Drug users.
I’ve been told by ex junkies that water on skin feels really bad if you’re strung out. That’s specific to heroin, of course, but being a drug addict in general no doubt decreases people’s care-factor about personal hygiene.
I hadn’t heard about the defecation thing, but there are other differences. For example, here in China most people shower last thing at night instead of first thing in the morning. I actually get teased about this…they’ll say “How can you go to bed without showering?!”
The other thing is that most of the people here don’t really have armpit body odor (they may have other kinds of odors however).
Several brands have tried to sell the concept of using deodorant, and it’s not really a matter of feeling it’s bad to suppress sweat (not here at least); they just can’t see any need for it.
I prefer to shower before bed. Could be a carry over from working nights and showering before I left work. My daughter also showers at night. My wife and sons prefer to shower after they wake up.
I have been working in China for the past 7 years, and many Chinese have told me that they bathe only once a week. They may think that they do not need to bathe more often, but my nose tells me that they do.
A daily bath or shower is not generally necessary for health or hygiene. (If you find the smell of people who don’t bathe every day offensive that’s your problem, not theirs. And your problem is aesthetic; there is no danger to your health or physical well-being.) Until comparatively recently, a daily bathing habit was rare even in the developed west, for reasons already pointed out in the thread - it was inconvenient and relatively expensive.
So it’s not so much that some cultures today have an “inherent reluctance” to bathe. They have simply never developed a cultural preference for a daily bath. In some cases this may be because it would still, for them, be inconvenient or expensive; in others, these barriers have disappeared but that in itself hasn’t been enough to generate a taste for daily bathing.
Although it was years ago, when I was in graduate school, it was the students from France who were quite whiffy due to a failure to wash. The students from other places all seemed to understand the concept of at least washing your genital areas several times a week. Pouring perfume on yourself does not compensate for not bathing.
Washoe:
This would surprise me, though I won’t claim to know every possible custom in the wide world of Judaism. Amongst traditional Jews, hand-washing is a multiple-times-a-day thing, so I’d be surprised at any aversion to bathing, and most Hasidic men immerse their entire body in a ritual bath (“mikvah”) every day - and that, after taking a standard shower for cleanliness (you’re not supposed to have any dirt on your body when immersing in a mikvah).
In the 1950s and into the 1960s my family bathed only when considered dirty enough to need it. I doubt I bathed more often than twice a week very often. I don’t remember my parents bathing every day back then, either – nor other people in our neighborhood. The houses in our 'hood typically had just one bathroom that included a tub but was not plumbed for a shower; that may have had something to do with it.
I showered daily for many years, but no longer do so. I shower at the gym, but on days I don’t go to the gym I rarely sweat enough to need it.
Actually, science fiction cons have been very conscientious about promoting good hygeine. An example:
http://2016.lunacon.org/index.cgi?title=5-2-1%20rule
At Arisia several years ago, one character went around distributing minibottles of shampoo with similar Rules written on them to those he felt violated them.
It’s good that the “rules of thumb” for attending a science fiction convention include daily showers. But really, should that be necessary?
In grad school, it was the Chinese students who were generally unpleasantly aromatic. The Indian ones would get a little bit funky if we were doing a late-night study session, or if they’d skipped showering for a final exam or something.
The Chinese ones just stank out loud. And on top of it, they had ghastly breath, like they’d been noshing on the delights at the bottom of a dumpster.
As a South Asian person, it would be a mistake to lump all South Asians into one group. For many South Asian cultures, bathing is a formal daily ritual. Almost anything of cultural significance is preceded by a bath.
In my family, the older generation would usually finish with their bathing well before sunrise. The women would not even enter the kitchen without having had their morning bath/shower.
Now, body odour is a different issue. I know of people who start stinking an hour after a shower.
I worked with a french fellow in the 90s that bathed/showered once a week and added more cologne as the week progressed. Towards the end of the week I could tell when he got to work from several cubes over.
These days I work with a lot of Indians. Sometimes it happens when they are new in the country they show up at work with BO (the BO of not having bathed recently and then sweat). The Indians that have been here a while take them aside and talk to them.
This. I’m not South Asian myself but I’ve lived in India for several extended periods, and IME pretty much everybody except the poorest people are very fastidious about regular bathing. (The poorest people would probably prefer to bathe often too, if they had the chance.)
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Now, body odour is a different issue. I know of people who start stinking an hour after a shower.
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Also, India is hot, so people tend to sweat a fair amount, and Indian cuisine has a lot of brassica-family vegetables and strong spices, which also increase the pungency of one’s body odor.
So while there are lots of reasons that visitors to India might think the people have a more noticeable smell than they’re used to, it’s definitely not because Indian culture has any “inherent reluctance to bathe”.
I could well believe that many Indians newly arrived in western countries feel greater reluctance to wash daily than they do back home, being as how from their perspective it is frigging COLD round these here parts.
I am reminded of a pub quiz I attended in Bangkok. An old-English-style pub, there was a large number of Brits. One of the questions was, “What was last used in France in 1977?” One Brit shouted out: “Soap!” 
The correct answer was:
The guillotine
I know you’re from NYC as well - have you never been on a crowded midtown train in mid August? No offense meant, but the Hasids in their long woolen coats were extemely whiffy. Seriously, my eyes would water just being near them.
Actually, completely understandable, given the 100 degree plus temps on some platforms!
After the Soviet Union broke up I worked with a lot of of immigrants, and a lot of them were reluctant to bathe. They believed (or so they told us) water was bad for you. And I suppose in the former Soviet Union it very well may have been.
With repeated assurance that the water here was safe to drink and bathe in, they gradually came around to it. Especially when we hinted the B.O. was keeping them from getting girls.
According to the Thais, anyone who is not a Thai is reluctant to bathe. Really.
Back in the middle 1930’s we were living on a farm in Southern Illinois. No electricity, no indoor plumbing, no running water. Water was all hand pumped from a cistern. So we all had a Saturday Night Bath, in a #2 galvanized wash tub. The lower down the pecking order you were, the more people had used the bathwater before you got to it. Don’t recall any deodorants, but don’t remember anyone smelling bad, either. I guess we were all just used to it.
The worst BO I ever ran into was in the early 70’s, when I was on an engineering contract in Lagos, Nigeria. We stayed at a very good hotel in town, all of four stories tall, each of which were served by several elevators. These were glacially slow. I rapidly learned that if a Nigerian houseboy got into an elevator with you at floor 1, it was no problem at all to not take a breath until getting out at floor 4. The atmosphere in that elevator cannot be described by any of the usual words in the English language.