Of dirt, dhat and discoveries

The past three weeks I've been busily engaged in learning about all things anthropological. Being a nosy character, I've welcomed this excuse to pry into people's personal lives. We've been doing a lot of village visits - interviewing people, photographing objects, observing how people interact with each other. It's amazing what you can learn. We've spent a lot of time trying to understand what 'dirty' and 'clean' mean to the locals here. Can you make food 'dirty' by taking it into the wrong room? What makes one water source 'clean' and another only suitable for animals? How often does a 'clean' person shower, and after which activities? The answers are fascinating.

The last two weeks have been entirely taken up by a qualitative study I've been doing into local factory workers' conceptions of work-related diseases. I expected to get a whole list of injuries one can get from various machines in the workplace. To my surprise, the main disease these furniture factory workers complained of was 'weight loss', which they thought was caused by breathing in sawdust and varnish. After probing a little deeper, it turned out that the reason they were bothered about the weight loss was that they thought it was causing dhat syndrome, a faintly hilarious folk illness that is very common all over South Asia. Having determined to avoid the Margaret Mead end of anthropology, I found myself listening to far more than I wanted to know about these young guys.

Folk illnesses are illnesses where locals have developed their own description of the disease, the things that cause it and potential cures, none of which usually have any basis in modern medicine. Lest we get all superior, an example of a folk illness from my own culture is 'the common cold'. There's an almost ubiquitous belief that you can 'catch a cold' from being out in the cold and wet, or suddenly changing your environmental temperature - absolute bunkum, but widely believed by legions of honey-and-lemon sipping virus sufferers. Anthropologists have traced this belief back to a mix of Greek humoral theories and some Celtic stuff about spirit possession, so think of that next time your Mum tells you to put a jumper on.

Anyhow, having found dhat syndrome was a major worry for these workers, I then asked about other diseases from the factory. They told me they were concerned about the high rates of jondiz (jaundice) in the factory. Hepatitis is very common in the community, so I wondered why they were linking it to the factory. "We know it's from the factory" one of the men said "Because they make us wear shoes all day".

Excuse me?

It turned out they saw jaundice as being due to an imbalance of 'wet' and 'dry' fluids in the body. Working in the factory is very hot, and they sweat, thus losing 'wet' fluid. "I used to work in the fields" said one of them "And I never wore shoes, so the healing fluid from Mother earth came up through my feet and nourished my body, replacing my sweat. But now I'm in the factory all day, the fluid can't get up through my shoes, and so I get jaundice."

Well there you go. I confirmed this belief with lots of different workers. It's never been written about in the literature, but it seems to be a heavily folkified version of some Ayurvedic theories. Ayurveda isn't really found in Bangladesh, so it's quite an interesting discovery to see it in health beliefs here. I might try to publish the paper if I get time.

So much for occupational health. I guess it beats talking to union officials about safety harnesses and maximum carrying loads...