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. Anthropologists 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).
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| Remonstrating with the referee, Anglo-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.
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| Azuri players use their fingers to remonstrate 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:
What would you think if a Frenchman stopped waving his arms? Why don’t Americans wave their arms in the same way?
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.
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.
Stoller on Listening to Songhay Music
Paul Stoller’s ethnography with the Songhay of Niger reminds us that listening is never just a passive act. In their world, sound is a force that acts in and upon people, linking them to spirits, ancestors, and each other.
Instruments like the godji (a one-string fiddle) “cry” in ways that stir deep feeling, while the rhythms of the gasi drum create an irresistible soundscape for spirit possession. Praise poetry, too, is more than words — it vibrates through bodies, shaping emotion, social standing, and even physical responses.
For Stoller, to understand Songhay music you must listen phenomenologically — attending to how sound is felt in the body, how it organises space, and how it works in ritual. Music here does not simply “symbolise” ideas; it does things: calling spirits, healing, forging solidarity, and revealing truths. In this way, Songhay sound practices show how listening can be a form of embodied knowledge, inseparable from cultural life.
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.
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.Thus, words are not important, but actions are. So see if you can analyze Jackson’s use of the idea of “habitus” and “embodiment”
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'.
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.
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| 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:
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.- Ourselves: our own experience when we are doing fieldwork; sights, smells, feelings, fears, etc.
- 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.
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 Week 8. 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.
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.
