Wanted: Male Truckers, Uber Drivers, and Bus Operators

No, this is not part of my tinder profile (idfw tinder or any dating sites/apps anymore) – though, I definitely wouldn’t mind hiring someone to drive me around for the rest of my life (even though I did FINALLY get my G1 the other day, nbd). But real talk, this may become part of Health Canada’s public health initiatives to screen men with driving occupations for prostate cancer. At least, according to a semi-recent study.

Young et al. (2009) surveyed the literature on the risk of prostate cancer in whole body vibration (WBV) related occupations (i.e. driving occupations) and found that, though not technically statistically significant, the pooled relative risk for prostate cancer found in their meta-analysis indicates that occupational exposure to WBV cannot be ruled out as a possible risk factor for the disease. In order to arrive at this conclusion, the authors systematically reviewed five case-control and three cohort studies between 1996 and 2004, that examined men with occupations with probable WBV exposure and whether they developed prostate cancer later in life, and then calculated a pooled relative risk estimate (Young et al. 2009). From this, they assert, “while there is no direct biological evidence that WBV may cause prostate cancer, WBV has been associated with increased testosterone levels and prostatitis, both of which have been associated with prostate cancer” (Young et al. 2009:555). Young et al. (2009) maintain that more epidemiological studies need to further examine the association between WBV and prostate cancer, as the prevalence of prostate cancer amongst Canadian men continues to increase.

Does this have anything to do with the typical anthropological literature students are typically exposed to (i.e. race, stress, or bones)? At the surface: no. However, this study does demonstrate a type of developmental approach in biology and social theory that currently excites sociocultural and medical anthropologists (especially me!) – embodiment. Nancy Kreiger defines embodiment as, “how we literally biologically incorporate our social and material world in which we live, from conception to death” (Gravlee 2009:51). This study looks at how one’s occupation can become embodied, which consequently, has the potential to negatively affect one’s health. Moreover, this study looks at how a social dimension of health – occupation – can become an important risk factor to the pathology of prostate cancer.

As Agarwal and Beauchesne (2011) maintain, our bodies are not exempt from the socio-cultural world in which we are situated. We inevitably fall victim to various stressors or as Nancy Scheper-Hughes would call them “the violences of everyday life”. Arguably, we embody these stressors, violences, or other social dimensions of health first through our emotions (Flinn 2007), which can thus negatively impact our overall health. Driving a vehicle all day, for multiple days, cannot be an “easy” or “stress-free” job (especially if you’ve ever driven in Toronto or driven a bunch of your obnoxiously drunken friends home from a bar). Adding to that stress, Young et al. (2009) have suggested that WBV may be an associated risk of prostate cancer, though more epidemiological research needs to explore this phenomenon. Grouping stress and WBV together, males who drive vehicles for a living are at risk for elevated testosterone levels and prostatitis, which are both associated with prostate cancer.

While Young et al. (2009) lack biological evidence for WBV and prostate cancer, they do demonstrate a type of thinking about the aetiology of prostate cancer that extends beyond the molecular or evolutionary developmental biological approaches. Thinking of the causes of diseases in a way that interweaves physiology with the “real world” is an important step in studies of prostate cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, or any other disease for that matter. Young et al. (2009) do a great job in taking the first step in welding “nature” and “nurture” together to look at how one’s “nurturing” (occupation) can affect and become embodied into one’s “nature”.  

So, the next time you order an Uber, hop on the bus, or hitchhike your way to wherever you're going and are seated with a male driver who has either a) told you to smile; or b) tries to make small talk with you even though you would 10/10 prefer a silent ride, casually ask them if they’ve been screened for prostate cancer...and then ask him to smile. It’s a great way to break the ice and get back at all of those creepy men who have told you that you should smile more!

Just kidding. Don’t do that. Or do it and lmk how it goes.

"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”.

Precarity, Emergence, and Becoming

Some of my readings have been primarily concerned with the production of inequality through interactions between bodies and the state, as explained through the Foucauldian paradigm of discourse and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Some of my other readings have pushed me to consider the exclusionary aspect of discourse and question why people behave and act the way they do. I’ve learned that in order to come to an understanding of embodiment, the concept of the body must first be understood as something “deeply historicized and socialized” (Nguyen and Peschard 2003). In viewing the body this way, our body then, becomes our primary vessel of navigation in the social world; how our bodies experience the social world and it’s inequalities is expressed through our emotions. What remains unexamined is what our bodies are experiencing from the social world and how do we embody the social world? How do the violences of everyday life interact with larger, overarching violences, like structural violence and social suffering? What are people doing to cope with said violences? How are these things affecting them? Moreso, what are they doing to eradicate them?

