The Anatomy of Disgust

by William Ian Miller

William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty.

Miller details our anxious relation to basic life eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy.

Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, History, Sociology, Theory

334 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This classic text has been really helpful for me in denaturalizing "disgust." Disgust often postures itself as a "biological" process, but what Miller argues is that it is a cultural process invested in entrenching and reinforcing a moral hierarchy. Here are my favorite takeaways from this book:

Disgust is about the awareness of being disgusted: "Part of disgust is the very awareness of being disgusted, the consciousness of disgust itself…Disgust necessarily involves particular thoughts, characteristically very intrusive and unriddable thoughts about the repugnance of that which is its object. Disgust must be accompanied by ideas of a particular kind of danger, the danger inherent in pollution and contamination, the danger of defilement, which ideas in turn will be associated with rather predictable cultural and social scenarios” (8)

Disgust is about separability: “There are few things that are more unnerving and disgust evoking than our partibility. Consider the horror motif of severed hands, ears, heads, gouged eyes…Part of death’s horror is that it too is a severance of body and soul and then, via putrefaction, of the body’s integrity” (27)

Disgust as anthesis of love: “Unless it is pardoned, excused, or overcome by desire, disgust terminates love, while contempt often maintains and sustains it” (33)

Disgust about species hierarchy: “the deep principle driving disgust is a universal human desire to avoid reminders of our own animal origins” (48-49)

Intimacy as antithesis to disgust: “One way of describing intimacy (and/or love) is as that state in which various disgust rules are relaxed or suspended” (Miller 1998)

Love permits disgust: “love, as we know it, privileges another to see us in ways that would shame us and disgust others without the intervention of love” (Miller 1998)

The fragility and vulnerability of disgust: “Disgust is a recognition of danger to our purity. But it is more. The mere sensation of it also involves an admission that we did not escape contamination. The experience of disgust, in other words, does not itself purify us in the way the experience of anger or indignation can. Disgust signals the need to undertake further labors of purification. It is thus that disgust does not do its moral work so as to allow us unambivalent pleasure in our relative moral superiority to the disgusting other. Disgust admits our own vulnerability and compromise even as it constitutes an assertion of superiority…It underpins the sense of despair that impurity and evil are contagious, endure, and take everything down with them” (Miller 1998)

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly weak book. I have a weakness for The Anatomy of (X) books. Not that I have read many of them, but they all point backwards to Burton's wonderfully comprehensive The Anatomy of Melancholy, and imagine that any author pretentious enough to allude to that magisterial work must know what he or she is doing. Like you wouldn't allude to Proust and then just write something like, 'yeah I remembered being a kid and it was ok, some of it was bad and some good, but enough about that silly past'.

The idea of reading a book that takes apart and analyzes disgust is super appealing to me. Disgust is almost as all-consuming an emotion to me as melancholy, one could even say they probably go hand in hand, and Miller kind of sees that too, but he pushes the idea of feeling too much disgust at the world as leading to misanthropy, another feeling that is also strongly present in me.

The big problem with this book is that it should have been called something like, The Things I Find Disgusting: With some historical references. Miller never really defines what he means as disgust. The book starts off with a look at what most of us would say illicit disgust, and most of those things stem from the human body. Miller believes that semen is the most disgusting of these things, and goes as far as to say that it is the universally most disgust worthy secretion. He can't back up this claim except that I imagine that if another man ejaculated on him he would probably immediately sandblast that part of his body to remove the offending substance. I don't know where I stand on what the most disgusting body fluid is, given the choice of having to have someone shit, puke or cum on me I don't now which I would want least. On the safe end of the body secretions Miller places tears, which he says are not disgusting at all. Although I think if someone was crying into a cup of something I was drinking I'd consider the drink as contaminated as if they spat into it.

Aside from the various opinions presented as fact about the relative disgustingness of things that come from the human body this part of the book is pretty interesting although kind of dry at times.

The book gets more interesting when Miller branches out to cover the social / ethical / political ramifications of disgust although sadly the book gets really weak at this point. Part of the problem is that aside from things like festering pus lesions and things like that there isn't a clear definition of what Miller means by disgust. At one point he claims that blind people are disgusting and that the disgust we feel towards the blind makes us feel some pity but mostly wish they would not show themselves in public and inconvenience us. This is just one example, but when he moves into the area of interpersonal arenas of disgust he seems to take on any kind of a annoyance or anything that makes someone feel uncomfortable and calls it disgust. Blind people aren't disgusting, maybe we don't know how to act around a blind person but that is based on a different emotion than disgust. The problem becomes in the book that everything is disgust, everything that causes a negative emotion is disgust, he tries to draw distinctions but he can't seem to just stick to what could be defined as disgust and instead the second half of the book should be called The Anatomy of Interpersonal Discomfort.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the most important things I read in 2017.

