The muddy semiotics of mud

Bibliographic Data

ID4302178
AuthorsLuisa Cortesi (0000-0002-6548-0573, Cornell University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume25
Issue1
Publication date2018-01-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Political Ecology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1073-0451 • E-ISSN: 1073-0451
PublisherUniversity of Arizona (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2458/v25i1.22945
OpenAlexW2906908873
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited64

In North Bihar, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies indexes their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this article suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness.Historical and political circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt lose their meaning

Aesthetics · Art · Cartography · Caste · Dirt · Epistemology · Geography · Political science · Politics · Prosperity · Semiotics · Sociology · African history and culture analysis · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Law · Philosophy

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