A friend of mine is doing his research on the coptic garbage collectors of Cairo, known as the Zabbaleen. He gave a presentation on it tonight that raised some really fascinating issues (for me) - as did the continuation of the discussion in the pub. On a more mundane side-note, having someone take notes on what you're saying in a pub is a very weird experience. Half-flattering and half just plain odd. But in terms of what we were talking about:
What is dirty, and what is clean? The classic definition of dirt is, apparently, "matter out of place" and, if you think about it, that probably encompasses most of what we regularly think of as dirty. But for the Zabbaleen, living constantly amidst the garbage, it isn't things that are dirty. Instead, they speak of corruption and exploitation as dirty. Which leads on to a broader question about how we express negative and positive valuation. Since western political thought fused with Christian morality, the notion of good and bad/evil has been dominant. But before that, Greek thinkers were as likely to speak about things (people, societies, and so on) as healthy or sick. And then there's beautiful and ugly (which can be interestingly applied to valuation outside aesthetics), sacred and profane, and so on. How we speak of these things - and how we conceptualise them ourselves - can give radically different outlooks on how we interpret our lives and how we think we should respond to them. And that's before thinking about the other areas where these things get turned on their head...like when dirty is seen to be desirable.
There was more, but that's all I can remember and express (I wasn't the one taking notes...)
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