"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”.

Un-silencing the Past, Bettering the Future

While many have tried to silence the past, partly due to their inability to face it and partly due to them deeming it not important (Trouillot 1995:98), the past remains to be inescapably loud and useful in both the production of new knowledge and analyses of interactions. Anthropologists’ earlier efforts to study “the other” have produced academic work that come from a distinct perspective and thus, have produced a distinct type of knowledge. Anthropologists’ efforts to study “themselves,” likewise, have produced academic work that comes from a distinct perspective and have also produced a distinct type of knowledge (White and Tengan 2001). The collaboration of indigenous knowledge with researched knowledge (i.e. the reconciliation and integration of the past with the present) is one of the major themes throughout a few of my readings.


White and Tengan (2001) point out, “disciplinary models and practices – from fieldwork to publication – have worked historically to authorize and reinforce dichotomies that separate native subjects and anthropological agents” (489). Instead of reinforcing these dichotomies, they advocate for and stress the importance and significance of breeding Pacific Islander anthropologists to add to current literature on the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Island. In adopting “decolonizing” approaches to anthropology, indigenous peoples are able to provide an alternative perspective on their identity and are able to bring new, once “silenced” knowledge, to current discussions and knowledge bases.


Similarly, Allen and Hamby (2011) maintain that collaborative research approaches, specifically between museums and Australian Aboriginals, can uncover new pathways to an enhanced knowledge. Instead of asking ourselves what we can tell the Australian Aboriginals about themselves, we should be asking what they could tell us about themselves. As seen in the collaborative efforts between the museum regarding the Douglas Thomson Collection and the Lamalama peoples, the integration of indigenous knowledge with current knowledge enhanced and heightened the integrative knowledge, but it also allowed for a “move[-ment] from [a] site of friction to a site where knowledge emerges and merges and new understandings are created” (Allen and Hamby 2011:210). Collaborative research models are understood to be a process of knowledge production from an integrative perspective. While collaboration and shared knowledge is surely beneficial for both groups in terms of knowledge production, political collaborations in terms of governance remains a problem.


Morphy and Morphy (2013) stress the importance of an understanding of “relative autonomy” in order to develop policies that engage the Yolngu in the process of regional development. Unfortunately, it appears that the dichotomies – as mentioned by White and Tengan – that separate the native subjects from the governmental agents are somewhat clearly defined. Morphy and Morphy (2013) argue that in order to overcome this dichotomy, “it is helpful to understand Aboriginal forms of sociality and their associated value creation processes as relatively autonomous” (185). Perhaps, White and Tengan would suggest that more Australian Aboriginals should be conducting research on “their” people to help elucidate this understanding for their “other”; Allen and Hamby (2011) would certainly not argue against this suggestion as they maintain it would create a “vastly enhanced and reinvigorated knowledge base” (211).

The past has and continues to remain particularly loud in our present. It may be time that we stop trying to silence it and come to terms with what has been done and listen to what it is trying to tell us. As seen through these readings, listening to what we once silenced, has enhanced and has significantly added to our knowledge production practices.