“Go Take a Shower!”
Based on ethnographic work conducted in the Paris area, this paper takes a look at the relationship between homeless people and those who take care of them. There is a tendency by the latter to label homeless people according to hygiene criteria. The more they see them as “dirty,” the more they label them as “bums” and the less they think they stand chances to be “cured” or “rehabilitaded.” But such conceptions do not only call back to sanitary norms. The value judgments regarding dirt go beyond matters of hygiene and are linked to symbols of purity and impurity. The aim of this paper is to show that the inability to find a place for homeless people in our classificatory systems leads us to see them as impure and to only see them as a figure of otherness.