandonment
Clutter in domestic spaces
Disassembling the actant
Coaching and 'Self-repair
Food Waste
The Traveller-Gypsies
Street-Level Bureaucracy
Theoretical sociology
Lectures on Conversation
Studies in Social Interaction
Behaviour under the condition of anonymity
Analysing visually available mundane order
Accounting for the Landscape of Regeneration
Identity, categorization and sequential organization
Membership categorization, culture and norms in action
Citations out of place (Respond to this article at http
Rubbish Theory
Categorization and Moral Order
I.1 The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar
Flowers in the bathtub
Categorization and the moral order
"Placing "Matter Out of Place
Toilets, Bodies, Selves
Purity and Danger
The Disposal of Place
Stephen Hester on the problem of culturalism
The Anatomy of Disgust
Residual Categories and Disciplinary Knowledge
The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs
Professional Vision
Beyond the symbolic
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |