7. Field Theory & Habitus

Welcome to Section 7 of Culture, Body, & Mind.

Revision: Phenomenology & Anthropology

After outlining the anthropological approach (Section 1), we embarked on this study by critically looking at the individual (Section 2) and Cartesian Dualism (Section 3). In a nutshell, Cartesian Dualism holds that mind is thinking subject and everything else in the universe, including the body, is a material object. Cartesian dualism effectively stripped the world of spirit, disenchanting the world. This allowed for an understanding that the universe was governed by 'laws of nature' rather than the will of God, spirits, deities or other personalized supernatural forces. This possibility was realized in Newton's physics and modern science.

Sections 4-7 could be seen as an anthropological response to the fundamental problems and limitations associated with Descartes' formidable philosophy. In a sense then, we have been searching for anthropological alternatives to the dominant Western perspective. As anthropologists, we need to respond because Cartesian Dualism underlies modern thought in the West, but, given the diversity of human cultures, we cannot assume cultures possess a subject-object distinction, nor, it has been argued, can we understand other cultures by using this framework. We saw how phenomenology and ontology presented a new way to understand a variety of cultures. Indeed by the end of Section 6, we questioned whether even 'modern' Western cultures are really characterized by Cartesian Dualism. So it seemed that phenomenology and ontology might also provide into Western cultures.

One observation that emerged from this excursion into phenomenology and ontology was the importance of the body; that knowledge, experience, and culture was embodied. So when we think of that body as culturally constituted, it follows that the experience of the self, and the world around the self, differs according to each culture.

Habitus: Class & society

We now investigate another dimension to the idea that body is 'cultured' and that your cultured body constitutes your experience of the world. We are familiar with embodiment, but we now turn to habitus. In general, this means we turn from pretty highfalutin and abstract theories to a more mundane reality; from other societies to the West; from a focus on person and culture to a critique class and society.

The way I talk, walk, dress, think, sing, dance, drink, drive etc. are differences of habitus. According to the concept, it's not just a result of my society, but also my class, sex, gender identity, etc. For instance, my habitus is very different from that of an 'oligarch' (millionaire) from Moscow, a first generation Somali teacher in Minnesota, an Indigenous Hawaiian surfer, obviously.  But it is also even an Australian farmer, lawyer, or computer 'geek'.

So the idea is that the body, society, and class are interconnected through habitus. This is a point, among several others, that we can take away from Mauss (1872-1950) in his famous "Techniques of the Body" a lecture given in French in 1934.

Swimming pool

Before you read this section, think about how you do breast-stroke and how you were taught. I think Mauss was taught to swim in the 1880s. He noted how the children of the 1930s, I guess, were taught breast-stroke according to a different technique.

Previously [in 1880s] we were taught to dive after having learnt to swim. And when we were learning to dive, we were taught to close our eyes and then to open them under water. Today [in the 1930s] the technique is the other way round. The whole training begins by getting the children used to keeping their eyes open under water. Thus, even before they can swim, particular care is taken to get the children to control their dangerous but instinctive ocular reflexes, before all else they are familiarised with the water, their fears are suppressed, a certain confidence is created, suspensions and movements are selected. Hence there is a technique of diving and a technique of education in diving which have been discovered in my day. And you can see that it really is a technical education and, as in every technique, there is an apprenticeship in swimming. On the other hand, here our generation has witnessed a complete change in technique: we have seen the breast-stroke with the head out of the water replaced by the different sorts of crawl. Moreover, the habit of swallowing water and spitting it out again has gone. In my day swimmers thought of themselves as a kind of steam-boat. It was stupid, but in fact I still do this: I cannot get rid of my technique. Here then we have a specific technique of the body, a gymnic art perfected in our own day. 

Digging trenches

For Mauss, swimming is just one example of many. Another is the way English troops dug trenches as opposed to French.

But this specificity is characteristic of all techniques. An example: during the War I was able to make many observations on this specificity of techniques. E.g. the technique of digging. The English troops I was with did not know how to use French spades, which forced us to change 8,000 spades a division when we relieved a French division, and vice versa. This plainly shows that a manual knack can only be learnt slowly. Every technique properly so-called has its own form. But the same is true of every attitude of the body. Each society has its own special habits…..

Then there is the female walking fashion in NYC compared to Paris.

A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. The positions of the arms and hands while walking form a social idiosyncrasy; they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely psychical arrangements and mechanisms. For example: I think I can also recognise a girl who has been raised in a convent. In general she will walk with her fists closed. And I can still remember my third- form teacher shouting at me: 'Idiot ! why do you walk around the whole time with your hands flapping wide open?' Thus there exists an education in walking, too.

Paris

To describe these differences, Mauss lands on the term habitus.

Hence I have had this notion of the social nature of the 'habitus' for many years. Please note that I use the Latin word-it should be understood in France-habitus. The word translates infinitely better than 'habitude' (habit or custom), the 'exis', the 'acquired ability' and 'faculty' of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). It does not designate those metaphysical habitudes, that mysterious 'memory', the subjects of volumes or short and famous theses. These 'habits' do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties.

I tried to copy the skullls drawn on shirts depicted on this Suicidal Tendencies album cover.

Field Theory

Capital & Field

Popularizing and further developing the idea of habitus is the work of anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. Like Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu also emphasizes the body. Our focus still is social class within culture. But with Bourdieu, the ways of the body are merely a part of a larger theory about capital. There are four kinds of capital

1. Economic capital: This is wealth. It could be money, stocks/shares, gold necklaces, Lamborghinis (liquid assets) or wine, real estate, factories, etc.
2. Symbolic capital: You could have the title "Dr." or "Professor", "Sir". You could be a "sensei" at a karate dojo. Even being "BA" or BSc", or more valuable still "BA Hons or "BSc Hons"in Australia
3. Social capital: When we talk about getting a good job, the way "it's not what you know, it who you know". If you're good friends with the boss, you might have a better chance of getting the job.
4. Cultural capital: Can you eat with your mouth closed, can you do Double Windsor knot that will give you 'credit' in amongst the "old money" fields of Australia and the US. It won't do much if you're trying to make it in the Hip Hop scene in LA; you'll need other forms of cultural capital there. 

The main thing is that these different forms of capital have different values in different fields.

80s Crossover Thrash / Punk / Skate field

I don't know how the idea of combining thrash/hardcore music with skating arose, but it seems to have emerged in Southern California in places like Oxnard.

When I was a teenager (c.1987) I followed by big sister around and tried to be accepted in her thrash / punk /  skater scene. Several times I was asked, with much suspicion if my parents were rich. I strenuously underplayed any wealth we, a middle-class family, had. Real estate, and a title ("Sir"), and knowing the President of USA, and having a great backhand tennis shot would have provided you with negative status or 'street cred' in that field. Rather, in that field:

1. Economic capital was virtually valueless. If you could secretly use it to your advantage, e.g. by buying a Marshall amplifier that's OK, but you might have to tell your friends that you stole it. I guess economic capital could be legitimate if you were dealing in 'drugs', which basically meant cannabis in those circles.
2. Symbolic capital was also almost worthless. If you got good grades at school that would count against you. The symbolism of awards, trophies, titles, etc. was at odds with the ethic of the time.
3. Social capital was extremely valuable; if you knew important local skaters or thrash metal 'heads' then you were 'in'. 
4. Cultural capital was the most important.  You needed to wear an obscure thrash band T-Shirt, tight black jeans, Converse All-Stars (preferably in black). Nothing should new like you just bought it; that was 'inauthentic'. For a guy to be able to play lead guitar really fast; to get  'rad' skating on a halfpipe; to draw 'cool' skulls etc on your shirt.

