Boxers and DNRs: Exclusivity and Agentive Embodiment

  Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock have suggested the power of emotions to bridge their three conceptualizations of the body: the individual body, the social body, and the body politic. They argue,  “Emotions affect the way in which the body, illness, and pain are experienced and are projected to images of the well or poorly functioning social body and body politic” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987:28). Because emotions have the ability to affect and to permeate across all three body conceptualizations, Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) maintain, “they provide an important ‘missing link’ capable of bridging mind and body, individual, society, and body politic” (29). By asserting that emotion is the “mediatrix of the three bodies” and given the ontology of the three bodies, they draw specific attention to the ways in which experiences of the body are simultaneously thought and sensed, as well as how they have both a social, moral, and cultural dimension. However, due to the lack of vocabulary, tools, and concepts to address, what they call “the mindful body”, medical anthropologists at the time were restricted to studying the mindful body in terms of intensified pleasure and pain.

           Fast-forwarding almost three decades later, anthropologists have begun to ask different questions and in asking these different questions, they have arrived at different answers. Instead of conceptualizing the body as a “thing-like” object, anthropologists began to more thoroughly conceptualize the body as process; essentially, in changing their conceptual framework, the ontology of the body changed from “thing-like” to process. This shift in ontology allowed anthropologists to gain access to a more nuanced vocabulary, tools, and concepts to address “the mindful body” in terms of embodiment. This response paper will concentrate on embodiment in terms of the papers by Loïc Wacquant and Carolyn Rouse.

           Loïc Wacquant, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Institute for Legal Research, Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, focuses his attention to the “diverse ways in which specific social worlds invest, shape, and deploy human bodies and to the concrete incorporating practices whereby their social structures are effectively embodied by the agents who partake them” (1995:65). In his paper, “Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour among Professional Boxers”, Wacquant explores how professional boxers – most of whom are “embedded in a social setting that puts a high premium on physical force and prowess” (1995:65) – conceive of, care for, and rationalize their body as a form of capital. He applies Bourdieu’s (1986:241) definition of capital to his analysis: “accumulated labour (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated’, embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labour”. Complicated at best, Bourdieu’s definition of capital extends beyond the notion of material assets and argues that capital can also be social, cultural, or even symbolic. Nonetheless, Wacquant conceives boxers are holders of and even entrepreneurs in bodily capital (1995:66), in that their bodies are simultaneously a means of production – the raw materials he and his handlers have to work with and on – and for a good part, a somatized product of his past training and extant mode of living (1995:67). Boxers, or pugilists, are constantly working on their bodies, improving their bodies, toning their bodies, and pushing their bodies to perfection. However, “much like fixed capital and like all living organisms, the body of fighters has inherent structural limitations” (Wacqaunt 1995:67). Here, Bourdieu’s influence on Wacqaunt becomes quite obvious. The inherent structural limitations the body of fighters are subject to, demonstrate how pugilists’ bodies become deposited in a form of lasting dispositions or trained capacities and structured inclinations or propensities to think, feel, and act in certain determinant ways (Wacquant 1995). Applying Bourdieu’s ideas, Wacquant would maintain that boxers do not simply train, discipline, and improve their bodies because they “want to win”; rather, boxers partake in these bodily endeavours because the structure of amateur and professional boxing - and even the larger societal habitus of professional athletes capitalizing their strength, determination, and bodily physique – deposits, determines, and guides aspiring and professional pugilists to the “want to win”. However, Wacqaunt maintains otherwise; instead, Wacquant nuances Bourdieu’s “would-be” argument, by arguing that pugilists participate in this extensive and rigorous training of the bodies to become a form of capital, because of the “unconscious fit between his (pugilistic) habitus and the very field which has produced it and into which, therefore, it fits ‘like a hand in a glove’ (Wacquant 1995:88). The interplay between the individual and the field demonstrates how pugilists, in a sense, embody their social, cultural, and symbolic surroundings, as “The boxer’s desire to fight flows from a practical belief constituted in and by the immediate co-presence of, and mutual understanding between his (re)socialized body and the game” (Wacqant 1995:88). Essentially, Wacquant is arguing that the boxer becomes embodied or inhabited by the very game he/she embodies or inhabits (1995). However, what happens when the individual is unable to embody his or her dispositions? What happens when the desire to fight is unexpressed by the individual and is, instead, transferred to other individuals around them? How do those individuals embody the desire to fight?

