Dirt is the attribution that life has become “messy” and disordered, where aspects of life—physical or, more often, moral—have come into illicit contact, been blended or dissolved into an undifferentiated mixture. More specifically, dirt is transgressive; it signals a normative failure. In this, by linking normative failures to dirt, pollution, and contagion, powerful psychological systems are mobilized to enforce the norms of the community upon the wayward individual. Transgression becomes a form of pollution.