Lacking in 3 and 4, my attempts to gain status were fruitless. But rejection wasn't too harsh; I turned to study! I guess I was a budding anthropologist because I wrote all about the different 'gangs' in this small community. I was fascinated by it.  I don't know what happened to those notes.

If I had known these guys, I might have got some social capital.

Actually, the 'scene' I tried unsuccessfully to crack into is what Bourdieu would call a field'. I prefer the analysis of  Weber. He would call  it a status group. Weber calls it such, because the values are not tied to money (for more see Weber's "Class, Status, Party").

Golf club field

A comedy movie that played on the ideas of habitus and capital at an exclusive golf County Club

Things would be quite different at an exclusive golf club. There:

1. Economic capital is crucial. Not only are membership rates exorbitant, but the mere fact of being rich confers status.
2. Symbolic capital is valuable. Having a title like "Dr." or "Sir" adds to prestige.
3. Social capital is crucial. You need other members to support your bid to be accepted into the club.
4. Cultural capital. Being a good golf player is worth something, but not much. Usually, the caddies at a prestige golf club are better than the average member. 

Like Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu is so difficult to read that I make an exception to my usual rule about reading the original author. Instead of Bourdieu, we will read Thomson on Field Theory as a way to understand habitus:

Thomson, P 2008, 'Field', in M Grenfell (ed.), Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, Acumen, Stocksfield, pp. 67-71. 

I have also made a dot point summary of Thomson's chapter.

Another comedy movie about golf and habitus

Habitus

Habitus is the ability to act, dress, talk etc. appropriate in each field. Habitus is when your body (not simply or even your mind) knows the rules of the game. Your body goes automatic mode. Karate students automatically bow when you enter dojo; businessmen can do a tie in almost literally "in their sleep", upper-class people 'naturally' don't lean over to pick up their spoon which has fallen on the ground.

We could just define habitus as ways of moving or techniques of the body. Habitus is can be distinguished with embodiment by its emphasis on class and field; i.e. sections of a society. Habitus naturalizes class hierarchies and is taken for granted. For instance, upper class (aristocratic; bourgeoisie) instill bodily ways into their children subtly (reminding children to 'mind their manners' at home) and more actively (deportment classes). This provides them with distinction and class.

I try to explain Bourdieu's ideas of habitus in this presentation:

Bourdieu's conception of the body fits into a larger theory about class hierarchies.

Ballet Dancers and their Capital

Now its time to take a more concrete example. We'll consider the field of ballet dancing and the different kinds of capital ballet dancers possess. What happens at the end of a dancer's career? This newspaper article describes the story of some Australian dancers.

So popular has Field Theory become that every researcher seems to want her/his own kind of capital. For instance, Wainwright and Turner add "bodily capital". In their chapter, they describe how older dancers in the Royal Ballet struggle with aging. The dancers discover they can not do what their minds tell them they can do, and what they love to do. But the end of performing does not mean the end of a career in ballet. The authors suggest ballet dancers lose their bodily capital but can 'cash in' on other forms of capital. How and what do dancers ‘cash in’ to continue their career? What does this tell us about body and society?

Wainwright, S, P. and Turner, BS 2004, "Narratives of Embodiment: Body, Aging, and Career in Royal Ballet Dancers", in Thomas H and Ahmed J (eds.), Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory, Blackwell, Madden, MA, pp. 98-120.

Summary

The basic point is that our body adapts to the fields and class we belong to. It is so adapted to these human creations that it seems 'natural' to move in ways that are, in fact, highly cultural. And it's not just the way we move. It's also the way we dress, speak, and even think. All that is contained in the idea of habitus. In the next two sections, Sections 9 & 10, we move to a completely different way of thinking about the body. The ideas of 'bare life' and 'panopticon' are almost entirely separate from the conceptual framework which we have been using since Section 4.

References

     Mauss, M 1973, 'Techniques of the body', Economy and Society, vol. 2, no. 1, pp.71-73.

    Wainwright, S, P. and Turner, BS 2004, "Narratives of Embodiment: Body, Aging, and Career in Royal Ballet Dancers", in Thomas H and Ahmed J (eds.), Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory, Blackwell, Madden, MA, pp. 98-120.

Further Reading

    Loïc Wacqaunt 1999. “Inside “the Zone”: the social art of the hustler in the American ghetto.” In P. Bourdieu et al The Weight of the World: Social suffering in contemporary society. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, pp. 140-167.

6. Phenomenology & Embodiment: Lived Experience

Welcome to Section 6 of "Culture, Body, and Mind" a course in the Anthropology of Body and Mind.

Revision

In Section 3, we looked one Western philosophical idea: body-mind distinction. This distinction was most famously elaborated by Descartes. The philosophical idea is phenomenology. In the mid-1900s at least, phenomenology was the ascendant philosophy in Europe. Anthroplogists have been attracted to the ideas several ideas from  phenomenology, namely that we can understand the self:

• by paying extremely careful attention to our experience (Merleau-Ponty and 'bracketing off');
• as being existing alongside other beings in the world (Heidegger and da sein) and not a radically separate kind of being (as in Descartes' subject).
• as a body interacting with the world (as described my Merleau-Ponty).

Remonstrating with the referee, Ango-Australian soccer player, Harry Kewell, points his finger. 

Phenomenology in Anthropology

So how did anthropologists make sense of this phenomenology? These presentation notes give some idea on how we might use phenomenology to anthropology.

Merleau-Ponty’s idea of embodiment implies that we see the world in relation to what our body can do in the world. Anthropologists have drawn on this idea, observing that what a body can and cannot do is different in different cultures and this significantly impacts on cultural phenomena and institutions.  In other words, the philosophical idea of "embodiment" provides a way forward for anthropologists to understand the body and culture. Anthropologists doing phenomenology have run with the idea that the body (which constitutes our world for us) is culturally shaped.

Azuri players disagree with ref Moreno in 2002 World Cup

Embodiment

The simplest way to approach this idea is to think that certain bodily practices (like how to handshake in Australia, how to kiss in France, how bow in Japan) become muscle memory. If you compile all your culturally specifically bodily practices these effectively change your muscles, possibly your mental process, and even the bones of your body. Now if your body is changed, your perception of the world is changed. In this presentation, I try to explain the anthropological take on embodiment:

Bateson, Why do Frenchmen?