           Carolyn Rouse, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, wrote an incredibly moving and heartwarming article on how two determined parents constructed cultural metaphors to effectively reach out to the medical professionals who were against continuing their daughter, Jasperlynn, on life support. Rouse documents how Jasperlynn’s parents controlled their embodied dispositions and how those dispositions were read by medical professionals, and how they attempted to author their subjectivity “by first specifying the sign value of particular objects and then associating themselves with those signs” (Rouse 2004:514). She introduces this process of embedding oneself in a meaningful array of symbols “embodiment-by-proxy”, which she maintains, she uses proxy to denote how objects, or what she calls “translational symbols”, are used to signify the subjectivity of someone other than self (Rouse 2004:522).  With this, she describes how Jasperlynn’s parents were more concerned about the presentation of their children and how their children’s subjectivity was read when they were with themselves (Rouse 2004:522), Jasperlynn’s parents believed that the medical professionals would read their subjectivity through their children. For instance, they represented Jasperlynn’s meaning and value, in particular, by dressing her up and combing her hair, by placing a Bible on or near her bed, and by ascribing meaning to her gestures. Applying Rouse’s concept of “embodiment-by-proxy”, Jasperlynn’s parents, by representing their unconscious daughter in this way, they are attempting to essentially, “bring life back” into Jasperlynn, by replacing Jasperlynn’s lack of inner subjectivity with material and symbolic subjectivity. As Rouse maintains, “The Washingtons were put in a situation of having to prove the value and meaning of Jasperlynn’s life so that the hospital staff would continue to invest emotional and material resources in the continued care of their daughter” (1995:524). The Washington’s struggle to reify the subjectivity of Jasperlynn and their struggle to make her body meaningful to medical professionals demonstrates Rouse’s concept of “embodiment-by-proxy”, as it shifts the focus away from the structural determinants of subjectivity and shifts the focus towards how the Washingtons situated themselves relationally to others symbolically and discursively in their struggles of bringing life, subjectivity, and meaning into Jasperlynn’s body. Moreover, the Washingtons’ struggles were only amplified by their marginalized social situation. Rouse notes, “For marginalized individuals whose presumed subjectivity is mired in tropes of inferiority, attempting to author semiotic ideologies for purposes of social agency is part of a communicative battle” (1995:515). For marginalized individuals, navigating one’s mindful body through the “violences of everyday life” is already troubling; therefore, navigating one’s marginalized, “inferior”, and un-mindful body through the violences and the bullying of the biomedical system is more horrifying than can be described. The battle between the biomedical system and the Washingtons’ demonstrated how both parties used “embodiment-by-proxy” to change the others’ dispositions towards Jasperlynn – while the Washingtons’ used it to prove Jasperlynn’s subjectivity and bodily meaning, the medical professionals used it to continually assert that Jasperlynn’s body lacked life, subjectivity, and meaning. The disposition of most the medical professionals involved with Jasperlynn was that she was essentially dead and that the Washingtons’ decision to not sign the DNR was both “irresponsible and selfish”. Nonetheless, the efforts of the medical professionals to effectively bully the Washingtons with complicated medical vernacular and guilt, were futile, as the Washingtons remained relentless in their efforts to change the medical professionals’ attitudes towards the very real subjectivity Jasperlynn still maintained. Essentially, Rouse states, “Embodiment-by-proxy describes how people reanimate themselves in other by locating through signification they cultural relevance and agency” (1995:527). The parents of Jasperlynn were able to reanimate themselves in Jasperlynn through their deep commitment to God and family, effectively transforming medicine’s object to include the family (Rouse 1995).

