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”.