In our recent readings, we have discussed the relevance of culture on cleaning practices. For example, in previous weeks, we discussed how different religions and cultures have a long past of practices, legend, and history with cleaning– that led to different practices with self-cleaning and home-cleaning. Similar to this practice of cleaning, a question should be asked about the repulsion many of us have towards shit. Is this disgust a learned reaction, learned from both our culture and the norms we’ve grown up with, or is it programmed in our biology to be disgusted by? Though many of us agreed that it was programmed within us to be disgusted– as we know of the harmful germs that can be in shit and that it is gross, there were some counterpoints. For one, we discussed changing the diapers of babies, and how often they will play with their shit if they are able to get ahold of it. However, to me, this brought up another point, whether this was relevant to shit or not. As we age, we often go through rebellious stages to our past norm, whether to express ourselves or when branching out of our parents’ hold into adulthood. When discussing this point, I was wondering if babies play with their shit because they do not care yet about the cultural disgust of poop or if it could be something like this? Instead, could babies be doing it because they can tell that parents do not want them to do it— not because they are inclined to do so unprompted? Aside from this, biologically we have “warning signs” for the shit, which could indicate to us that it is something to be avoided. Humans had the sense of taste, smell, and a gag-reflex initially to protect us from foods and items that we should avoid, which was a valuable adaptation to avoid us from eating poisonous foods and other potentially harmful aspects of survival. Shit often has a vile smell, and I assume probably a very unpleasant taste as well (though I’m not inclined to prove this). This is very likely to be a biological warning for us to avoid this, which would help support our idea that disgust from shit is not a learned reflex. But, despite this, it also seems like there is a part at play here related to learnt disgust, because shit is also known to be full of germs, and contamination can make people extremely sick. Though we may know not to eat or touch shit now, I think the learned disgust portion of shit may be more related to contamination– which leads into our discussion of germ theory previously. As germ theory is relatively recent but many cultural cleaning procedures that seem to combat germ-illness are not, I wonder if there are any practices of the past related to preventing contamination of shit and things like water or food? Though this isn’t exactly relevant for humans, I know that many animals do not like to have their poop near their food (though some animals, like dogs, who may eat their poop may be an exception). Could this be an unconscious biological practice done because of this contamination or is it just because of the smell of poop? Either way, this is an interesting intersection of cleaning and shit we’ve discussed in class, and it is an interesting discussion to have alongside our readings.