Imperio Del Asco - Revision Libro Nussbaum

Brandeis University, Center for Global Development and Sustainability
Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Empire of Disgust: Prejudice, Discrimination, and Policy in India
and the US by Z. Hasan, A. Huq, M. Nussbaum and V. Verma
Review by: Rajesh Sampath
Source: CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion , February 2020, Vol. 1, No. 1, THE
PERSISTENCE OF CASTE (February 2020), pp. 244-246
Published by: Brandeis University, Center for Global Development and Sustainability
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Book Review
CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion

Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 244–246
February 2020
brandeis.edu/j-caste ISSN 2639-4928
DOI: 10.26812/caste.v1i1.13
Title: The Empire of Disgust:

Prejudice, Discrimination, and
Policy in India and the US
Author: Z. Hasan, A. Huq, M. Nussbaum, & V. Verma,

(Eds.) (2018)
Pubishers: Oxford University Press: Delhi
Reviewer: Rajesh Sampath

Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Justice, Rights and Social Change,
Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University,
Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
E-mail: [email protected]
This timely anthology of essays edited by Hasan, Huq, Nussbaum, and

Verma breaks new ground for several reasons. For one, the rise of right-wing,
authoritarian, majoritarian politics in Western and Eastern ‘secular, constitutional,
legal’, democracies necessitates sensitive, nuanced multidisciplinary and
multidimensional approaches in comparative studies. Understanding one social
and national context could be helpful in illuminating unseen gaps or blind spots
in another system. As the volume states from the outset all societies in one way
or another ‘exclude and stigmatize’ minorities. Given this enduring dynamic in
modern democratic societies, it behoves researchers, who examine questions
of discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, stigmatization, and prejudice to
create analytic and theoretical spaces whereby humanists, for example ethicists
and philosophers of justice and rights, can collaborate with social scientists, legal
scholars, and applied social policy analysts. The book achieves this great feat.
The current historical and political present in the U.S. and India reveals that
over the last few years right-wing political parties’ ascendance to power has meant
the erosion of certain basic, liberal, democratic values such as equality and equal
protection under the law. Minority groups of different intersectional identities
have faced great repression and violence in everyday life; but this is compounded
by subtle changes in law and policy that seem to justify their exclusion and
© 2020 Sampath.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
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Book Review 245
stigmatization. Having stated the obvious, for some the matter goes beyond current
politics and the nature of authoritarian, right-wing populist appeal in electoral systems.
The text by illustrious scholars in India and the U.S. tries to introduce a novel
and philosophically rich framework of analysis that reveals a ‘rhetoric of disgust’
to understand how in fact current social realities of exclusion and degradation of
minorities operate. Some groups are castigated as ‘animal-like’ in which their ‘full
human’ dignity is deprived. This critical addition of the category of ‘disgust’ sheds
new light on traditional research in law and social policy to examine modalities of
social exclusion and therefore, ways to craft sound recommendations to mitigate or
eliminate them. In some senses we must go beyond the twentieth century theories of
ideology and hegemony, which operate by traditional dichotomies of the ideal and
material realms, or theory vs. practice. We need deeper investigations into the reasons
why social dynamics result in material practices perpetuated by real mechanics of
violence against minorities based on social-psychological bodily manifestations of the
pure and the impure. Caste in India and race in the United States are two examples
of this non-dialectical, synthetically complex phenomenon encapsulated in the term
‘disgust.’
Great predecessors that examined this dominion of ‘disgust’ can open doors for
future research, another great virtue of this collaborative, anthologized endeavour. The
work as a whole is inspired by the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the great Dalit (formerly
known as ‘untouchable’) visionary leader who examined one of the most horrendous
forms of exclusion, stigmatization, marginalization, oppression and therefore ‘disgust,’
namely the Hindu caste system in India and South Asia more broadly. One can say
his unique achievement in the twentieth century context (compared to other national
contexts of his time) was the attempt to inspire a social movement to eradicate such an
internal, cultural, and civilizational system of tyrannical majoritarian ‘disgust.’ What
makes Ambedkar stand out in his time was the fact that he pioneered his efforts during
decolonization from an external imperial oppressor, in this case the British Empire.
All the while, he chaired the drafting of a secular, legal, democratic constitution of a
newly liberated Eastern society in the Global South, namely India, that attempted to
take on its seemingly indestructible system of caste. In other words he was fighting
two oppressions as the same time—one internal, the other external. The volume takes
up his cause by venturing into realms he was not able to traverse.
Taking it one step further, a comparative analysis is needed to see how differing
dynamics of stigma, exclusion, and ‘disgust’ occur in different contemporary and
historical contexts. Therefore, we must see how differing remedies in law and policy
recommendation will be required, perhaps experimentally, to tackle the complexity
of minority control and degradation. The volume states from the beginning itself
that it does not intend to be ‘reductionist’ whereby all phenomena of ‘prejudice and
discrimination’ can be explained by an epiphenomenal category or meta-concept
known as ‘disgust.’ In comparative studies, other factors such as ‘imagined violence,
competitive envy, and unconscious group bias’ also have to be explored and from
myriad perspectives to avoid the fallacy of attempting to discover one ‘determinate
emotional origin.’ Different disciplines have to be marshalled, not just one, say

