291–300 of 360 posts
TL;DR immaturely written for no reason.
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> afaik untouchables as a concept was mostly enacted around (british) colonial rule (when they instituted the caste system we see even to today), so might not apply to the time period they are talking about... This is revisionist nonsense. Ancient texts, both sacred and secular both describe a extant caste system.
Um, no, they don't. They describe a jaati system, and a varna system, both of which do not take the same meaning as caste. The british conflated the two, and invented caste. The jaati system was a system of hereditary professional guilds - so you'd have different jaatis for accountants (Kulkarnis for example), farmers (Vokkaligas), teachers (Upaadhyayas), etc. The professional skill was jealously guarded and generall…
For example, from jaati and varna, what follows from that? Admittedly, a vague question but wanting to learn a bit more.
Just saying this is the first perspective on HN I have read about caste being inaccurate, and wanting to understand this fresh context.
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Where do you shop that doesn't sell plain old soap bars? Need me to mail some for you?
Obviously, plain old soap bars will not suffice to make a bath last for weeks or months. As I said pretty clearly, and you must have read, you cannot buy the good stuff .
It’s trivially easy to find ancient soap recipes and revert them at hope. Or one can buy Aleppo soap, or Castilian soap from specialty markets.
It’s not like there’s some lost secret, or extinct ingredients - it’s soap, and it’s been a pretty simple thing to make for thousands of years.
Here are some contra points: - Aztecs were burning incense around the conquistadors to hide their unpleasant body odor (documented) - The Christian Church actually said bathing naked was forbidden - the pope instructed all public bath to be closed - The monks order clearly said to bath only once a year - general decline of the cities caused that a lot of public baths to be closed. Rome had none in medieval time. - Mu…
Addressed in the article - the church’s opposition to bathing came much later than the medieval period according to the author.
Pope Gregory I declared baths should be only used to cure the sick. Of couse, we read his words different today (like he allowed it) but bathing was considered sinful. There was a belief that bathing invited demonic possession and that the dirt, sweqt, etc. actually repelled demonic forces.
In my part of the world, there are still stories how church was telling people that you should take a bath only on Đurđevdan (and joke is that only Gypsies followed that).
You do know that the devil is lurking from the water don’t you? I guess folk tales cannot be used as proof since they are no written records.
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> This evidence is actually the creation of historians in the past century... Academic history tends to refer to primary sources. It is true that what survives in the archive is a curated collection, but curating the archive is not the same as doing history and should be thought of differently. Historians have absolutely no trouble with the idea that the archive can produce multiple narratives and that no narrative i…
> Historians have absolutely no trouble with the idea that the archive can produce multiple narratives and that no narrative is the absolute truth. and > I find it frustrating to see so many people with no or minimal background in anything resembling the discipline making wide proclamations about the limitations of history writing. I think I already made the same point as you, ie that no narrative is the absolute tru…
I think you are unreasonably critical of historical writing and are presenting a false claim about what historical writing today looks like.
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Not just probably impossible. Imagine if you wanted to obtain information about the bathing habits of people today. Where would that information come from? The universe doesn't simply provide it. People have to collect it! The do polling . Polling for bathing behavior wasn't a thing in the medieval period. It isn't like the numbers existed and were lost, they never existed in the first place.
> Where would that information come from The observance that every house in the US has bathing facilities, even housing built for poor people. The observance of building codes requiring bathing facilities exist in all new housing built in order to get a permit. That’s just 2 items off the top of my head…
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I was going to say the same thing, but then I realised the initial claim was also about 'cultural unity'. So fair enough, and yes a lot of Europe (or all of it in a few sections) has been culturally unified since time immemorial. It is a bit more complex though, certainly even today there's some very distinct 'culture' in different regions across India. But also shared themes and roots (e.g. Sanskrit & texts written…
> [...] has been culturally unified since time immemorial. Could you be a bit more concrete?
The Roman Empire is located in Europe, is more recent than "time immemorial", and I'll claim that they didn't regard the various barbarians in Europe outside its sphere of influence as culturally unified with them.
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Indians definitely still have certain specific hygiene practices that Westerners don't. Anybody who has worked at a large tech company will have taken note of the tooth brushes in the bathrooms. I found this to be very confusing at first, but then I noticed that a good amount of my Indian coworkers would brush their teeth after lunch.
Wait, you people don't brush your teeth after lunch?
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> I stopped reading here. But he's right; I don't know if I would call it colonialist, but you are applying your current perspective of how the poor lives to a culture extremely far removed from our own. I think our current situation of extremely disproportional wealth is a new phenomenon and we should be careful in blindly applying our current viewpoints backwards. India has always been an extremely fertile and arab…
someone was doing the massaging, and it wasn't the same people who were being massaged