Fertile, Social, Dangerous, Sacred, Gift, and System: Religion and the Ambiguity of Human Excreta

Excreta, specifically feces, the “solid waste” produced by humans, is an understudied phenomenon in the study of Religion. Yet, both ancient texts and contemporary contexts speak to its importance for the lives of human individuals (in the realm of health and cleanliness) and the environment (nutrient cycling, pollution, and social organization). Excreta can describe a broad range of bodily materials and functions including urine, feces, menstrual blood, semen, sweat, and dandruff. This proposal focuses primarily on urine and feces, with special attention to poop. There is actually not a neutral word in English to describe excrement: poo is childish, shit offends, stool is too medical for a normal conversation. Poop is potentially the front runner, but talking about it in public is not yet a completely neutral and acceptable thing to do. Without a neutral word to describe this excreta however, it remains difficult to address the dual sanitation crisis plaguing the planet. On one hand, there are 3.5 billion people who do not have a dignified, private place to relieve themselves. On the other hand, the copious use of resources to flush (and then extract) feces and urine from fresh water is straining municipal systems.

Much more than a technical problem, however, the crisis and its solutions require asking religious, psychological, and social questions. Paying attention to the dynamics of power, worldviews, and practices elucidate why the current 200-year-old technology of the freshwater flush porcelain toilet system is so entrenched, even in places where ecological sanitation alternatives exist. This paper hones in on the religious dimensions of this question. Traditional categorizations of the sacred (e.g. Émile Durkheim, Mary Douglas, and Rudolf Otto) do not categorize poop as sacred, even though it retains similar qualities to that which is, or could be, considered sacred. These thinkers categorize poop as profane, pollution, and unmentionable, respectively. The impact is physical infrastructure that reinforces this worldview. The scholarship of Robin Wall Kimmerer creates space for poop to be understood as a gift, and Joanna Macy’s work invites us to think about excreta through a systems perspective.

Using the example of poop to examine foundational definitions of religion and religious activity, excreta registers as sacred, and excreting as a ritual activity. This counters the placement of poop as profane, and pooping as unceremonial. As an essential part of life, wellness, vulnerability, rites of passage (e.g. potty training and as a stage of old age), social structures, and ecological connection, why have poop and pooping been so disregarded in the literature of Religion? Why the silence and intricate social conventions that render shit as inaudible and invisible as possible? In areas where freshwater flush toilets are the main excreta infrastructure technology (ExIT), why is there so much resistance to ExIT system transformation, even as water-based sanitation is known to be financially costly as well as to toxify rivers and lakes? Why is addressing the worldwide sanitation crisis one of the most underfunded global initiatives? How is the treatment of crap (one vulgar word for feces), when it is rendered disposable, replicated in the treatment of people labeled disposable? What possibilities of literal and metaphorical (re)integration are there, for materials and populations designated expendable? How do the various words for excrement function linguistically in US American English, and what’s at stake in its use?

My methods are a literature review, enriched by an ethnography of Salt City Harvest Farm, an organization serving refugee farmers in upstate New York, who are in the process of making a collective decision regarding which excreta infrastructure technology (ExIT) system is ideal to construct at their farm site.

The implication of this theory and method is that if the definition of religion and religious activity cannot accommodate poop and pooping as sacred and ritual activity, or at least render them ambiguous (rather than profane and unceremonial) then those definitions of religion and religious activity are inadequate to describe religion as a fundamental aspect of life, since poop and pooping are inextricable from organic life processes of all beings. If the examination of poop and pooping enhances the extant definition of religion and religious activity, then those definitions will continue to be helpful for understanding human behavior. Given projections of peak phosphorus, chemical fertilizer shortages, and freshwater scarcity, the “(re)turn toward poop and pooping” will eventually happen in environmental, economic, and societal scenarios that demand communities deal with their crap, literally and metaphorically, whether they want to or not (Hoppenhaus, 2024; Rhodes, 2013).  

This paper concludes that refugee farmers are treated like sh*t by US society, partially because they are ambiguous in citizenship, legal status, racialization, and cultural de/assimilation practices, and cannot be neatly categorized. This parallels sh*t’s ambiguity. In being both alive and dead, fertilizer and poison, attractive and repulsive, poop also cannot be neatly categorized. Being uncategorizable, this causes great discomfort in the dominant social paradigm of the US, which has come to prominence in its ability to enforce its categorizations and classifications, not in the least upon places perceived as “shithole countries,” from whence refugees come (Williams, 265).

Dangerously, perhaps none of the pure theories will hold. Perhaps a complete composting of the dominant social paradigm’s understandings of religion and religious behavior will reveal the elemental forms of religious life, in order to spiral around to new/ancient understandings of the holy. Feeding and being fed: neither end of the digestive tube need be neglected in forming an embodied awareness of the gift of being consciously, wholly, reciprocally, interconnected. Deeper than interpolated, we are inter-polluted. In life and death, we keep the cycle going. The choice to embrace poop, and voluntarily orient to this involuntary offering, may realize a revolution from the biome up!