Potoooooooo
Contributor
http://popanth.com/article/silent-but-deadly-farts-across-cultures/
While I was lecturing at a regional university in the USA, a colleague told me about a student (let’s call him Steve), who had asked for her anthropological opinion on a recent incident. While waiting for class to start, Steve yawned and stretched in his chair, and he accidentally let out a “loud and proud” fart[1]–the brunt of which was borne by a classmate sitting directly behind him.
The classmate was most offended by this errant fart and insisted that Steve apologise. Faced with Steve’s unwillingness to repent the fart, his irate classmate responded with threats to beat him up. Bewildered at the response his fart engendered, Steve asked my colleague: why is this natural occurrence treated with such hostility?
Now to most people (other than Steve, who was admittedly an odd sort of bloke), the student’s response to the fart, although extreme, is somewhat understandable.[2] However, Steve did raise an interesting question–just why do farts engender hostility? And laughter? And embarrassment?
The interesting thing is that anthropologists have never tried to answer this question. While we haven’t generally been afraid to get down and dirty in our subject matter, apparently we draw the line at farts. Are we prepared to just take Diane Ackerman’s word for it in her A Natural History of the Senses that “though ancient and uncontrollably natural, a fart is generally considered to be repellent, discourteous, and even the smell of the devil”?
Call it an insatiable curiosity about the human condition, call it a Freudian anal fixation, call it what you will, but I, for one, am not willing to let the matter rest there. So in the interests of sharing the fruits of my intellectual labours, I present for you some thoughts on farts.
While I was lecturing at a regional university in the USA, a colleague told me about a student (let’s call him Steve), who had asked for her anthropological opinion on a recent incident. While waiting for class to start, Steve yawned and stretched in his chair, and he accidentally let out a “loud and proud” fart[1]–the brunt of which was borne by a classmate sitting directly behind him.
The classmate was most offended by this errant fart and insisted that Steve apologise. Faced with Steve’s unwillingness to repent the fart, his irate classmate responded with threats to beat him up. Bewildered at the response his fart engendered, Steve asked my colleague: why is this natural occurrence treated with such hostility?
Now to most people (other than Steve, who was admittedly an odd sort of bloke), the student’s response to the fart, although extreme, is somewhat understandable.[2] However, Steve did raise an interesting question–just why do farts engender hostility? And laughter? And embarrassment?
The interesting thing is that anthropologists have never tried to answer this question. While we haven’t generally been afraid to get down and dirty in our subject matter, apparently we draw the line at farts. Are we prepared to just take Diane Ackerman’s word for it in her A Natural History of the Senses that “though ancient and uncontrollably natural, a fart is generally considered to be repellent, discourteous, and even the smell of the devil”?
Call it an insatiable curiosity about the human condition, call it a Freudian anal fixation, call it what you will, but I, for one, am not willing to let the matter rest there. So in the interests of sharing the fruits of my intellectual labours, I present for you some thoughts on farts.