           Wacquant’s article describes how a boxer’s embodiment is through practice and discipline – how their desire to fight is constituted within the game or fight itself – therefore, demonstrating the role of individual agency in embodiment. Rouse’s article serves as a sharp contrast to Wacqaunt’s implication, as in the case of marginalized bodies, these bodies often have little to no agency; that is, their agency is restricted by structural limitations. Wacquant and arguably, Bourdieu’s conceptualization of embodiment seems to integrate the concept of agency quite thoroughly, in that subjects have the agentive power to develop specific tendencies or dispositions. Can this conceptualization of embodiment be applied to all individuals? What happens when marginalized individual come to embody their sense of restricted agency – that is, will they begin to accept their socially perceived inferiority?

           It seems to me that if we accept Wacquant’s conceptualization of embodiment, the bodies and subjectivities of marginalized individuals will forever be stigmatized as “inferior” and, in time, will come to embody that inferiority. When or if marginalized individuals embody that inferiority, the structural inequities will only become heightened and more problematic in a neoliberal society, which will naturally have severe social, political, economic, and health consequences. There needs to be an alternative conceptualization of embodiment that can be applied to more accurately fit the dispositions of marginalized individuals, where the desire to fight is not synonymous to the desire to survive.

"Botho" and the Trouble with Foucault

Honestly, throughout most of my undergrad, I often wished that Foucault would fouck-off, but this Frenchman has some seriously intriguing insights into how and where power is situated within society. 

Multiple discourses often work together to accomplish a common totalizing goal: to produce docile bodies that exercise self-surveillance. For Foucault, the social body is the docile body and maintains, “the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals” (1975:55). In other others, Foucault is arguing the social body (society) – a collection of individual, docile bodies – is a material manifestation of the sets of power operating within the discourse. The social body/society is not constituted by the universality of individual wills, rather, the social body/society is constituted by multiple, dominant, and interconnected discourses that work together to produce specific types of docile and deviant bodies in specific contexts at specific times. The deviant bodies produced are often situated outside of the discourse (Li 2007). Moreover these deviant bodies are often viewed by others situated within the discourse as “troubled”, “deeply disturbed”, or even “disgusting”; therefore, resulting in efforts to minimize the visibility of these adverse or abject bodies through governmental policies. This response paper will look at how these discursive, “troubled” bodies are managed, ignored, and kept hidden from the docile, social body through the ethnographic works of Livingston (2008), Herrera et al. (2009), and Kawash (1998).

           Julie Livingston, Professor of History at Rutgers University, has written about how people in Botswana manage their feelings of disgust towards “aesthetically impaired bodies” (Livingston 2008:288) or ill and disabled bodies, in a context where a “humanistic ethos is stressed in the public discourse of nationalism” (Livingston 2008:288). In Botswana, the Setswana concept of botho – a Tswana ethic of humanness, which acknowledges that one’s actions affect others and is referred to the enactment of moral sentiment (Livingston 2008) – is deeply engraved in the publics’ consciousness and has been indoctrinated  into the Botswana government’s new, high-profile national development strategy that aims “to propel its socio-economic and political development into a competitive, winning and prosperous nation” (Livingston 2008:293). Livingston maintains, “Since its incorporation as a national principle in 2000, botho has become central to a range of national discourses about citizenship and community” (2008:294). The multiple discourses of nationalism, citizenship, community, and arguably, botho are simultaneously working together in Botswana to create specific types of subjects – subjects that can facilitate the accomplishment of the government’s national development strategy; subjects that can and have the ability to propel Botswana’s socio-economic and political development into a competitive, winning and prosperous nation. These multiple discourses strategically exclude the ill, disabled, and aesthetically impaired bodies (among others) which pose challenges for the enactment of botho. Livingston argues, “Disgust can be embodied in a relational sense…it often emerges in one person in response to the bodily aesthetics of another” (2008:290). This feeling of disgust is problematic because it compromises the humanity of the ill, disabled, and aesthetically impaired body (Livingston 2008). However, Livingston maintains that many people in Botswana attempt to manage their feelings of disgust towards these adverse bodies, by deliberately striving to ameliorate, subvert or transform their disgust into respect and compassion – deliberate acts with botho (Livingston 2008:296). Sometimes, aesthetically unpleasing bodies may act with bothothemselves, by relying on aesthetic transformations (i.e. provision of artificial limbs, surgical reconstructions, etc.) to rework their bodies. In other instances, aesthetically impaired “disgusting” bodies would intentionally exclude themselves from participating in social life. For example, Livingston mentions how a 60-year-old woman with stage two cervical cancer confided in her that she never left her home any more because she was terrified that everyone could smell her rotting vagina (2008:298). While her neighbors, daughters, and friends tried to encourage her by visiting her and extending invitations to their homes and events, she was afraid ‘it will not be nice for them’ if she took them up on their offers (Livingston 2008:298). Another example cited by Livingston, are the cancer patients going to the hospital to receive treatment – they would not sit in the waiting room, but would stand in the corridor by the entrance, as an act of botho to the medical staff and other patients. These examples demonstrate that sometimes, to have botho means to excuse oneself from public spaces. In Botswana, the pervasiveness of botho and the things society does to manage their feelings of disgust to aesthetically impaired bodies, as well as the things aesthetically impaired bodies do to act with botho, illustrates the power of emotion; not only as inner experiences, but also as powerful social forces that impact the bodily, emotional and material well-being of others (Livingston 2008:299). Moreover, this ethnographic example demonstrates how multiple discourses act together to create docile subjects that are subsequently forced to confront and manage their distasteful feelings of disgust towards the socially excluded, “deviant” aesthetically impaired bodies situated outside of the discourses.