A nice introduction to the idea of embodiment comes from before anyone in anthropology was even talking about it. Bateson is one of anthropology's more eccentric thinkers. The selection below comes from his 'metalogue' called "Why do Frenchmen". This is an imaginary dialogue between a daughter and her father:

Daughter: Daddy, why do Frenchmen wave their arms about?  
Father: What do you mean? 
D: I mean when they talk. Why do they wave their arms and all that?  
F: Well—why do you smile? Or why do you stamp your foot sometimes?
D: But that’s not the same thing, Daddy. I don’t wave my arms about like a Frenchman does. I don’t believe they can stop doing it, Daddy. Can they?
F: I don’t know—they might find it hard to stop…. Can you stop smiling?
D: But Daddy, I don’t smile all the time. It’s hard to stop when I feel like smiling. But I don’t feel like it all the time. And then I stop.
F: That’s true—but then a Frenchman doesn’t wave his arms in the same way all the time. Sometimes he waves them in one way and sometimes in another—and sometimes, I think, he stops waving them...What do you think? I mean, what does it make you think when a Frenchman waves his arms?                            D: I think it looks silly, Daddy. But I don’t suppose it looks like that to another Frenchman. They cannot all look silly to each other. Because if they did, theywould stop it. Wouldn’t they?
F: Perhaps—but that is not a very simple question. What else do they make you think?
D: Well—they look all excited…
F: All right—”silly” and “excited.”
D: But are they really as excited as they look? If I were as excited as that, I would want to dance or sing or hit somebody on the nose … but they just go on waving their arms. They can’t be really excited.
F: Well—are they really as silly as they look to you? And anyhow, why do you sometimes want to dance and sing and punch somebody on the nose?
D: Oh. Sometimes I just feel like that.
F: Perhaps a Frenchman just feels “like that” when he waves his arms about.
D: But he couldn’t feel like that all the time, Daddy, he just couldn’t.
F: You mean—the Frenchman surely does not feel when he waves his arms exactly as you would feel if you waved yours. And surely you are right.
D: But, then, how does he feel?
F: Well—let us suppose you are talking to a Frenchman and he is waving his arms about, and then in the middle of the conversation, after something that you have said, he suddenly stops waving his arms,  and just talks. What would you think then? That he had just stopped being silly and excited?
D: No… I’d be frightened. I’d think I had said something that hurt his feelings and perhaps he might be really angry.
F: Yes—and you might be right.

What would you think if a Frenchman stopped waving his arms? Why don’t Americans wave their arms in the same way?

Leenhardt on Canaque space

Read Synott & Howes' summary of Leenhardt on Canaque notions of space and body

 These earlier anthropologists, Bateson and Leenhardt, were not explicitly influenced by theories of phenomenology. Nevertheless, their writing appears to have stumbled upon a phenomenology independently.

Jackson, Lighting a fire

Jackson,  more than any other figure, is the proponent of phenomenology in anthropology.

Imagine you are an anthropologist analyzing people going to church. Taking a functional approach, you might say that going to church functions to provide solidarity to the group of church-goers and to provide a sense of psychological calm to each person (this is referred to as "function" below). Taking symbolic approach, you might interpret what Christ's sacrifice or Mother Mary's caring nature means to the church-goers  (this is referred to as "ethnographic interpretation" and "exegesis" below).

But Jackson does not want you to do either of these things.  He wants you, as an ethnographer to look do what people do and copy or imitate it ("practical mimesis"). He wants you to acquire their skills and bodily habits. By doing this, you obtain a practical embodied knowledge of the culture, which escapes ready explanation. He explains this in relation to lighting a fire among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone.

      My focus on the embodied character of lived experience in the habitus also reflects a conviction that anthropological analysis should be consonant with indigenous understandings which, in preliterate societies, are frequently embedded in practices (doings) rather than spelled out in ideas (sayings). Although such a consonance is, for me, a fundamental measure of adequacy in ethnographical interpretation,  I do not think that interpretation  necessarily consists in finding agreement  between our verbal reactions to observed practices and the exegesis which may be provided by the practitioners. Inasmuch as bodily praxis cannot be reduced to a semiotic, bodily practices are always open to interpretation; they are not in themselves interpretations of anything.      
    If we construe anthropological understanding as principally a language game in which semiotic values are assigned to bodily practices, then we can be sure that to the extent that the people we study make nothing of their practices outside of a living, we will make anything of them within reason. But if we take anthropological understanding to be first and foremost a way of acquiring social and practical skills without any a priori assumptions about their significance or function, then a different kind of knowledge follows. That is to say that, by avoiding the solipsism and ethnocentrism that pervade much symbolic analysis, an empathic understanding may be found.     
    Let me elaborate by considering the relationship between theoretical knowledge and fieldwork practice. When I first lived in a Kuranko village I used to light my own fire to boil water for drinking or bathing. But I regarded such a mundane chore as having little bearing on my research work, and my way of building a fire was careless and wasteful of wood. It was a task to get done quickly so that I could get on with what I took to be more important things. Villagers joked about my fire-lighting, but did not criticise or censure me, which was remarkable considering the scarcity of firewood and the time consumed in gathering it. Then one day, for no reason at all, I observed how Kuranko women kindled a fire and tended it, and began to imitate their technique which involved never using more than three lengths of split wood at one time, laying each piece carefully between the firestones, and gently pushing them into the fire as the ends burned away. When I took pains to make a fire in this way I found myself suddenly aware of the intelligence of the technique, which maximised the scarce firewood (women have to split and carry it from up to a mile and a half away), produced exactly the amount of heat required for cooking and enabled instant control of the flame.     
    This 'practical mimesis' afforded me insight into how people economised both fuel and human energy; it made me see the close kinship between economy of effort and grace of movement; it made me realise the common sense which informs even the most elementary tasks in a Kuranko village. Many of my most valued insights into Kuranko social life have followed from comparable cultivation and imitation of practical skills: hoeing on a farm, dancing (as one body), lighting a kerosene lantern properly, weaving a mat, consulting a diviner (see Jackson I978b). To break the habit of using a linear communicational model for understanding bodily praxis, it is necessary to adopt a methodological strategy of joining in without ulterior motive and literally putting oneself in the place of another person: inhabiting their world.     
    Participation thus becomes an end in itself rather than a means of gathering closely-observed data which will be subject to interpretation elsewhere after the event. Devereux has shown that one's personality inevitably colours the character of one's observations, and that the 'royal road to an authentic, rather than fictitious, objectivity' is perforce the way of informed subjectivity (I967:  xvi- xvii). In my view, subjective determinations are as much somatic as psychological in character. Thus, to stand aside from the action, take up a point of view, and ask endless questions, as I did during the female initiations, led only to a spurious understanding and increased the phenomenological problem of how I could know the experience of the other.  By contrast, to participate bodily in everyday practical tasks was a creative technique which often helped me grasp the sense of an activity by using my body as others did. This technique also helped me break my habit of seeking truth at the level of disembodied concepts and decontextualised sayings. To recognise the embodiedness of our Being-in-the-world is to discover a common ground where self and other are one. For by using one's body in the same way as others in the same environment,  one finds oneself informed by an understanding  which may then be interpreted  according  to one's own custom or bent, yet which remains grounded in a field of practical activity and thereby remains consonant with the experience of those among whom one has lived.     
    While words and concepts distinguish and divide, bodiliness unites and forms the grounds of an empathic, even a universal, understanding.  This may be why the body so often takes the place of speech and eclipses thought in rituals, like Kuranko initiation, whose point is the creation of community. The practical and embodied nature of Kuranko thought is thus to be seen as an ethical preference, not a mark of primitiveness or speculative failure. Likewise, practical mimesis may mediate many insights in anthropological fieldwork. And, because one's body is 'the nearest approach to the universe' which lies beyond cognition and words, it is the body which in so many esoteric traditions forms the bridge to universality, the means of yolking self and cosmos. The way that learning to light a fire disclosed new understanding for me suggests that we might recognise a reality revealed through what we do which is at once the matter and measure of what we say and think. After all, as the Kuranko adage says: 'The word fire won't burn down a house'.

