Mourning Trash and Haunting Bodies

A Comparative Dialogue Between Modern Finnish Waste Discourse and Classical Japanese Courtly Tales

_Dialogue A philosopher, P, and a Japanologist, J, walk together down the riverbank of the Aura, in Turku, Finland. It’s an early spring afternoon, cold but clear. Old snow and pebbles punctuate the cobblestones by the still naked trees. P: Finland is so clean; there’s hardly any trash on the streets. And we have the cleanest air in the world, did you know? [1] We have all the health benefits of clean air and clean cities, like better sleep and a better mood. The place in the world with the cleanest air is actually in Finland, in Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park. [2] Here, we pay a lot of attention to cleanliness. Clean air, water, and food. You can even pick berries and mushrooms in the forests and eat them; [3] that’s how clean Finland is. J: It really sounds almost utopian when you look at all the information from national and local websites! And yet, it is interesting to consider when we think of something as dirt. Look at this gravel scattered all through the streets. In winter it makes paths safer and cleaner. But in spring, when the snow melts, it becomes dirt and dust. P: A lot of Finnish street cleaning discourse is devoted to when and how the stones should be cleaned in the spring. [4] You could say this is an example of dirt as “matter out of place.” [5] This is a concept popularized by Mary Douglas in the 1960s, but she didn’t originate it. It was a pre-existing Victorian phrase, employed in a speech by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), talking about urban planning ideals. [6] At this time, England was dealing with an ‘urban blight’ where rapid industrialization and inequality caused destitute urban dwellers to live in close quarters in unsanitary living conditions. Waste management was insufficient for such large groups of people in such small areas, and Lord Palmerston’s position was that natural byproducts were essentially good. The problem was not waste itself (as human and food waste make perfectly good fertilizer if managed properly), but waste management. [7] J: From how you are talking, I thought you were going to tell me the bodies living in close quarters were the matter out of place and not the waste they produced! Because both waste and bodies are like this gravel we were talking about. They could fulfil particular social functions when organized…