Material civilization and hygienic modernity. Reflections on toilet practices in rural South China

Abstract

Without really thinking about it, we have come to assume that the flush toilet and the wider waterborne system of waste disposal supporting its operation is one of the requirements of an urban setting and one of the symbols of an ‘advanced’ society. In this paper, I would like to explore the role played by the ‘flush toilet’ and the question of human waste management in the making of ‘modern identities’. My account is ethnographic in that it focuses on the spread of the ‘flush toilet’ in a specific setting - a rural community in South China -, but my theoretical goal is more general. I am interested in thinking about how ordinary people make ‘technological choices’. My usage of the term ‘technological choice’ does not imply that there was a formal discussion on the necessity and the implications of a technical transformation prior to adopting or dismissing it. There are instances - not just in the contemporary period - in which human communities seem to make deliberate and systematic choices, but this is not always the case. In most instances, it is only by analogy that we can say that it seems as though a society or a community has chosen a particular technical feature from a whole range of possible technological avenues. In this paper, I argue that these ‘technological choices’ result less from inherent benefits in the technologies being adopted than from specific cultural values and social relations. Rather than treating technology independently of the human relations surrounding their use, I argue that technology is a socially and culturally constructed means of action upon the physical world.