Thus words are not important, but actions are. So see if you can analyze Jackson’s use of the idea of “habitus” and “embodiment”

Culture, body, & identity

In brief, anthropologists argue that your society and culture shapes your body which shapes how you experience the word and thus who you are. And if you want to research how this happens, you had better try to move around like the people you are studying.

Downey on Capoiera

Capoeira is a Brazilian activity which incorporates music, dance, and martial arts among other things. The music is produced by several instruments including a berimbau. Now I want you to read Downey's article on Capoiera. It is argued that many of our most natural or automatic ways of moving are meaningful and reflect our cultural background. By considering the way Capoeira practitioners hear music, we examine the argument that cultural ‘muscle memory’ is necessary to be able to perceive the world by considering the way Capoeira practitioners hear the music. In this phenomenology of listening, how, according to Downey, can one hear capoeira music? 

Helliwell on Longhouses

Like all anthropologists entering a new fieldsite with a radically different culture, Helliwell took some time to adjust. She was doing fieldwork in Borneo, among the Gerai. The Gerai were still living in longhouses. She lived in one of their longhouses but found herself initially:

....bewildered and overwhelmed by the cacophony of sound that characterises longhouse life...
    Eventually I, too, was able to appreciate and make sense of this tapestry of sound, and to recognise individual voices as they wovetogether with others in the air and flowed through the spaces of different apartments. These voices will never raise as a dialogue moved across four or even five petitions, but they’re very muted must reinforced the sense of membership in an intimate, privileged world. Conversations were taken up at will Andra link wished according to the demands of work or body; they were never forced, never demanding a participation, but always both gentle and generous in the reminder of a companionship constantly attend. Even now, the memory of such conversations fills me with emotion; it is they which most clearly define long house life for me and wish distinguish that from from the Australian one to which I have since returned.
    Light also flows along the length of the longhouse particularly at night when the structure is demarcated from the surrounding blackness by the tiny lights glowing up-and-down its length. In explaining why they sow seeds of a plant bearing red flowers in the rice seed, Gerai people told me that once in bloom, the flowers serve as "lights" for the growing rice: "Just as human beings in the long house at night like to see many lights around them and so know that they have many companions in the same way the rice sees the flowers at night and does not feel lonely" . In the long house at night, one is aware of the presence of neighbours by the glow of the lights and the hearths. If a light is not showing in any apartment, its absence is source of concern and investigations...
     While longhouse partition may e demarcate the space of each household, then, they simultaneously incorporate the household into a larger community space divided by the movement of sound and light. This movement continually reaffirms – – to any individual household as well as to those on either side of it – – its status as part of the longhouse, and thereby of the community of neighbours that is encapsulated within that long house. It is the  character of these petitions as they are lived and used – – the flimsiness and permeability – – which allows for the creation of community in this way, a point which Gerai people themselves are perfectly well aware. Thus, my attempts, in the early days of residence in my own apartment, to create privacy for myself by filling in some of the gaps in my two petitions with strategically placed pieces of cardboard and bark, were viewed with extreme disapproval by my neighbours. They saw such behaviour as constituting a denial of not only my own "need" for community, but also of their needs in this respect, since by blocking up my participants I was effectively stopping or reducing the flows of sound and light which linked them into the larger longhouse neighbourhood.

Longhouse in Borneo

You can see how Helliwell's anthropology be characterized as phenomenological anthropology. As a method, Helliwell pays close attention to the sensory experience of living in a longhouse; especially focusing on light and sound in this case.

Anthropology & Lived Experience

For anthropologists,  the simple 'take away' point is "lived experience". Phenomenology in anthropology means focusing on lived experience. I hear the phrase so often that it sounds like a cliche, but if we tie the idea of lived experience to the phenomenological theories above, I think it qualifies as a profound concept. Strangely enough, anthropologists do not need to be steeped in the theory of phenomenology to do a fairly decent job of phenomenological anthropology. What is necessary though is as anthropologists to carefully attend to:

1. Ourselves: our own experience when we are doing fieldwork; sights, smells, feelings, fears, etc.
2. Others: the experience of the people we are doing fieldwork with. In other words, we put aside what nationalism means to Polish citizen, and rather focus on how they feel when they hear the national anthem.

If you are acutely observant of experience and can express through your writing, the chances are you can write about 'lived experience' and your research might even be regarded as phenomenological anthropology.

Limitations

What are the limitations of the school of Phenomenology and the idea of embodiment? As the ideas emerge from Philosophy we can be sure that they have been heavily scrutinized in that discipline. Sometimes, anthropologists just move on to new approaches rather than engage in direct criticism of the old model. Phenomenology and Embodiment still remain 'in vogue' and I'm not aware of a radical challenge to this approach. In a sense, the idea of habitus changed the focus a little towards a class based analysis of bodily disposition, so we'll turn to that in the next section:  7. Field Theory & Habitus.

References

    Downey, G., Dalidowicz, M. and Mason, P. H. (2015) ‘Apprenticeship as method: embodied learning in ethnographic practice’, Qualitative Research, 15(2), pp. 183–200
    Downey, G 2002, 'Listening to Capoeira: Phenomenology, Embodiment and the Materiality of Music', Ethnomusicology, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 487-509.
    Helliwell, C., 1996. Space and sociality in a Dayak longhouse. Things as they are: New directions in phenomenological anthropology, pp.128-48.
    Jackson, M. (1983). Knowledge of the Body. Man, 18(2), 327-345.

5. Phenomenology & Embodiment: Your Self, Your World

Welcome to Section 5 of "Culture, Body, and Mind".

Revision

We started this course (Section 1) learning about the anthropological approach and especially its emphasis on reflexivity. We developed this reflexivity by studying typical Western beliefs regarding the self and the individual (Section 2) as well as regarding mind and body (Section 3). Typical Western beliefs center around the notion that thinking-things and/or non-thinking-things exist. To develop our understanding, we studied the dualism of Western philosopher, Descartes. We immediately contrasted Cartesian dualism with an Aboriginal Australian vision of 'one-ness' in the universe, as described by Stanner. In Section 4, the aim was to develop a deeper appreciation of alternative views of body and mind by looking at Ojibwa culture.

Solution to Descartes' problem?

In this section, we away from the philosophy that we experience the material world with our mind. The new idea is that we are things in the world with bodies that experience the world.

