Leave it to academics

[Stonehead]

Shit and Civilivation, a course offered in London.

 

"Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure."

 

--snip--

 

"Slums - favelas, barrios, shanties - have no sewers. Ordure is carried away in carts or by open drains. Yet we exhibit a fundamental ambivalence to shit, and see it as the opposite of civilization, rather than its inevitable accompaniment. It is repressed, literally driven underground by sewers, and driven into the unconscious by taboos and toilet training. Yet we cannot leave shit alone. We tire of aseptic modernist urban utopias, and seek the bustle and confusion, and the dirt of a 'real' city. The scatological urge - to joke and 'talk dirty', to break taboos, to return to the childhood freedom to play with faeces - constantly interrupts the attempt to ban shit from culture."

-- Source

 

Uh..."the scatological urge...the childhood freedom to play with faeces..."??

[catbirdseat]

Not just ordinary academics, British academics.