‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’

Abstract

Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenomenological and culturally informed account of the complex links between pervasive social categories and their emotional embodiment and expression in phobic individuals.

Humans and Nature: How Knowing and Experiencing Nature Affect Well-Being

“…Significant literature indicates connections between perceiving natural elements and feelings of fear. Obsessive fear of natural elements is common on the basis of visual (or sometime auditory) interactions with natural elements, such as snakes, spiders, wasps, moths, blood, thunder, and feathers (98), and almost all specific phobias are directly www.annualreviews.org • Nature and Human Well-Beingor indirectly associated with natural objects (99). Such phobias covary with fears of animals that are often considered disgusting (but not harmful), such as maggots (100).…”

The phenomenology of bodily care: caregivers' experiences with AIDS patients before antiretroviral therapies in Lesotho

“…However, in general, fluids that pour or seep from the body are treated circumspectly because of fear that they can infect or contaminate (Seymour, 1998;Turner, 2003). It is usual for people to experience negative emotions, such as disgust and fear, about human bodily wastes and fluids (Smith & Davidson, 2006); this possibility suggests another source of tension that caregivers might have to deal with in their attempts to maintain orderliness despite a lack of appropriate materials to assist in maintaining a sanitary care space. Their emotional reactions suggest a concern for HIV infection, but also that filth is matter that is inappropriate in a given place (see Douglas, 1966).…”

Spiders, Sartre and ‘magical geographies’: the emotional transformation of space

“…We seek to demonstrate the value of Sartre’s work through a discussion of the disturbing spatial transformations experienced as part of the intense emotional reactions that characterise specific phobias (Davidson and Smith 2003; Smith and Davidson 2006). When the specific ‘objects’ that trigger these events enter the phobic’s orbit, the emotional forces associated with them warp the phenomenology of the everyday world in ways analogous to the spatial/temporal distortions exerted by strong gravitational fields.…”

“…Interestingly, specific phobias are almost always related to ‘natural’ objects or situations, including rats, lightning, moths and wasps as well as spiders (Smith and Davidson 2006). Arachnophobia constituted the largest single group represented in the project as a whole and these six interviews are actually broadly typical of other specific phobias in terms of both their phenomenology and etiology (Davidson 2005).…”

“…However, since the purpose of the current paper is to investigate the detailed phenomenology of a specific phobia, the emphasis on spiders allows us to focus on a relatively homogeneous group with, as the high incidence of spider fear in the population at large suggests, broader cultural significance. Those interested in how these cases might relate to specific phobias are directed to previous papers (Davidson and Smith 2003; Smith and Davidson 2006) where we speculate that these patterns of affect are intimately connected with such ‘objects’’ demonstrated abilities to continually evade and compromise the dominant symbolic order of modernity which constitutes itself, and hence its ‘subjects’, in terms of the control and maintenance of hard and fast boundaries and distinctions between (the actually very fluid categories) of nature and culture, human and animal, and so on. Since male and female subject positions are also differently constituted within this symbolic order, this analysis also helps explain why specific phobias are so heavily gender‐specific – women are approximately three times more likely to suffer from such conditions as men (Gelder et al 1996; Davidson and Smith 2003).…”