           The concept of “affect” was introduced to me a competing paradigm to Foucauldian discourse, which seeks to explain why people do what they do – why they behave according to the habitus (which, is something Bourdieu never fully articulates) – what our bodies are experiencing during the constant interaction with the social world, how we come to embody the social world, how the various forms of violence interact with one another, how we cope with violence, how violence affects us, and what we are doing to get ahead of them. The theoretical paradigm of ‘affect’ comes to look at the pre-discursive forces that condition the body, consciousness and the senses and implies a way of apprehending social life that does not start with the bounded, intentional subject (Mazzarella 2009). This theoretical paradigm is very much influenced by the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and maintains that, “society is inscribed on our nervous system and in our flesh before it appears in our consciousness” (Mazzarella 2009:292). What this means is that our bodies – our affective bodies – preserve the memories of our social interactions and bring them into our present; thus, we have the potential to act upon these memories – that is, we have the agency to either repeat the occurrence or change it. What we do, however, is exactly what concerns the authors – Biehl and Locke, Lowe, and Allison.

           João Biehl and Peter Locke (2010), both professors of Anthropology and Princeton University, apply Deleuze’s ideas of becoming and emergence to address “lives in contexts of clinical and political-economic crisis” (317). According to Biehl and Locke (2010), Deleuze’s ideas about becoming and emergence were concerned with “those individual and collective struggles to come to terms with events and intolerable conditions and to shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from determinants and definitions” (317). Essentially, Deleuze’s ideas of becoming and emergence are symbiotic in nature; “becoming” implies that at least two systems “come together” to form an “emergent assemblage” or system. The assemblages come together to form an emergent assemblage. Using these ideas, Biehl and Locke (2010) were primarily concerned with how people “become” or maneuver their ways through the “dynamism of everyday” (318) and paid close attention to how people “moved through” (Biehl and Locke 2010) the violences of everyday life by “complicating the a priori assumptions of universalizing theory” (Biehl and Locke 2010) by “breaking open” alternative pathways. For them, Deleuze’s ideas opened up an “anthropology of becoming”, which specifically looked at how things change in everyday life, how our bodies handle change, how our bodies get through change, and how our bodies either accept or reject change. Their work engaged with “the complexity of people’s lives and desires – their constraints, subjectivities, projects – in ever-changing social worlds” (Biehl and Locke 2010:320) and understood that “collective categories and alternative solidarities can come through only in the understanding of individual lives and stories” (Biehl and Locke 2010:320), with the hope to “convey the messiness of the social world and the real struggles in which [their] informants and their kin are involved” (Biehl and Locke 2010:321). In searching for how people navigate through the “messiness of the social world” and create meaning from the flux of the social world, Biehl and Locke endeavor to examine the precarity of our bodies’ emotive interactions with the social world.

           The concept of precarity plays a significant role in the theoretical paradigm of affect. Moments of precarity are underscored during times where affective bodies’ are met with the decision to either “re-live” the memories of the past or change it. For example, the interaction of two systems or two entities or even two bodies or two of any of the aforementioned, “become” and “emerge” as a singular assemblage. The uncertainty, or the precarity of the becoming and the emergence of the assemblage can be argued to be what may hinder bodies from change and to be what may cause bodies to “re-live” memories. As Anne Allison (2012) from Duke University maintains, “precarity can also be the conditions for social change, new forms of collective coming-together, even political revolution” (349). Precarity, then, can be a beneficial state for societies recovering from economic and social hardships like Japan, as it offers the younger generations of 21st century Japan the opportunity to “break open an alternative pathway” (Biehl and Locke 2010) from “ordinary refugeeism” (Allison 2012:351) that can overcome their violences of everyday life and ultimately, defeat social suffering. However, Allison’s informants were rather nihilistic – they embodied a “social precarity”, which Allison (2012) defines as “a condition of being and feeling insecure in life that extends to one’s (dis-)connectedness from a sense of social community (349). The embodiment of social precarity amongst Japanese youth caused them to feel “devoid of the tokens of social status and connectedness” (Allison 2012:357) and to be rendered “socially dead” (Allison 2012:356). The social uncertainty of the collective youths interviewed by Allison is argued to be spreading globally and people are losing clarity and confidence over who they are and where they fit in (Allison 2012:357). The beneficial aspect of precarity is lost among Japanese youth and is instead, replaced by a “cloud of insecurities implicated [in] specific social and biological forms in speculation about future possibilities” (Lowe 2011:626).  

           Celia Lowe (2011) of the University of Washington would comment on Allison’s young informants’ embodiment of social precarity and nihilistic attitudes, saying that they are completely caught up in a “cloud of uncertainty” and a “cloud of speculative possibility that has made specific demands on them as a national population” (629), much like the H5N1 influenza. Her metaphor of “cloudy reassortments” is to highlight the processes of global exchange/global assemblages, underscoring the fleeting and constantly changing nature of said processes, which are arguably akin to cloud formations/assortments. The multifaceted nature of clouds “queries the boundaries of species” (Lowe 2012:644), in the same way the multifaceted nature of the social world questions the limits of bodies. In a cloud of uncertainty and in a social world of constant flux, how are people handling, getting through, succumbing, overcoming, and experiencing the violences of everyday life and the pressures of structural violence? These readings not only attempt to answer these questions through the theoretical paradigm of affect, but also attempt to explain how our bodies respond to precarity in it’s various forms and how “becoming” and “emerging” are ongoing processes, frequently met with precarity.

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.