The 'phenomenological' (for want of a better word) theories of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty provide an alternative to Cartesian dualism. According to these theories, you are a self or body existing in the word. This must be the starting point for any philosophy. The radical doubts regarding the existence of the physical world and body can thus be dispelled.

Maybe, in philosophical terms, the embodiment theories just 'beg the question'; they don't really answer Descartes' problem. Regardless, as we will see in Section 5, the theories of phenomenology (and within them the concept of "embodiment") have proven very useful for anthropologists to analyze cultures with.

Phenomenology in Philosophy

This section must be read with a huge caveat in mind. I have only an undergrad understanding of philosophy. And now I only read this philosophy as an anthropologist seeking a better understanding of culture, which was not the goal of any of the major philosophers of phenomenology. That said, you could start by reading my presentation notes on phenomenology, or just go ahead and read the rest of this blog.

Small "p" phenomenology

The concept of "phenomenology" goes back at least the Enlightenment. Different philosophers tend to use the concept in different ways. Famously, Kant distinguished between phenomenon and noumenon. The moon, trees, doors, carpet are all both a phenomena and a noumena. The moon as a phenomenon is the moon as we perceive it shining (or shadowy) in the sky. A moon as a noumenon is the moon in itself, which lies behind appearances, and can never be perceived. (Kant is NOT proposing a scientific idea that there is a solid object which reflects light. Rather for Kant, the solid object of the moon and the light it reflects are both phenomena, not noumena.) [NH: don't take my word on Kant. I'm relying on memory and the last time I studied him was 1995! Please double-check for yourself] . This concept of "phenomenology" is usually spelled with a small "p". 

But the "Phenomenology" (capital "P") that anthropologists are interested is a 'school' of philosophy. Like "Logical Positivism", "Existentialism", in begins in the late 1800s. Anthropologists have skipped the early figures of Phenomenology--including Hegel. Rather, anthropologists tend to start with Husserl. 

Husserl

Phenomenology & Husserl 

Husserl consciously side-stepped the skepticism (or solipsism) about the outside world which was bequeathed to us in Descartes' philosophy. He was more interested in investigating our direct experience as I try to describe in my summary of "Lecture 1" in "The Idea of Phenomenology".

Husserl & 'Bracketing off' (Epoque)

Husserl thought he had found a way out the impasse created by Descartes. This was to investigate direct experience by bracketing off.  Husserl called this process "Epoque". Here is my example of bracketing off, as I understand it:

Leave aside the question of whether your right elbow is real. Now observe your right elbow. Move it a large circle. Notice that while connected 'properly' to your body, your elbow extends only to a certain extent.  Observe that you can bring a side of your elbow close to your face, that you cannot place in your right underarm but you can make it touch your left knee. Notice that trying to directly perceive the point of the elbow requires manipulating the arm. Does it feel uncomfortable and frustrating doing this? If not how exactly does it feel? Try to focus deeply on this. Now notice that you can point your right elbow up and down and to the right. It's impossible to make it point towards your shoulder.

You might now feel more acquainted with your right elbow than your other elbow. This gives me a sensation of having a body of two 'sides' right and left. Maybe I could go on from there. But I don't need to assume that I actually have an elbow to do this exercise. What I do have is the experience of my elbow and I can pay extremely careful attention to this. Maybe by doing this, I can understand this phenomenon; my right elbow.

But remember, I am not talking about what my right elbow really is. I don't even assume that I have a right elbow. Maybe it's all in my imagination.

Rather what I am doing is a 'descriptive science of consciousness'. I'm describing my mental state of awareness of my elbow, regardless of whether my elbow exists as matter or is real in other ways.

I can do the same for a bedroom fan that is blowing air in my living room. My feet, which are closest to it feel cooler. I feel comforted by the whirring sound as it swings from left to right etc. I keep doing this Epoque for other objects I observe.

And if I'm talented enough at Epoque, I may be able to make some great findings about elbows, fans, and experience in general. I would then be able to contribute the 'science of phenomenology'--a detailed description of consciousness--that Husserl envisioned, but which never really took off.

Bracketing off vs Mindfulness

This process of bracketing off reminds me of one kind 'mindfulness' practices in meditation, whereby you focus on for example the feeling of your feet touching the floor, the feeling of anger in your chest etc.. In the kinds of meditation I've been exposed to in the West, the goal is, I guess, presence, acceptance, and inner peace. But for Husserl the goal is knowledge.

"To the things themselves"?

Famously, Husserl wanted to take philosophy "back to the "things themselves"". But to my way of thinking, this is a misleading statement. It seems to imply that there are objects existing outside our mind and that we should attend to those objects. As I understand, Husserl wants us to focus on experience and forget about whether the objects are real independently of our existence.

Summary

What Husserl provides for me is, potentially:

1.  An answer to Cartesian doubts about the existence of the outside world;
2.  A new attitude towards knowledge being based on experience alone; and thus,
3. A reason to focus deeply on experience.

Application

As anthropologists, we can extend Husserl's 'bracketing off' and use it for our own purposes. Take the right elbow described above. A Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) practitioner experiences her elbow as something to protect from 'traps'; whereas a karate practitioner experiences her elbow as 'weapon' for an elbow strike attack (enpi). A cellist is aware (unconsciously!) of the position of his right elbow in relation to the strings and his body. So different social positions (cellist, BJJ or Karate practitioner) could lead to different experiences of the world and the place of self in it.

Now let's take it even further. As a teenager, I played drinking games with friends. Pointing with the index finger was always 'punished' with a 'drink'; therefore my friends and I became accustomed to pointing with the elbow; so accustomed, in fact, that we began pointing with our elbow even when we weren't playing drinking games. So a subculture--teenage male drinking 'societies'--develops its own awareness of the world.

The next move could be to the class level. Now, as a parent, I no longer engage in drinking games. Rather, I would encourage you to think of me as a thoroughly, righteous and upstanding member of the community. (Just kidding!) Anyway, I encourage my children not to rest their arms on the table when they eat. That's my middle-class upbringing shining through!

Korean drinking etiquette

Finally, we can move to a cultural level.  In Korea, if we can believe what I've heard, there is another experience of the right elbow. If you are pouring a drink for someone and wish to show respect, you can pour with your right hand and rest your right elbow lightly in your left palm.

Now following from Husserl, within a society we expect that the experience of the body is contingent on sociological factors such as class, age, even sports and hobbies. The experience is heightened when comparing cultures. The experience of the body therefore gives us great insight into cultures. This insight is not just cultures as sets of beliefs (e.g. the Ojibwe believed that bears are their grandfathers) but cultures as sets of experiences. 

Heidegger

Heidegger vs Husserl

Eclipsing Husserl in influence is Heidegger. Poor old Husserl is so easily overlooked, famous philosophy Professor Dreyfus said, in an unguarded moment, about phenomenology "Heidegger's the source...it all comes from him". Heidegger studied under Husserl, but he came to increasingly disavow his Jewish teacher. This seems to have occurred after Heidegger became a Nazi, something for which he never apologized or even seemed to regret! Regardless, some people place Heidegger, along with Wittgenstein, as the two greatest philosophers of the 20th Century.