I really love this book, but before I talk about why, I must air the thing about it that irritated me the most: it consistently misuses the term "fornicate," as when Miller asserts that "the fact that animals fornicate works to undo our self-deception regarding the transcendence of the sex act" (49).

NO! Fornicate is not just a polite substitution for the OTHER f word referring to sexual intercourse. The polite substitution Miller wants is copulate. Fornicate is a term that conveys moral judgment. Fornication refers to sex between humans who are not married to each other. Saying that "animals fornicate" is like saying that "animals break the sabbath." They can't break the sabbath because we don't expect them to stay home and not do any work on the first or last day of the week (depending on how you define the sabbath); likewise, they can't fornicate because we don't make them stand up in front of some authority figure and plight their troth before they screw.

I knew this before I had any understanding of the mechanics of sex. That's what a religious education will do for you. That, or a dictionary. #LookThisShitUp #WhyDidntAnEditorCatchThis

OK. On to the good stuff.

First of all, having nearly died as a 14-year-old from a disgusting illness (I lost almost three liters of blood--half the blood in my body--through intestinal hemorrhaging, and bloody diarrhea is pretty damn disgusting), I am interested in how we can talk reasonably about disgusting things. So the first half of the book, focused as it was on a bodily, visceral sense of disgust, was interesting and valuable to me in ways that it might not be to others.

But what was most valuable to me, and the reason I think so many of my friends should read it, is for the last third or so, beginning with Chapter 8, "The Moral Life of Disgust," at which point the book becomes an exploration of the political ramifications and manifestations of disgust and contempt.

I am somewhat troubled by Miller's conception of contempt; he thinks it is something we feel as a matter of course for people we love--for example, he asserts that parents feel contempt for their small children, because children are so frequently ridiculous and foolish and gross. He also thinks we feel contempt for our pets, even as we love them. I think this is a very idiosyncratic view of contempt and love, but once he moves from the way he believes that love mitigates our contempt for loved ones and focuses instead on contempt between people who do not love each other and occupy different social categories, his points become extremely compelling as a way to understand our current political landscape.

Consider the following analysis, which is not intended to justify our reactions but simply to describe them accurately:

The sympathetic identifications borne by disgust do not always, by themselves, clarify the moral order. Consider the relation of disgust to the vice of cruelty. Cruelty generates a double disgust in the impartial spectator, that is, once we recover from the shock it can give. First, the perpetrator is looked on with fear and loathing, with the most intense kind of disgust and horror. Then a second disgust focuses on the degraded victim, whether bloody and disfigured or morally annihilated in the disgrace of having been so abused. Our pity and desire to relieve the suffering of the victim are inhibited by the same emotion that compels us to execrate the person responsible for the plight. Thus does cruelty compromise the impartial observer, who is caught up in such a superfluity of disgust that he is paralyzed. The observer must now come to feel acutely his own inadequacy in the face of such evil. The disgust directed against the violator is raised partly by what we would recognize as moral failure; the disgust directed against the victim, however, imputes moral failing to him as a consequence of his having been rendered ugly, deformed, undignified, and disgusting by victimhood. The victim is held to some moral account for being so degraded unless the victim has the peculiar status we accord to infants and children for whom the demands of dignity are largely suspended. This is some of the cost of disgust’s inevitable association with shame. Witnessing another’s shame disgusts us. And this is why shaming is such a powerful sanction; shame is the internalization of the spectator’s disgust and contempt.

I think that's a pretty accurate analysis of how we view victims of, say, rape or domestic violence.

Chapter 9 is entitled "Mutual Contempt and Democracy" and does a remarkable job of explaining the Trump campaign, despite the fact that the book was published in 1997. Miller compares downward contempt--the contempt social superiors have felt for their social inferiors throughout history--to upward contempt, which includes the sort of contempt that high school students feel for their parents and teachers, or entry-level employees feel for managers, or poor white people feel for politicians:

upward contempt makes for some psychic space for the low. It never loses the sense of its own limits; it knows itself to be secondary, a kind of remedy for the contempt that is rained down on one, never constitutive, always reactive.... The contempt of the low for the high, unlike conventional contempt, will often be coupled with a kind of Schadenfreude.... It is the contempt of those who actually have to clean up the messes and implement the policies of those they contemn.

