Body

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Body Summary

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Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology

body

In anthropology the human body is always recognized as a relative concept, conditioned and conditioning other complex entities that range from society to the cosmos. A key if little read contribution remains †Marcel Mauss’s (1935) article ‘Les techniques du corps’, which draws attention to the universal influence of what today would be called *‘culture’ on people’s use of their bodies and anticipates the later development of kinesics by R.Birdwhistell and others. Mauss instanced the cultural moulding of such activities as walking, running and swimming as well as sexual intercourse and such necessary bodily functions as urination and defecation. It was through what Mauss called ‘traditional effective techniques’, which were taught by precept and example, that human beings acquired confidence in the control and disposition of their bodies. An example was the distinctive waggle of the hips that Maori women instilled in their daughters.

But the characteristics of the body also serve to structure the world of culture. In his essay on the right hand Mauss’s colleague †Robert Hertz surveyed the worldwide existence of dualistic symbolic systems embracing society and the universe, systems which derived from the fact of human physical bilaterality, the complementarity and opposition of right and left sides of the body. It is apparent that the culturally general existence of four cardinal directions originates in the structure of the human body, the east-west axis correlating with the right-left duality and the less emphasized north-south axis with the differentiation of front and back aspects of the body. To these could be added the general equation of the head with the sky and the celestial domain and the lower body and feet with the underworld. In human biology, an influential theory of the role of organic physiology in the perception and construction of cultural worlds has been proposed by Jacob von Uexküll (1982). According to von Uexküll, each natural species constructs a characteristic perceived environment or Umwelt. The features of the Umwelt, like that of other species, are both realized and constrained by their bodily senses. For example, human beings are naturally unable to discriminate units of astronomical time of less than one-eighteenth of a second in duration.

The work of †Mary Douglas developed the Maussian and †Durkheimian theme of sociocultural constraints on bodily perception and activity. In Natural Symbols (1970) Douglas argues that the ‘social body’, the organization of society as a system of relations, constrains the way the human body is perceived and thus also constrains social behaviour. In turn perception of the body constrains perception of society. Adapting the sociolinguist Basil Bernstein’s distinction of restricted and elaborated codes, Douglas proposes a fourfold categorization of human societies which correlates the type of social organization with culturally prescribed attitudes to the human body, including conventional ideas on trance or *possession states:

The body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression. The forms it adopts in movement and repose express social pressures in manifold ways…all the cultural categories in which it is perceived…must correlate closely with the categories in which society is seen in so far as these also draw upon the same culturally processed idea of the body.

(Douglas 1970:65)

Within the past two decades comparative research has tended, as against earlier theories of socio-cultural determinism, to highlight the physiological, ultimately genetic, constraints on social behaviour. An interesting example of this trend is Paul Ekman (1974) who reviews evidence that human beings universally possess a repertoire of six elementary facial expressions, each conveying a certain emotion.

Whereas Western biomedicine since Descartes has developed a model of the human body as a complex, self-governing machine, non-Western cultures commonly conceptualize the physical body as the material expression of an invisible causative entity often called a ‘soul’. Theories of a subtle body, or bodies, have been developed most elaborately in ancient India and China but the concept is also widespread in tribal cultures around the world. Among the Congo people of Zaire the human being is thought of as endowed with an ‘interior’ body and soul, the invisible and causative counterpart of the visible ‘exterior’ body and soul (Jacobson-Widding 1979:310).

Also widespread is the idea of the human body as a model or microcosm of the universe. This idea is typical of *shamanistic, *hunter-gatherer cultures (Eliade [1936] 1964), but is also found elsewhere. According to the agricultural Hopi Native Americans, the human body and the ‘body’ of the planet both reflect the structure of the universe (Waters 1963). The Bambara of West Africa hold that the human body, society and the cosmos conform to a single pattern (Dieterlen and Cissé 1972) and a similar conception pervades the ‘Tree of Life’ doctrine of the Qaballah in the European *magical tradition.

Humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Alexander Lowen and the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich have sought to rehabilitate Western perceptions of the body, which they have seen as distorted by culturally transmitted images associating the body with sin and moral pollution (Lowen 1967). Meanwhile, feminist anthropologists have described the ways in which *gendered bodies become the site of powerful discourses (Martin 1987), while recent theoretical work -inspired by †Foucault, †Bourdieu and the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty—has emphasized the †phenomenological priority of the body in our apprehension of the world (Csordas 1993; Jackson 1981).

ROY WILLIS

See also: gender, hunting and gathering, magic, shamanism

Body

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