Heidegger & Being-in-the-world

What Heidegger provides for me is a completely new way to understand my self. Before I read Heidegger I thought I was either (i) ethereal soul or spirit somehow trapped or connected to a physical body, or (ii) just a bunch of synapses and neurons, and entirely material entity. According to Heidegger, I am neither (i) nor (ii).

Heidegger refuses to split the world into thinking things and matter (i.e. subject and object). Rather, according to Heidegger, I am "da-sein" a being in the world. "Da-sein" is Heidegger's name for the self. The self is being along with other kinds of beings (headphones, remote controls, clouds, corn plants). )But da-sein is unique in that it knows about, cares about, and purposefully interacts with its fellow beings (I put headphones on my head, replace the batteries on my remote control, worry whether the cloud will bring rain, harvest my corn plant).

For more on Heidegger, you could start with my summary of Heidegger's "Being-in-the-world".

Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty & Embodiment

Merleau-Ponty's most important work was published in the 1940s. He was a French philosopher who put the final piece of the jigsaw together, for anthropologists at least. Husserl turned us on to experience; Heidegger places us in the world with other things. But where Heidegger seems largely to have overlooked to the body in the world, Merleau-Ponty stressed the role of the entire body interacting the world. In other words, Heidegger neglected the body; he treated the self ('da sein') as something like a head (replete with eyes, ears, taste buds etc.) interacting in the world. 

Merleau-Ponty drew on Husserl and Heidegger, but his idea was that perception is only possible if we take for granted that we possess a body in the world. So his philosophy starts with a body in the world, rather than (as with Descartes) a thought. Merleau-Ponty makes us aware that this body is replete with arms, legs, and adopts different positions (such as squatting, walking, riding a skateboard). Perception is always embodied, you cannot perceive without being a body in space. The form of your body (as a baby or an elderly person) and the position it takes (riding a motorbike or pushing a shopping trolley) constitutes your experience.

According to Merleau-Ponty the experience of walking on stilts, compared to walking or riding a bike, would
provide these 'Burning Man' revelers with a unique perspective of the world

To have senses is to have a body in space. That is what our subjectivity consists in. What it is to be you is to be a body in space. All your most precious experiences and also your most mundane actions and movements define who you are. But they all come through your having a body in space. This implies that changing your body (e.g. if you acquire a physical disability or a new physical ability) changes your perspective and changes who you are.

Reading Merleau-Ponty

For anthropology students who wish to develop an advanced understanding of phenomenology, of all three philosophers, I would suggest concentrating Merleau-Ponty. This is only because I think Merleau-Ponty has been more influential for anthropology. When it comes to studying, I usually think it is best to read the original author of an idea, rather than someone else explaining them. However, unluckily for us, Merleau-Ponty is très difficile to read. So we will read another philosopher Charles Taylor explaining Merleau-Ponty. Taylor is easier than Merleau-Ponty but is still challenging. So, take a big breath and read Taylor's "Embodied Agency". If you find it too much, my summary of Taylor might help.

Parkour enthusiasts experience, the stairs, concrete, bollards differently to a skateboarder. 

Philosophy and anthropology

And now a disclaimer. It feels strange to use so much Western philosophy in an anthropology course. Yet anthropologists have drawn much inspiration from philosophy in the study of body and mind. Maybe this is partly because questions of body and mind have troubled philosophers for generations, whereas body and mind has only emerged as a focus in anthropology since the 1980s. In any case, we anthropologists need a basic grasp of this philosophy, as it provides a theoretical basis for understanding body and mind in other cultures.

Required Reading: Kalpana Ram & Phantom Limbs

Now it's time to turn to an anthropological application of these ideas. Ram draws on the ideas of phenomenology to describe the experience of first Indian generation migrants in Australia's capital, Canberra.  They often live in a time-warp and create essentialized or reified versions of their ‘culture’ for their children. How is this embodied? You can read for yourself in:

Ram, K 2005, "Phantom limbs: South Indian dance and immigrant reifications of the female body", Journal of Intercultural Studies, v. 26, no. 1-2, pp. 121-137.

In the reading,  Ram describes the phenomenon of the 'phantom limb'. Philosophers have long pondered the question of the 'phantom limb'. Just say your arms and legs were amputated. After the surgery, your arms felt itchy and your legs felt painful. The 'phantom limb' refers to the frequently painful sensation that a missing arm or leg is still attached to the body.  It can occur in two situations; when a person was born without the limb, or when the limb was lost in an accident, amputation and so on. The 'phantom limb' troubles philosophers because it suggests that sensory data cannot be trusted. Ram, however, takes a different approach to the 'phantom limb'. She shows how it can be an analogy for the bodily experience of migration in two ways:

1. The phantom limb retains the position of the real limb at the time of injury—“the frozen quality of the “Indianness” that immigrants practice overseas” (e.g. they left India during the 1970s so Indians still wear flares in their imagination)
2. Phantom limb is created “in subjects who hitherto had none” in response to some circumstance or emotion—migration in colonial and post-colonial settings (e.g. they imagine a historical India that never existed)

For Indian migrants, in both cases, you feel something that is not actually there. The culture passed on to the second generation is replete with ‘phantom-like’ constructions.

Put simply, with phantoms limbs you feel that something which is there is real. Similarly, Indian migrants feel like something that isn't there is real. And this imagined (or ‘phantom’) culture becomes embodied.

Baseball Embodiment

Baseball players have a special way of moving.

Baseballers have unique ways of conducting their body. In this clip,
watch how, among many other things, the umpire signals "3" with his middle,
ring, and pinkie finger. 

Summary

Only a minority of anthropologists explicitly attempt to do phenomenological anthropology. Nevertheless, the concepts of "embodiment" and "lived experience" have come mainstays in contemporary anthropology. So, in Section 6, we will delve further into anthropological accounts of lived experience and embodiment.

 

4. Mind & Matter: Non-Human Persons

Welcome to Section 4 of "Culture, Body, and Mind", a course in the anthropology of body and mind.

Revision

In Section 1, we learned about the anthropological approach. In Sections 2 & 3, we applied that aspect of the anthropological approach which is known as 'reflexivity'. Specifically, in Section 2, we critically examined notions of self, including the Western idea of individual. Then, in Section 3, we looked at the foundational text which underlies contemporary Western ideas of body and mind; Descartes' meditations. In Section 4, we consider alternative ideas of body and mind.

Tylor's animism

E.B. Tylor

"Animism" is the belief in the existence of soul. Most people, following early anthropologist, Edward B Tylor, use the term animism to describe beliefs that rivers, streams, rocks, animals etc. have souls.  You can read more about this in my summary of a section from his Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor applied the term "animism" to describe what he perceived as 'primitive tribes'.

This raises problems for anthropologists. You might think the word "primitive" is not very "PC"--and indeed most anthropologists have problems with it for various reasons related to politics, racism etc. But even leaving that aside, we no longer find the word "primitive" useful in describing societies. The term "tribe" is used, but in very specific contexts (for example as a contrast to bands, chiefdoms, and civilizations).