A later conclusion seems to me to describe the panic felt by white nationalist as they observe racial minorities occupy more and more positions of prestige throughout society, or just not be treated like shit; and the panic of men as they realize that they cannot command women's admiration and flattery just for being dudes:

The low now have available to them the Hobbesian contempt of just not caring to attend to their superiors, and it is this which does so much to engender anxieties in the superior, for the superior cannot fathom that he or she could be so utterly disattendable.

Miller's conclusion is that

It just might be that the mutuality of contempt is much of what pluralistic democracy is all about. What democracy has done is arm the lower with some of the contempts that only the high had available to them before. Every person is now entitled to think his vote undervalued in comparison with those of all those contemptible others with whom democracy has lumped him. This is no small achievement. It is much of what makes democracy so different from the old order.

The final chapter is called "Orwell's Sense of Smell" and relies heavily on The Road to Wigan Pier, which I had never read even though I love Orwell because it seemed like it would be super gross. Miller's account made me see that that was probably the point. I knew I would want to reread The Anatomy of Disgust, but I made myself wait until I had read Wigan Pier. I really do recommend both.

[Patrick Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few books have shaken up my world-view as casually as this one did. Brilliant, cunning look at the most important emotion you've never thought twice about before. Full of humor, Miller, by slow steps, leads you from an amusing essay about a neglected passion, to a shocking revelation of why humanity has failed, after all this time, to achieve utopia.

[Emily]

A big thanks to everyone who offered such thoughtful suggestions for additions to my Disgust Bibliography! It's now at over 60 works, most of them book-length, so I'd better get reading. (For those just joining us, I'm doing a long-term project on the literary treatment(s) of disgust, and if you have anything to add to the ever-growing list, I'd be delighted to hear about it.)

In the spirit of getting this show on the road, I'm finally writing up my thoughts on William Ian Miller's 1997 The Anatomy of Disgust. This is the first disgust theory book I've tackled, and it was incredibly helpful in giving me some useful frameworks for my thinking about disgust. While there were a few areas I felt Miller's logic breaks down (for example, in his claim that the sensation of finding someone or something cute necessarily involves having contempt for that being), all in all it was incredibly helpful. For the rest of this post, rather than critique Miller per se, I think I'll focus on recording the elements of his argument that I think most likely to be helpful to me in the future.

So, first of all, Miller agrees with pretty much every other source I've researched in putting together the bibliography, that disgust developed as a way to police the boundary between "safe" and "contaminating" states. At the most basic level this means that the feeling of disgust prevents us from eating and coming into contact with things that might contaminate us—eating rotting food, for example, or touching someone's running sores. Unsurprisingly, although the exact set of disgusting objects varies cross-culturally and with the individual, there are certain things that are pretty much universally disgusting, and others that show a strong tendency to disgust across cultures. Miller spends a large part of his opening chapters breaking down some general cross-cultural trends as far as categories of things we're likely to find gross: viscous things are generally more disgusting than solid or liquid things; tepid things more disgusting than hot or cold; wet things more disgusting than dry; organic more disgusting than inorganic; animal more disgusting than plant; many more disgusting than few, and so on. Again, there may be exceptions to all of these rules, but in general the more disgusting qualities are connected with what Miller called "life soup": the writhing sites of generation and decomposition, birth and death. In his view these states are disgusting, "Not because all ends in death, but because there is no fixed point. [...] there is too much flux for fixed structures to get a grip on all the turmoil."

Perhaps inevitably, the direct physical variety of disgust long ago spread into the moral realm. As illustrated in Orhan Pamuk's Snow , disgust often manifests when we're confronted with other people who we perceive to be members of a "them" category: "they" are nearly always more disgusting than "us," especially if "they" are perceived as coming from a lower social position. Miller spends a lot of time dissecting this very rich set of issues: traditionally, women have been disgusting to men, Jews to Christians, the sick to the healthy, the poor to the rich, and so on. In a fascinating section on the medieval European Christian disgust toward both Jews and lepers, Miller writes

But one might distinguish a difference of emphasis between the disgusts and styles of loathing prompted by Jews and those prompted by lepers. More than lepers, who were associated with rotting flesh and cadavers, Jews were associated with excrement and menstrual blood. Such as the Christian demonization of the Jew—and the uncomprehending Christian horror of circumcision—that the Jewish male was believed to menstruate. Jewish men were thus feminized and all women were thus Judaized to make both more disgusting, more dangerous than they had been before. Without pushing the distinction too far one might notice that physical disgust at appalling sights and odors of lepers led to a belief in their moral loathsomeness; whereas the Jew's assumed moral loathsomeness led to a belief that his body must then be as disfigured as his soul.