           Hererra et al. (2009) explores how Mexican street youths attempts to control and understand their lives, relies on a control of and identification with their bodies. Mexican street youths’ bodies are aesthetically marked by difference – through abominations of the body, blemishes of character and distinctions of race, nation, or religion, through their dress, odour, colour, and shape, as well as their interaction with society through consumption or work (Herrera et al. 2009:68). Hererra et al. maintains that Mexican street youths strategically use their bodies, mark their bodies, hide their bodies and effectively manage their bodies to accentuate their identification as street youth, and at other times, to obscure this identification (2009:68-69). For example, windscreen washers – commonly considered as dirty drug users by mainstream society – don yellow T-shirts that signify their membership to a particular organization. In an effort to “unsettle” or subvert the perception that all people wearing yellow t-shirts are drug dealers, Manuel, Ramon, and Rodrigo all try to present their bodies in ways that reduce of soften the stigma associated with street youth, by “cleaning themselves up” through haircuts or showers (Herrera et al. 2009). While some street-youth generally tried to present their bodies in ways that fit better under the dominant social discourse of how youths shouldlook like, therefore attempting to reduce their marks of difference, not all street-youth necessarily “buy into” the discourse. For instance, Carlos, a windscreen cleaner, has several visible tattoos, particularly on his face; thus, leading the authors to imply that he has no real interest in strategically managing or controlling his body for the purposes of working on the street. Nevertheless, Herrera et al. conclude their article by maintaining that the street youth they interviewed all described how their bodies do not fit neatly the discourses of what bodies should be – the ‘modern’ or ‘normal’ body – and of what street youths bodies should be. The bodies of Mexican street youths are outside of the ‘normal’ body discourse; therefore, Foucault would suggest that these bodies fail to practice self-surveillance. However, Herrera et al. seem to suggest otherwise; their informants were consciously aware of their bodies and were keen enough to strategize and manage their bodies according to various social situations.

           Samira Kawash (1998), Professor Emerita in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, wrote about the concept of the “homeless body” in North America. Much like the aesthetically impaired bodies in Botswana and the bodies of street youth in Mexico, Kawash argues that the bodies of homeless people are situated outside of multiple dominant discourses working together to create the productive, docile subject. In fact, Kawash argues that the dominant image of the homeless is North American society is the image of homeless as “victims or parasites outside the pale of society” (1998:321). Because of this view, Kawash maintains, “The aspect that seems most to trouble policy makers is not how to help the homeless, but rather how to control the homeless and especially how to protect the public from them” (1998:320, emphasis added). However, instead of problematizing the homeless body, Kawash problematizes the public by questioning who the public is, of who may inhabit public space, and of how such space will be constituted and controlled (1998:325). She therefore argues that the question of homelessness is always a question of public space. Thus, the aim of vengeful homeless policies is not limited to the immediate goal of solving the problem of homelessness by eliminating the homeless; but, is extended as a mechanism for constituting and securing a public, establishing the boundaries of inclusion, and producing an abject body against which the proper, public body of the citizen can stand (Kawash 1998:325). In other words, Kawash is arguing that the “war on the homeless” is really a strategic political euphemism that is being used by the opportunistic government in order to justify both political and structural violences experienced by the homeless. Moreover, multiple discourses of neoliberalism, governmentality, public safety, and security are operating together to create relational subjects – the “good citizen” and in this case, the homeless. Kawash is arguing that by adopting and perpetuating these multiple, powerful discourses, the state is effectively producing an abject – homeless – body, so that the proper, public body – the good citizen – can exist. In this case, public policies that address the notion of “public safety”, simultaneously address “the war on the homeless”, implicating that the homeless body is a threat to overall society; a threat that must be managed, controlled, and eliminated.

