In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

152 7 Purging through self-induced vomiting and taking laxatives was only one of a range of practices participants cited for cleansing the bodies they experienced as dirty and disgusting. Other techniques included washing and scrubbing parts of one’s body with water or antiseptic cleansers, or sucking antibacterial lozenges to cleanse one’s “contaminated” mouth. The goal was a body that was sanitized, scrubbed, and exfoliated of experiences, memories, and its own corporeality . These combined washing and flushing practices led me to reexamine the experiences of anorexia under the lens of hygiene. Bathrooms, toilets, bedrooms, and kitchens were the household sites where these anorexic cleansing practices took place—the sites where bodies and spaces were most intimately related. Despite the great interest in the anthropology of the body, it is only recently that connections between gender and architectural spaces have come into the field’s analytic spotlight (see, for example, Butler and Parr ; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, ). In their edited collection, Carsten and Hugh-Jones suggest that, like the body, the houses in which people dwell are so commonplace and familiar that ethnographers hardly seem to notice them. They may be part of our initial survey of who lives where and who does what in each space, but they “soon fade into the background to become merely the context and environment for the increasingly abstract and wordy conversation of ethnographic research. . . . In time, for both anthropologists and their hosts, much of what houses are and imply becomes something that goes without saying” (, ). Inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s writings on “house societies,” Carsten and Hugh-Jones go beyond the assumed priority of kinship or economic dynamics of houses to focus on the complex ways in which social and cultural relations are manifest in the domestic sphere. This, they argue, enables them to see houses “in the round,” focusing on “the links between their architectural, Be-coming Clean The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity. —Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb BE-COMING CLEAN 153 social and symbolic significance.” Linked in intimate and conceptual ways, “the body and the house are the loci for dense webs of signification and affect and serve as basic cognitive models used to structure, think and experience the world” (, , ). As I show in this chapter, experiences of anorexia cannot be entirely understood without an analysis of spatial practices. Domestic houses were an idiom of habitus for participants, places where they learned about the pleasures and dangers of cooking and sex and the cultural logic of privacy and hygiene. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus extends beyond discursive approaches of hygiene, for it allows an investigation of how people use and transform household spaces and hygiene practices in their everyday lives, the gendered nature of hygiene, and the emotional investments with which cleansing is imbued. The intersecting domains of hygiene—spaces, gender, and emotions— structure this chapter. It becomes clear that hygiene is more than a discourse; it is a taken-for-granted everyday practice that can transform relationships and emotional states. Comorbidity or the Logic of Practice? To counter abjection, many women developed highly routinized cleaning practices such as hand washing and teeth brushing. Following a suggestion by her doctor, Bettina meticulously documented the times during the day that she would wash her hands, and what thoughts prompted her to do so. The resultant diaries were recordings of her daily routines in a hospital ward, detailing when she washed her hands, the length of time, and what triggered the washing. All the triggers related to what Bettina considered dirty and contaminating : for example, anything to do with food (she had to wash her hands before and after eating), washing her body (she washed her hands before, during , and after washing her face, before and after she showered, before and during brushing her teeth), when she overheard another patient say a “dirty” word (swearing or slang), when she thought of words such as “fat,” “devil,” or “pig,” and after using cosmetic cream. The amount of time that Bettina and many others spent cleaning their bodies and houses suggested to me that there was more to this than first appeared. While psychiatric circles saw these behaviors as symptomatic of obsessive compulsive disorder, I began to ask people why they washed themselves (and why particular body parts), in what location they washed, what products they used, and...

Share