Wind, traffic and dust: The recycling of wastes

Indian conceptions about the earth's recycling of wastes is an important do main far investigation. The use of dust os a cleansing agent leads us to in quire into local notions about elemental processes, the tropic cycle, and t he role of the streets as venue and traffic as process in recycling the det ritus anti castaways of daily life. We relate local expectations about wast e disposal to textual sources, utilise Ayurvedic theory and practice to und erstand traffic as a flow, and examine Samkhya philosophical underpinnings for a humoral worldview. By reviewing ethnographic and Indologic analyses o f how bathing, or entering the flow, is experienced we examine the deep imp licit meaning of flows and churning. We argue that the very entering into t raffic is transformative, an experience that is further sanctified in the r itual elaboration of some travel as pilgrimage. There enlarge from our inqu iry recurrent themes on flows, and their outcomes, for which we select an e thnosociological frame on which such patterns, symmetries and inversion may coalesce into a single coherent design.