190.189.48.100 on Sat, 21 Sep 2024 11:32:09 UTC
246 CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion Vol. 1, No. 1
sociology on structures and actions, humanistic, critical, or post-modern theories on

‘discourse’ analysis, or social psychologists on group behaviours and mindsets. One
gets the sense that new ground is being broken in trying to understand ‘disgust’ with
empirical data with the aim of eradicating it, at least in the US and Indian contexts.
Martha Nussbaum, who is renowned for her pioneering works on justice, rights,
and the capabilities approach, offers a framing orientation for the anthology. Drawing
from the psychologist Rozin, Nussbaum starts off with the idea of ‘primary disgust’
in which all humans across societies and time are rooted not so much in outright
fear of real danger but inherent discomfort that all humans have about other human
body’s excretions, smells, and ultimate decay. This seems obvious enough but then she
takes it one step further with her own powerful notion of ‘projective disgust.’ Given
this ‘cultural universality’ of human discomfort with human ‘animality’ in general
and natural functions, say excretion and death, humans, unlike animals, go further.
Majorities in societies create distinctions between themselves and some minority
group which they have to characterize as ‘quasi-animals,’ minorities that are often
‘powerless,’ because those majorities cannot deal with the ‘primary disgust’ of their
own ‘animality.’ And this happens in the heart of the allegedly most peaceful, secular,
and liberally sound democracies.
Nussbaum’s brilliant insight provides explanatory power to complement how
others research and analyze various forms of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination,
and prejudice when they occur in societies with majorities and minorities, such as the
US and India. When majorities institute this distinction by ‘projecting, irrationally,
smelliness, hyper-animality, and hyper-sexuality’ onto other minority groups, the
majority creates an illusory distance from its own ‘animality’ and ‘mortality.’
From this incredibly profound insight, comparative contexts begin to open up,
such as antisemitism in twentieth century Europe, the plight of African-Americans
from slavery to the present in the US, the millennial-long struggle of Dalits/outsiders
in the Hindu caste system, and Muslims where they are minorities, for example in
Europe, the US, and India. Every aspect of law and social policy, including voting,
education, housing, and health access, is infected so to speak by the way majorities
treat their minorities. Without going into further details about the conclusions of
each contributor’s chapter, this critical and timely volume is highly recommended
for academics, practitioners, policymakers, activists, leaders of social movements,
and elected officials. We must translate theory into practice to reform democracies
with majoritarian systems that continue to demonize and therefore prejudicially
discriminate against minority groups given the underlying phenomenon of ‘disgust.’

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Brandeis University, Center for Global Development and Sustainability

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48644576

This content downloaded from

CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion

Title: The Empire of Disgust:

Author: Z. Hasan, A. Huq, M. Nussbaum, & V. Verma,

Pubishers: Oxford University Press: Delhi

Reviewer: Rajesh Sampath

This timely anthology of essays edited by Hasan, Huq, Nussbaum, and

This content downloaded from

sociology on structures and actions, humanistic, critical, or post-modern theories on

This content downloaded from

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