           Foucault’s work on discourse is undoubtedly powerful and influential. Specifically, his work around the notion of subjects has been of particular interest throughout this course. However, in his conceptualization of subjects, Foucault maintains that the docile body practices self-surveillance; indeed, he argues that the practice of self-surveillance is the key characteristic of the docile body. If this is the case, then by contrast, the relational, “deviant” body must not practice self-surveillance. The ethnographic works of Livingston (2008), Herrera et al. (2009), and Kawash (1998) seem to trouble Foucault’s argument. These articles all demonstrate that the deviant, aesthetically impaired (Livingston 2008), differentially marked (Herrera et al. 2009), homeless (Kawash 1998), abject bodies all practice self-surveillance; perhaps, not in the same capacities as their relational oppositions of the “healthy” or “normal” “good citizens”, but under their specific temporal and contextual contexts, the troubled bodies encountered in all of the readings did practice self-surveillance. They were all able to “read” their situation and subsequently, “read” and “control” their bodies in ways that the docile society would find acceptable. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they were all able to navigate their “mindful bodies” through the “violences of everyday life” – that were given to them by the multiple discourses acting against them – because they practiced self-surveillance. Their awareness of their positionality – being situated outside of the discourse – was integral to how each of the types of abject individuals encountered, made sense of their world and of their subjectivities. Essentially, the subjectivities of aesthetically impaired bodies, the bodies of the Mexican street youth, and the homeless bodies allowed them to evaluate and make sense of their world and their situation, and strategize or control their bodies and practice self-surveillance accordingly.

       This, I believe, is an example of Csordas’ concept of embodiment (“perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world”), as the two key attributes to his conceptualization of embodiment are agency and intentionality; which, arguably, all of the troubled bodies encountered, demonstrated through the strategic control of their bodies in various social situations. Through these readings, and even through transcribing the interviews with street involved youth in Victoria, it has occurred to me that if people really want to know anything real about society – Foucault’s docile subjects or programmed robots – then perhaps people should stop talking to the “good citizens”, and begin focusing their attention on the “troubled bodies”. It has become very apparent to me that “troubled bodies” are often the most knowledgeable about the true botho of the world, as they have experienced the inherent structural violences hidden in the multiple discourses that governments opportunistically use for public doublespeak. I wonder what Foucault would say.

"How are you your Body?"

Wait, what?

Having been neglected and “taken for granted” in typical anthropological studies of gender, class, and culture (among other objects of inquiry) for a number of years, anthropology finally began to focus more attention on the body: questioning what the body is (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987), what the body represents (Douglas 1966, 1970, 1982), how the body is regulated (Foucault 1975), how bodies are related and why bodies are produced (Foucault 1975), and finally, how bodies produce and reproduce dispositions that are socio-culturally situated (Bourdieu 1986). Implicit in these studies of the body is the passivity of the body itself – the body is merely an object upon which is acted. Additionally, these theoretical approaches to the body are cemented in some sort of Cartesian dualism, whether the mind and self are separate from the material body or the body is separate from society. Most importantly, these conceptualizations of the body severely marginalize the materiality and inherent “messiness” of the body, as well as ignore bodily experiences, sensations, and feelings. Essentially, these earlier theoretical approaches to the body certainly recognize that we have bodies, but have not necessarily acknowledged that we are bodies.