Furthermore, as Tylor himself acknowledges, contemporary Westerners might be seen as animist. It seems to me that anyone (including, but certainly not limited to all pious Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, etc whom I have met) who believes they have a spirit or a soul would necessarily be animist, as defined by Tylor. Descartes, obviously, would be an animist, attributing spirit to humans and to God. But when Tylor was writing, many people believed that with 'march of progress', and the rise of science,  these irrational beliefs in spirit would become extinct in the West and then maybe the rest of the world. This is not a position that I, and indeed most anthropologists, hold.

Ojibwa territory

Essential reading: Ojibwa animism?

We now consider the work of Hallowell an anthropologist who studied among First Nations (American Indians) in, I think, the 1930s. His most famous work is an essay on the Ojibwa (aka Ojibwe). The Ojibwa a  First Nations people from the Great Lakes.  It is believed that they began migrating westwards (to the left in the above map) from eastern (right) Great Lakes area. Please read, and enjoy, "Ojibwa Ontology..."

Hallowell observes that, for the Ojibwa, certain animals, plants, rocks, streams, trees etc have a spirit. On one level we could say that the perspective of the Ojibwa, is thus called animism (the idea that objects can be animated with soul). At a deeper level, it is hard to see a clear distinction, as in Cartesian dualism, between subjects and objects. So that it's not as if objects as soul, but more that things like rocks and bear might not be objects at all. Rather, for the Ojibwa is a big category of persons: and we belong below this category, having equal status with other animals and rocks. Put simply, two kinds of person exist: human and non-human. Instead of the dualism Descartes perceived in the universe, for the Ojibwa there is a oneness. What concept might we draw on to explain this difference?

Ojibwa family

Ojibwa ontology

If you find reading the original Hallowell difficult, you could also look at my summary In my summary I focus on the concept of ontology:

The word "ontology" means "your theory on what exists". So, if you believe in aliens and ghosts, then aliens and ghosts are part of your ontology. Descartes, a Western philosopher said that there was only mind and matter in the universe. Thus, his ontology held that there is only two radically distinct things, also known as "subject" (mind) and "object" (matter). And for a long while many Westerners adopted this ontology. Ojibwa ontology includes that persons take human and non-human form. This contradicts  Descartes' distinction of subject and object. It also means that humans, animals, trees, rocks, etc. are merely a sub-category of the larger category of persons 

Ojibwa family

Analyzing Ojibwa world-view

If we take a non-anthropological Western perspective we could say "oh Ojibwa have got it wrong. They don't understand that plants don't have souls". Or more likely, "wow the Ojibwa are so spiritual, they believe that a plant has soul!". By contrast, from the anthropological perspective, we say: "Let's say they've got it right. What would that mean?" 

Summary

By considering Aboriginal (Indigenous) Australians (Sections 2 & 3), and the Ojibwa (Section 4) we have been exposed to different conceptions of self, body, and mind. This could encourage reflection and introspection for us anthropologists. Even Western philosophers cannot agree on Western ideas of body and mind so it would seem incumbent upon us, if only as anthropologists, to seriously consider the possibility that we are not who or what we think we are. So what's the take-away point? Basically: Anthropology has shown that the idea of what constitutes self varies between culture. We can get this from such accounts as:

• Stanner on The Dreaming; 
• Tylor's on animism;  and, 
• Hallowell's on Ojibwe ontology,

all demonstrate that Descartes' theory is a culturally specific understanding of personhood. In a similar way, "Another way the cultural specificity of Cartesian Dualism shows up is with regard to "The Dreaming"

Speaking frankly, when I reflect on the materials we've covered in Sections 1-4, my own ideas about body and mind start to seem a little strange and those of the Ojibwa and other cultural groups seem more familiar. Indeed, this is a common experience for anthropologists. We find that studying anthropology makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. 

3. Mind & Matter: Cartesian Dualism

Welcome to Section 3 of "Culture, Body and Mind", a course in the Anthropology of Body and Mind. Anthropologists see "matter" (and "mind") as culturally constructed. Accepting this would mean

Revision

In Section 1, we learned to recognize the anthropological approach. Part of the anthropological approach is reflexivity, being able to critically reflect on one's own culture and challenge one's own ethnocentrism.  Then in Section 2, we applied this anthropological approach in considering various ideas of the self, in an attempt to answer the question "what am I"?

This section

In Section 3, we provide one, culturally specific, answer to this crucial question; namely, "I am a mind, a thinking thing all other things in the universe are material non-thinking things". This idea has evolved into what are now standard Western ideas of body and mind. From extreme materialists (think Richard Dawkins) to extreme New Agers (think Neo-Pagans or Wiccans), most Westerners have been strongly influenced by Descartes, many without even realising it! Yet few take the opportunity to analyse the philosophical underpinnings of their ideas. In this Section, we undertake this analysis by looking at Descartes.

Descartes' influence

“Modern philosophy begins with Descartes,” writes Russel (2012). Writing in the early 1600s, Descartes presents the greatest formulation of dualism—a philosophical approach to body and mind that predominates in the West. The idea of matter devoid of soul or spirit provided a philosophical basis for the new science of Isaac Newton and others. For several centuries now, thinkers and more recently anthropologists, even those who disagree with Descartes, have been forced to engage with it. So what is his understanding of body and mind? How are the two connected?
 Read  “Synopsis…” pp. 161-164 and “Meditation II” pp. 170-179 and find out.

According to Descartes you are not your brain. Your brain is a material object.
Rather you are your mind.

I think therefore I am: "cogito ergo sum"

One of the most famous quotations in English is "I think therefore I am". Descartes wrote this in Latin as "cogito ergo sum". So sometimes philosophers call it "the cogito" for short--yep that's the street slang that philosophers use.

Descartes is trying to work out definitely exists in the universe. You can doubt the existence of me (Nicholas Herriman), the screen or paper you're looking at. Maybe you're on drugs and you're just hallucinating; maybe you're actually in a dream; maybe the CIA has a mind implant that's fooling you; maybe you've been stuck in a virtual reality suit as part of a weird experiment. These are all possibilities, however unlikely you might feel these scenarios to be, you can't be 100% sure of the screen in front of you, maybe 99.9% sure, but Descartes wants 100%! He wants something that you cannot possibly doubt. He is something that is, in philosophical jargon, "indubitable". While you are doing all this doubting there is one thing you cannot doubt, he says, is that you are doubting, you are thinking, you have cognition. And that is you; you are the thing that is thinking right now as you read these words and maybe doubting the very existence of the computer screen you're reading them on.

Descartes: Subjects and objects

The basic idea is that there exist two kinds of things:

1.  thinking-things (subjects)
2.  and non-thinking-things (objects)

That's all that exists. Thinking things include the human soul and God. These are subjects: they possess thinking, feeling, a soul. Thinking things don't occupy space; they don't weigh anything. But they can experience (subjectively) objects. When eating ice cream at the beach, the thinking thing that is you experiences an object (the ice cream). Everything else, bricks, skateboards, and plants are objects. No matter how much you mash ice cream into a brick, the brick cannot taste it; a brick cannot subjectively experience other objects.

