PREMENY ŽENSKEJ HYGIENY AKO SÚČASŤ KULTÚRNYCH PROCESOV

The issue of hygiene is one of those components of the way of life that did not represent a research topic in the early days of ethnography in Slovakia, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, hygiene habits and practices both determined and reflected the level of culture in the broadest sense of the word. In the process of the formation of normativity, ideas about hygiene, as well as actions in terms of hygiene, underwent significant developmental changes. Personal hygiene, intimate hygiene, hygiene of clothing, hygiene of dwelling, can be studied from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives. Both its normative and symbolic significance are integral to social transformations, from ideas about the rightness of action in terms of cleanliness, beauty and nutrition, to the development of social and health services and care. The overview of the topics can be further developed through the details of the hygiene of individual parts of the body, including, for example, the culturally significant and anthropologically treated topic of smells and odours, and other aspects of this historically, culturally, aesthetically, healthily and socially significant area of the way of life.