           In attempting to “break away” from the durability of Descartes’ infamous “cogito ergo sum” (mind/body split), as well as address the underlying implications of previous theories of the body, anthropologists have adopted the concept of “embodiment” to complement more recent theoretical approaches to understanding how we are our bodies. This reflection will focus on how we are our bodies and how we experience our bodies in the contexts of the works by Dundi Mitchell (1996) and Nili Kaplan-Myrth (2010). It will also look at more nuanced trends in anthropological bodily research in Steven Van Wolputte’s (2004) review essay.

           Many scholars of the body in wide-ranging disciplines have routinely applied social epidemiologist Nancy Kreiger’s definition of embodiment, in which she defines it as “a concept referring to how we literally incorporate, biologically, the material and social world in which we live, from conception to death” (2005). One can see why researchers find this definition attractive: it’s clean, safe, and quite easy to understand and apply to social constructs like race. However, Kreiger does not necessarily problematize the body in any way and she also tends to ignore the lived experiences of the body, which many scholars of the body would argue, is one of the most central components to contemporary scholastic work on the body. Nonetheless, Dundi Mitchell’s (1996) work about Australian Aboriginal women’s experiences of racism in a clinical setting nicely exemplifies Kreiger’s concept of embodiment. Mitchell (1996) highlights how racist governmental policies and attitudes towards Aboriginal women have contributed to the high rates of physical ill-health, mental stress, chronic illness, and fatigue from which they suffer (Mitchell 1996:259). She argues that racist attitudes towards Australian Aboriginal women brings their bodies into a distinctive or heightened awareness – their bodies are not simply unmarked, unnoticed, or different; rather, their bodies are just wrong. She applies Leder and Fanon’s theories of the body by introducing the concept of “dys-appearance”, which she cites as “no longer absent from experience the body may yet surface as a absence, being away within experience” (Mitchell 1996:265). Essentially, the term “dys-appearance” involves the body to come into painfully agonizing awareness only when the body is viewed as wrong, devalued, “defected” (Taylor 1988) or “deviant” (Foucault 1975). Nonetheless, Mitchell (1996) argues that the bodies of Australian Aboriginal women have effectively “dys-appeared”, as they come to embody the racial inequalities that simply “makes you sick inside” (Mitchell 1996:265).

