Abstract

The essay proposes a diachronic and comparative reflection on the relationship between decency and hygiene and their semantic transformations over time. To do so, the paper will refer to different texts within which certain ideas of clean and dirty, decorous and indecorous, are always culturally defined – from the dictionary and manuals of manners to advertisements. The hypothesis is that, although cleaning practices today are dominated by a health-conscious culture that separates aesthetic issues from purely sanitary ones, there is a normative dimension of cleanliness that, like decorum, establishes rules of social convenience and modes of coexistence among the human and nonhuman agents that constitute society.