This kind of "othering" disgust, which is presumptive yet still hugely visceral combination of moral and physical disgust presents some serious ethical problems. The presence of disgust is often processed as proof that the disgusting object is inherently wrong or objectionable—in the minds of the medieval Christians, Jews were objectively disgusting, both physically and morally. (Indeed, as Miller points out, Christian culture often found Jews more disgusting than lepers: although those aspiring to sainthood would willingly expose themselves to leprosy in order to mortify their flesh, there are no records of anyone converting to Judaism as self-flagellation.) This anti-Semitic disgust seemed to them just as rooted in reality as their disgust at leprosy, although from a modern perspective it seems clear evidence of religious bigotry.

Disgust is thus a persuasive yet unreliable witness. Not only does it suggest to us that the physically deformed or ill must also be morally flawed; it can actually elicit a visceral feeling of repulsion in us for someone "contaminated" with various kinds of otherness. And more than most other emotions, like love or jealousy, it seems to present us with objective fact about the object that disgusts us. Witnessing something disgusting, the temptation is strong to believe anyone would find that object similarly repulsive—yet in many cases, that assumption is unfounded. Miller writes:

The avowal of disgust expects concurrence. It carries with it the notion of its own indisputability, and part of this indisputability depends upon the fact that disgust is processed to particularly via offense to the senses. It argues for the visibility, the palpability, the concreteness, the sheer obviousness of the claim. Disgust poses less of a problem for intersubjectivity than perhaps any other emotion.

That is, it is easy for an outsider to imagine what we mean when we say we are disgusted. However, the claim to "sheer obviousness" does pose a problem when, for example, a person who finds menstrual blood infinitely more disgusting than feces, extrapolates this feeling into a universal claim that everyone shares this hierarchy of disgust-feeling (as Freud does in Civilization and its Discontents, following his traditional practice of not consulting any women before drawing his conclusions). The "sheer obviousness" aspect of disgust feelings are also a problem when the feeling of disgust is used as a rationale for justifying oppression, as in the example of the medieval Christians and Jews, or the more modern-day example of those who oppose allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military, because the heterosexual servicepeople may find the idea of homosexuality disgusting. To those feeling the disgust in these cases, it seems like evidence of an obvious fact—because the person in question causes me to feel disgust, there must be something wrong with them. Such is not necessarily the case, yet a visceral disgust is a difficult hurdle to overcome. Miller argues, in fact, that the dehumanizing and ostensibly self-evident qualities of our experience of disgust present ongoing challenges to our democratic ideals.

One more theoretical construct offered by Miller promises to be particularly useful: he breaks down disgust into two basic types, the disgust of repression and the disgust of surfeit. Most attention, he claims, has been paid to the latter. Freud and his followers explain disgust as a "reaction formation" in which our unconscious desires (leftovers from earlier stages of our evolution from animals to humans) are repressed, and the feeling of disgust is a mental roadblock convincing us that what our unconscious mind finds attractive is actually repulsive. Freud being Freud, most of these forbidden activities are sexual in nature, and our initial disgust actually functions to build tension so that we experience greater release and pleasure upon finally overcoming these mental barriers. The foul is revealed to be fair. In this type of disgust, we are initially revolted, but that revulsion is often coupled with emotions of attraction as well: fascination, curiosity, and so on, which draw us forward even as our aversion is pushing us back. On the flipside, the disgust of surfeit—the feeling following overindulgence in greasy or sugary food, alcohol, or similar—reveals something that initially seemed fair, to in fact be foul. In this type of disgust there is no push-and-pull; the source of the satiation appears utterly unattractive until the effects of the overindulgence have worn off, and all we want is to have it removed from our presence. There is a neat and appealing symmetry between these two types of disgust—perhaps too neat, but one I'll definitely keep in mind as I progress through the project.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

love involves a notable and non-trivial suspension of some, if not all, rules of disgust
Disgust rules mark the boundaries of self; the relaxing of them marks privilege, intimacy, duty and caring... involving us in the pleasure that attends the breach of prohibitions.

wine: there are no strong norms that tell us to be loyal to wines nor are we in the habit of getting pleasure out of seducing wine, the very idea being absurd. The pleasure of wine is mostly in the physical pleasure of drinking, tasting, and smelling and in the attendant liberating intoxication. The pleasure is sensual. Wine drinking offers no real opportunity for the pleasures of violating prohibitions that sexuality constantly offers.