           As seen from Dundi Mitchell’s (1996) article, racism negatively affects one’s physical, emotional, and mental health. Racism can – and often does – negatively affect one’s body image, and consequently, one’s experience within one’s body. However, racism is not the only thing can affect body image and body experiences. How one views their body and how one feels within one’s body can and is continuously affected by larger society, as “one’s sense of oneself is assumed to be constructed via one’s interactions with others, with the environment, and various other factors including ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality” (Kaplan-Myrth 2010:279). According to Kaplan-Myrth (2010), viewing body image in this way “presupposes that body image is something ethereal – an ‘image’ of ourselves that we store in our minds” (280). She goes on to say, “Proponents of an alternative model suggest that body image is a lived phenomenon rather than an ethereal one” (Kaplan-Myrth 2010:280). The alternative model proposed does neither assume body image to be fixed, nor stable. On the contrary, the alternative model proposes that “One’s body image is thus constantly in flux, changing as the body passes in and out of awareness” (Kaplan-Myrth 2010:280). In viewing body image in a constant state of flux, Kaplan-Myrth (2010) is really viewing the body itself in a constant state of flux; therefore, implicating the body to be in constant and active engagement with social world, or put more simply, part of the social world. Nevertheless, Kaplan-Myrth’s (2010) focus on body image is centred around how blind people talk about how they view their bodies, how they manage their bodies, and how they experience their bodies. She found that blind people are quite concerned about their physical appearance and found many of her informants to be self-conscious about their bodies in terms of weight and fitness, as well as daily grooming regimes (Kaplan-Myrth 2010). For instance, when asked whether appearance was important, one of her informants replied: “Very…Because I know that, with the majority of people, it’s what they see that makes their first impression of you. I couldn’t go without washing my hair everyday…first thing in the morning making sure that I look alright” (Kaplan-Myrth 2010:284). Kaplan-Myrth (2010) has found that blind people have a great ability to absorb society’s body ideals even without sight; therefore, arguing that the blind people she worked with shared the same cultural obsessions with body image that sighted people have. In terms of studying how blind people experience their bodies, Kaplan-Myrth was unable to really un-attach feelings about appearance (body image) from day to day experiences of being a body without sight, with the exception of her informant Sarah. Sarah lost her sight due to an unidentifiable neurological disorder as a toddler and has become gradually paralyzed and put “in a chair” because of what seems to be permanent paralysis of her legs (Kaplan-Myrth 2010:293). After posing the question, “Do you sometimes get angry at your body for not working?”, Sarah replied, “Yeah, yeah I do. I talk to my legs…I’ll tell them to ‘shut up!’ and ‘Be quiet!’ and ‘Behave yourselves!’” (Kaplan-Myrth 2010:293). From this, Kaplan-Myrth (2010) concludes that Sarah, because of her disability, is “continuously aware of her body, having to perform an ‘inventory’ each morning of how her body feels, and then keep a close watch for changes in her body as the day progresses” (293). However, much like the Australian Aboriginal women in Mitchell’s (1996) work, their bodies, just as Sarah’s body, only seem to come into everyday awareness because they are perceived to be either socially or medically “defected”, “deviant”, and “wrong”. Moreover, while Kaplan-Myrth’s research was on a very interesting subject matter, her trouble with posing questions to attempt to capture blind peoples’ everyday experiences in their bodies greatly limited the types of responses she could get, which likely limited her analysis of how she understood the body as active, to, in a sense, “dys-appear”. However, I do not think that this was necessarily a limitation of Kaplan-Myrth herself, but rather, a limitation of the English language to effectively pose and answer questions about the lived experiences people have within their bodies. Again, simply asking people “how are you your body?” is neither an easy question to ask, nor is it an easy question to answer.

           Steven Van Wolputte (2004) perhaps, suggests a solution to studying the active body and the day-to-day experiences of being bodies towards the end of his Annual Review essay, “Hang on to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves”. After he reviews a long list of literature about bodies and embodiment, he begins to talk about “selves”, and argues that as anthropologists continue to study the body or “the self”, they should steer clear of the question, “What is self”? and rather, “try to document how people create or maintain a sense of self and belonging and how this ‘becoming’ is permeated with questions of hegemony and power” (Van Wolputte 2004:261). Van Wolputte (2004) is ultimately arguing that if anthropologists’ aim is to study the active body’s day-to-day experiences in interacting with the body, then they have to come to terms with the fact they will not be studying a durable, stable entity that will give repetitious results, answers, or findings. They have to be open to the fact that the reunification of the body and self as one, coupled with the view of the body as active and integral to everyday social life, fundamentally means their studies of the body will be fragmented, incoherent, inconsistent, and “messy”, “precisely because it arises from contradictory and paradoxical experiences, social tensions, and conflicts that have one thing in common: They are real, that is, experienced” (Van Wolputte 2004:263). Furthering this, he argues, “the anthropology of the body focuses no longer on the abstract or ideal(ized) body, but on those moments during which the body and bodiliness are questioned and lose their self-evidence and on the experience or threat of finiteness, limitation, transience, and vulnerability” (Van Wolputte 2004:263). Essentially, what Van Wolputte is ultimately arguing is that in viewing the body as embodied by society, the body is ultimately rendered vulnerable to uncertainty and is thus, in a constant state of flux and precarity.

           I think that one of the main difficulties in approaching the study of the embodied body is that it forces anthropologists to abandon these grand narratives which they have comfortably hung on to for many years, much like our attraction to binaries. Because the embodied body is, in a way, a precarious body, it becomes unpredictable and thus, very difficult to study – arguably, more difficult to study than embodiment, not only because we lack the language to study it, but also because we lack the tools to even approach it. It seems to me that the future of the anthropology of the body and embodiment will become a central aspect or idea to the anthropology of becoming. As the body becomes self and as the self becomes more and more schizophrenic, with decreasing borders and increasing visibility, new theoretical approaches to the study of the precarious embodied body are needed to document the “madness of our civilization”.