Chloé Roubert
There are many theories as to why things are considered filthy or disgusting. Valerie Curtis from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Disease believes that disgust is an instinctual reaction in humans to avoid objects or situations that could potentially be harmful to health or threats to survival. 1 From this angle urban pigeons are disgusting in their potential as a vehicle for disease – faeces cement their nests, they live off food from grimy streets and their flocks can be overbearing. And yet while their droppings can potentially cause disease, pigeons are no serious health threat to most people. 2 From a hygienic perspective they are as threatening as doves which, with similar habits, embody one of the most impeccable of human ideologies, peace. So why are doves so pristine in contemporary Western thought while their cousins remain so filthy? The mother of cleanliness and pollution studies, anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that for a society to function it has to have an agreed cosmology – a set of organising principles that provide purpose and rationale, such as religion or ideology. Exceptions to these principles are anomalies that threaten the system, and therefore are cast as dirty or impure. 3 Accordingly,
urban pigeons are dirty in our value system because they are in between cultural categories – between the civilised and the wild, the self-sustaining and the dependant. Québec’s legal system, an institution representing its society’s norms, is having difficulty reconciling these categories. The limbo status of pigeons makes them unclassifiable. Semi-hidden behind signs and embedded within our urban structure, the urban pigeon is like a riddle with many answers – most of which are questions. Questions about nature versus nurture, but also class, consumption, space and urban development. Rue Saint Hubert’s glass canopy was a way to compete against the increasing presence of new models of consumption: malls as gigantic semi-private spaces accessible by car and unreachable to those deemed impure. But since its covering in the 1980s, Saint Hubert remains a public space with a glass canopy and an ambiguous identity. Today it is neither a local store artery nor a clean palace of material acquisition. Rue Saint Hubert, in a way, is like the urban pigeon: it stands dirty, in limbo between the various categories of early twenty- first century urban development. And perhaps the resentment residents have towards pigeons is more about their own situation reflected in the pigeons, than an issue with dirt or hygiene. n
53
1 Curtis,Valerie.‘Dirt, Disgust and Disease: a Natural History of Hygiene’ in Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health Vol. 18 Num.10, 2007: 660-664 2 Three human diseases are known to be associated with pigeon droppings: histoplasmosis, cryptococcosis, and psittacosis, all of which are very rare and mostly contracted by individuals with low immune systems or after having been in contact with infected pet birds. http://www.nyc.gov/ html/doh/html/epi/epi-pigeon.shtml 3 Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London:Ark Paperbacks, 1988.
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator