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Derek A. Dow, Dirt: Filth and Decay in a New World Arcadia, Social History of Medicine, Volume 19, Issue 2, August 2006, Pages 364–365, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkl028
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Pamela Wood, Dirt: Filth and Decay in a New World Arcadia , Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. Pp. 300. $54.95. ISBN 1 86940 348 7.
This book has been a long time in the making. It is more than a decade since Pamela Wood published her first article on dirt in Dunedin, although the bibliography does not list any of her articles, or the title of her 1997 Otago Ph.D. on the subject. Academics are often warned about citing too many examples of their own work, but these omissions appear to carry this advice to an extreme. The author's starting point is her belief that dirt is a ‘complex cultural construct’ (p. 219), deserving of the historical centre-stage rather than a merely contextualising role in explaining urban development and public health policies in a nineteenth-century colonial setting. She is equally interested in the ‘sanitising’ responses to dirt and the construction of ‘dirt’ in public discourse, and her study is intended to combine a social history of a new community with a cultural history of the changing meaning of dirt, using tools from literary theory and anthropology.