Date of Award

8-22-2025

Date Published

September 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religion

Advisor(s)

Phillip Arnold

Keywords

Excreta;Justice;Refugees;Shit;Solidarity;Toilet

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | Religion

Abstract

Shit, the taboo term for the human excreta that exits the anus, can be understood as sacred. Shitting, the vulgar verb to describe the act of discarding solid excreta, can likewise be understood as religious ritual activity. This counters the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) in the United States (US) of the placement of shit as profane, and shitting as unceremonial. An aim of this dissertation is to reclaim the word shit from the realm of what the DSP has rendered invisible and unspeakable, and spark rigorous academic discussion about it in the context of Religion and Environmental Studies. The DSP is the set of widely held values, practices, and frameworks that shape a society's worldview and influence its institutions. In the current US, the genealogy of the DSP comes from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD), manifesting as the societal hegemony of cisheteronormative white Christian supremacist patriarchy. The DSP influences how people shit, and how they think and write about shitting (or don’t). A focus on shit in Chapters 1-3 exposes gaps and ambiguities in the categories created by three foundational scholars in the academic study of Religion (Durkheim, Douglas, and Otto). Though like other facets of Religion which chart aspects of human life as material beings and our social organization, shit and shitting have been understudied in the canonical literature, to the detriment of the categories that we inherit. The work of contemporary scholar-activists Chapters 4-5 (Kimmerer and Macy) reconnects the field of Religion to the field of Environmental Studies, helping to make space for the discussion of excreta. Shit humans produce has implications for both areas as the inner and outer lives of each person as an excreting individual, and our collective life on planet Earth. Closing the poop loop, that is, re-cycling all discarded nutrients, is key to the survival of humanity. Yet environmental efforts need approaches Religion offers because solutions to the global sanitation crisis are not only technical, but are questions of orientation, worldview, and values. Dealing with our crap collectively begins with breaking the taboo on poo in order to see and speak alternatives, as well as to analyze the systems of wasting and power operating in US society. The ethnographic component of this dissertation reveals how the treatment of shit (marked as disposable) is replicated in the treatment of people (when they are marked disposable). The field site is Salt City Harvest Farm (SCHF), an organization serving refugee farmers in upstate New York (unceded Onondaga land). The farmers are in the process of making a collective decision regarding which excreta infrastructure technology (ExIT) system is ideal to construct at their farm site, in the future. Refugee farmers are treated like shit by US society, partially because they are ambiguous in citizenship, legal status, racialization, and cultural de/assimilation practices, etc. This parallels shit’s ambiguity. In being both alive and dead, fertilizer and poison, attractive and repulsive, shit, like refugees, cannot be neatly categorized. This causes great discomfort in the DSP 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 to the US, arriving at this political moment.

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