Freud underestimates the degree to which scarcity can enhance the pleasure of those wines and beers that geography and price make a rare treat.

The surfeit of habituation and addiction plays itself out in different domains. Freud discusses the symbiotic relation of desire and its frustration and whether “the mental value of an instinct invariably sinks with gratification of it.”

Sex is only one kind of boundary crossing, involving one kind of nakedness. There are other strippings, exposures and knowledges upon which intense intimacies are founded, the intimacies of prolonged, close and loving contact. One thinks of sharing and revealing doubts, worries, concerns; of admitting aspirations, confessing shortcomings and failures; of simply being seen as having warts, weaknesses, and needs. That is the touching picture. We could recast it. We could define friends or intimates as those persons whom we let whine to us so that in return we may whine to them, with both parties understanding that such whining is the privilege of intimacy which our dignity and disgust would prevent in the absence of the privilege.

[David Becker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at a rather fascinating topic -- what disgusts us, why and how -- that unfortunately tends to bog down in the author's academic, multidisciplinary approach. He's especially fond of relating ideas to Shakespearean and earlier literary passages, which makes it even more of a slog for those of us whose comp lit credentials aren't equal to the author's. When he relates concepts to contemporary, real-world phenomenon, however, he can be quite compelling.

To whit, my two favorite take-aways:

* The author makes a brief but solid case for disgust as a primary emotion -- it can't be resolved down to other emotions -- but one that's not inherent. Babies, of course, are fine with filth. Until they are toilet trained, at which point they can swing wildly the other way and have hissy fits about two different kinds of foods touching each other and the like. The rest of childhood and adolescence, the author somewhat sadly concludes, may be seen as learning to put up with icky stuff.

* Imagine yourself swallowing. Now imagine yourself taking that same mouthful of drool, spitting it into a cup, then swallowing it....So just when and how did the saliva become disgusting?

[Brenda Pío Pío · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my view on life and human interactions. Disgust plays a much more significant role in our lives than we are able to admit or even realize.

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 5 out of 5]

O nojo é um sentimento classificatório. Talvez seja ele quem esteja na base do nosso sentimento de preconceito e de hierarquização social em diversas instâncias. Por isso me interessei por este livro como estudante e pesquisador da sexualidade, do sexo e do gênero. Porque quer queiramos ou não esses três elementos são perpassados por sentimentos de nojo e de seus correlatos, como o ódio, a abjeção, entre outros. Como alguns sentimentos de nojo são relevados, como os de natureza sexual, e outros não são, principalmente os de natureza social? Isso certamente se relaciona com um fator cultural e é isso que William Ian Miller tenta explicar neste livro. Não preciso dizer que se trata de uma edição supercaprichada da Darkside e um dos poucos livros de não-ficção que a editora apostou - e que acho que deveria apostar mais nesse tipo de texto. Aprendi imensamente com este livro não apenas sobre como o nojo funciona como um elemento de separação social mas como ele é intrinsecamente cultural e serve para apontar valores para as coisas e as pessoas, criando, assim, uma hierarquia.

[Madeline]

It's not my favorite [book about disgust], but it is my least favorite [book about disgust].

[Adrienne Kiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was certainly an interesting book! I've never really given any thought to the idea of disgust before (other than thoughts along the line of "oh my god what did I just step in"), so I was fascinated to read the potential relationships between disgust, class structure, morality, feelings of superiority, and sexuality.

I've noticed that I seem to have a much different concept of what is disgusting than that of my peers (nobody wants to look at the pictures of my recently excised tumor, for example), but after reading this I realized that there is a consistency among our views that I'd previously unrealized.

I tend to experience disgust in a moral/intellectual sense rather than the physical, and even though I don't seek out either feeling I am almost looking forward to the next time it happens so I can put my new perspective to use analyzing my feelings and seeing what they potentially say about me.

[Deodand · Rating 3 out of 5]

You wouldn't be surprised by how interesting a subject disgust makes. There are many kinds of disgust out there, and Miller goes ahead and finds them all, including types I've experienced without ever calling the emotion by its name.

I'm glad he errs on the side of prudishness. You won't find this a shocking or prurient book. It is an intellectual piece. There is a lot of quoting and referring to Freud, who spent an uncomfortably weird amount of his life thinking about the subject. Both he and Miller have a larger-than-average fascination with disgust.