If you're still having difficulty understanding, perhaps my presentation might help:

Descartes & wax

From Meditation II, we get the famous case of the wax. Descartes writes:

Let us begin by considering the commonest matters, those which we believe to be the most distinctly comprehended, to wit, the bodies which we touch and see; not indeed bodies in general, for these general ideas are usually a little more confused, but let us consider one body in particular. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax: it has been taken quite freshly from the hive, and it has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey which it contains; it still retains somewhat of the odour of the flowers from which it has been culled; its colour, its figure, its size are apparent; it is hard, cold, easily handled, and if you strike it with the finger, it will emit a sound. Finally all the things which are requisite to cause us distinctly to recognise a body, are met with in it. But notice that while I speak and approach the fire, what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it, and when one strikes it, no sound is emitted. Does the same wax remain after this change? We must confess that it remains; none would judge otherwise. What then did I know so distinctly in this piece of wax? It could certainly be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notice, since all these things which fall under taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing, are found to be changed, and yet the same wax remains....

But what must particularly be observed is that its perception is neither an act of vision, nor of touch, nor of imagination, and has never been such, although it may have appeared formerly to be so— but only an intuition of the mind, which may be imperfect and confused as it was formerly, or clear and distinct as it is at present, according as my attention is more or less directed to the elements which are found in it, and of which it is composed. 

Only a philosopher could get so much from a candle! See if you can answer the 'wax' questions in the comments below.

Interactionism

The biggest problem, most philosophers agree, with Descartes' philosophy is interactionism. If your mind is so radically different to the material word around you, how could you possibly perceive the world? How could you possibly act on the world? (I feel like Descartes like trying to smash a brick against an ethereal non-material entity.) Descartes recognises this difficulty and argued that God ensures that we are not fooled by our perception. As philosopher Schopenhauer, a critic of Descartes, put it:

And so it was he [Descartes] who discovered the gulf between the subjective or ideal and the objective or real. He clothed this insight in the form of a doubt concerning the existence of the external world; but by his inadequate solution of such doubt, namely that God Almighty would surely not deceive us, he has shown how profound the problem is and how difficult it is to solve.

If Schopenhauer is right, Descartes' mind-body distinction fails to properly explain how perception or acting on the world is possible. But anthropologists, with our methodological relativism, are not particularly concerned with this 'problem'.

Sentience

An important concept often arises when discussing both Descartes and, as we will see in later sections, the anthropology of body and mind. That concept is sentience. Sentience is the ability to perceive, feel, experience, the world. According to Descartes, only humans, thinking things have sentience. You can put a rabbit in a blender; it's no different to putting a banana in blender!

Ontology

Now I also need to introduce the word "ontology".  Ontology is basically an account of what exists. If you are a Shinto priest in Japan, what you think exists is typically different to a Latter-day Saint from Utah. So who is right? When you study ontology in philosophy, then you start to question what actually exists; God, minds?, matter?, cause & effect? In what way do things like numbers exist? You try to provide answers to these questions. You engage with famous arguments that nothing exists independently of perception like Bishop Berkeley. "If a tree falls over in a wood and no one hears it does it still make a sound?" your professor might ask. She might concede that vibrations of air are created by the falling tree but she might deny that sounds exist without someone to hear then. So you can have a lot of fun debating this stuff but you won't learn much anthropology.

That's because in anthropology the approach is different. With regards ontology, anthropologists are not usually interested in what exists in the world. Rather we are interested in what different cultures/societies perceive exist in the world.


Descartes created a new ontology. For Descartes what exists is thinking and non-thinking things. Because he proposed that there are two kinds of things in the universe, we call his theory "dualism". And because it's from Descartes, we call it "Cartesian Dualism". We see this as merely one kind of ontology and, in accordance with methodological relativism, we are not concerned with whether it is correct or not.

The Cartesian universe

Famous 20th Century philosopher, Bertrand Russell described Descartes as effectively ripping the soul out of the universe. Descartes posited a universe devoid of meaning, which was in keeping with the modern science of Newton and the disenchantment of the world. In Russell's own words

Even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temper of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. 

Do you think Russel is too convinced that Western science is correct?

Japanese Anime artist Shinka Makoto portrays a dreamy, fantastic universe.
Maybe it's not as lonely as the universe of modern science.

Descartes & philosophy

As mentioned, Descartes expounded the philosophical system of dualism that underlies the predominant W.ern thought 1700-1970. He provided the first & most thorough exposition of this dualism and lay the groundwork for Newtonian physics.

As such undergrad students of philosophy (like myself in the early 1990s!) spend time asking questions like: was Descartes right when he said animals have no soul? Can or will computers be able to think or just perform operations with electric pulses?

Radical materialist philosophers who emerged in the mid-1900s questioned whether soul existed, they thought our all we humans are is a set of electric pulses; so of course computers can think. But all they managed to do was keep Descartes' idea of matter and purge the universe of soul.

New Agers kept Descartes' soul but they merged into Descartes' matter. So as I write 400 years later, no philosopher has supplanted Descartes ideas. Though as we will see, several had a very good crack at it.

Descartes & anthropology

Anthropologists are interested in the kinds of philosophical questions I grappled with as an undergrad with.  Not all cultures share the idea of Cartesian dualism nor is our specific take on dualism (whether we are idealists, materialists or New Agers for example) necessarily correct. So as anthropologists, it is crucial that we can conceive of Cartesian dualism as culturally specific.

Stanner & The Dreaming

Harry Tjutjuna, Pitjantjatjara, Walytjatjara, north-west corner of South Australia, Australia born c. 1928/1932, Wanka Tjukurpa (Spiderman), 2007, synthetic polymer paint on canvas 154cm h x 182cm w. Collection National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, © the artist, courtesy Ninuku Art Centre

For another example of a non-Cartesian understanding of body and mind, we could turn to Stanner's classic essay "The Dreaming" about the 'Dreamtime' of Aboriginal Australians.

Stanner's account has been critiqued (implicitly, at least) for being sentimental, essentialist and so on. (For a deeper understanding of the implications of Indigenous Australian ideas in relation to subject and object, you should read Munn's "Transformation of subjects into objects"). But we'll put aside the critiques of Stanner for the meantime. If he is correct about the 'one-ness' which the Aboriginal person perceives in the world,  how it is different from Cartesian dualism? What would an anthropology of body and mind look like if it began with the principle of oneness and not of dualism?

Conclusion 

The reason why we read Descartes is to articulate what a lot of us take for granted and see that this is just one way of looking at body and mind. Analysing this theoretical approach also allows us to see its pros and cons and contrast it with other cultures.

The primary weakness with Descartes, from a philosophical perspective, is usually thought to be the problem of interactionism. From an anthropological perspective, Cartesian Dualism is merely an artefact of a certain culture in a certain time. The vision of personhood is neither right or wrong, but is culturally specific. 


Putting aside our taken-for-granted ideas about body and mind sounds easy enough. But to deeply understand other cultures' ideas of body and mind is a constant effort for anthropologists. It is also one of the aims of this course. So we will analyze the idea of non-human persons in Section Four.