I've always felt that surprise lay at the heart of disgust. Anyone who's ever drank out of a carton of supposedly-fresh milk knows what I'm talking about. The reason it didn't get more stars from me, even though I enjoyed it, was that I was hoping for more concrete examples of what disgusts various cultures.

[Gretchen Rubin]

I decided that "disgust" was something I need to learn more about, for my study of the senses. Interesting, and not as disgusting as I'd feared.

[Laurent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something I wish I knew before getting into this book is that is not a easy read. Not because of the concepts, but because of the academic language used. This will make this book difficult to comprehend if one struggles with the English language by only having knowledge of 'basic' vocabulary.

As already mentioned by some other reviewers, the author attempts to explain Disgust in its social sense rather than in its biological one. The author shifts from the common believe that disgust is merely a biological emotion that everyone is born with and knows how to 'use' without being taught (such as happiness, sadness, anger etc.). Instead it is a 'learned' emotion in that it is shaped by ones upbringing making it unique to every individual. He goes on too argue on this point by using various examples of texts written by various individuals on how each of them comprehends disgust differently, which are then further analyzed by the author. (I dont want to end up spoiling anything else, so I will leave it at that)

In conclusion I would say this was a nice if not difficult read, yet this dosent stop me from recommending the book. If one is interested in social science/Psychology, this book is a no brainer as it focuses on one of the basic aspects of understanding why we do what we do by attempting to understand a everyday basic (some would say complex) emotion. Also, if one merely is interested in improving their academic English, this book will easily be of help.

[Alice Wardle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always complain that Good Reads does not let you choose half stars, otherwise I would have chosen 3.5 stars.

'The Anatomy of Disgust' by William Ian Miller takes on a fascinating inquisition into the notion of what 'disgusting' is. There are some elements that are repeated a bit too much much throughout, and I find the second half of the book considerably less enjoyable than the first. I think this is based on personal interests as the first half focuses more on psychology and literacy while the second half focuses more on history and politics (and I'm a psychology student).

The two pieces of knowledge that I found to be most dominating and interesting in this book are 1) If you think about the word 'disgust' (dis-gust), it relates to taste, which is what the word is related to first and foremost, 2) According to Mary Douglas's Structural Theory, things are seen as polluting based on their contextual occurrences. For example, if something is out of place, such as dirty dish water but not in the sink where its supposed to be.

It is mostly a philosophical book, and so I am left with more questions than answers, though there are certainly many good points made in the book. I always find philosophers to be verbal enthusiasts, and they can make the mundane sound beautiful. But, they are also literary geniuses, so it's sometimes difficult to follow and understand.

[Charles Bookman · Rating 3 out of 5]

What disgusts us and why? Disgust brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Disgust sets cultural and personal boundaries. Imagine aesthetics, contempt, horror and morality without its counterweight, disgust. This is a serious, even slightly pedantic discussion of a defining element of our common humanity. Read more at bookmanreader.blogspot.com .

[Tara Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, a bit more academic than I expected. A treatise on the emotion/feeling of disgust. It's a physical reaction, and also an emotional reaction, and disgust is more fascinating a topic than one might initially imagine. I am keeping the book as I feel like I want to revisit it again.

[Sam Eccleston · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece- penetrating insight and razor sharp analysis; convincing and enlightening throughout.

[B · Rating 2 out of 5]

The historical angle is interesting, but in attempting to rebut the science that has been done on the topic, little is erected in its place.

[Elizabeth Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good

[Frazt Des · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightfull, but not to much of a "whoah!" factor from me. The author is obviously very intelligent, I will look into his other books.

[Megan McInnis · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most precise, informed, and eloquent books I've read on any subject. With great respect for the reader's sensibilities, the author examines unflinchingly and unprejudicially this peculiarly human emotion, carefully distinguishing it from neighbor emotions such as horror and contempt. He draws from and criticizes the ideas of Darwin, Freud, Orwell, and others, and uses evocative, sometimes shocking illustrations from such sources as Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, and Dickens to demonstrate the many ways we have found revulsion in matters of everyday life throughout history.

[Dustin Brauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read. If you don't understand disgust, you don't understand yourself or your friends. I mean, just look at the stuff you are reading!

After I die I may ask god for a redo as William Ian miller. He seems creative and intelligent in a way few others are.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

really interesting, sometimes the observations were a little obvious.

[Ryan]

re negative emotions). Cool book