Welcome to the final week of this section on phenomenology in anthropology
As an undergraduate in the 1990s, the 'feminist theory', as it was called back then, which I studied was tied up with post-structuralist theories of language. We looked at difficult-to-read French theorists such as Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva and came to the conclusion that the oppression of women and patriarchy were basically a linguistic problems. What I wasn't aware of was another approach to issues of gender which, focusing on the body, used Merleau-Ponty's ideas of phenomenology.
Following from the previous blogs on embodiment and phenomenology, in this blog, I consider here two theorists, both writing in the 1980s, who have focused on the phenomenology of women's bodies. Young and Butler demonstrate--in different ways--how the experience of body connects with issues of gender.
Young: throwing like a girl [are my notes written on the article print out?
Analysing 1960s female bodies also demonstrates how embodiment (as envisaged by Merleau-Ponty) operates with regard to gender. In her "Throwing like a Girl" article, anthropologist Iris Marion Young (1980) shows how female bodies are 'limited' in three ways. First, ambiguous transcendence [two sentences]. Second, inhibited intentionality... [write two sentences]. Finally, discontinuous unity...[two sentences]. As useful as Young may be, she overlooks of class habitus (Bourdieu 199?) and race (Bourgios & Schoenberg 201?). Providing we keep this in mind, we could say that Young's three 'modalities' demonstrate how gender becomes embodied.
Butler and acting
Butler's "Performative Acts" Butler goes further than Young. Simply put, Butler does not say "women act like women", but rather "there is no such thing as a woman to start with".
What does this mean? For Butler woman is only constituted through acts. There is no being a woman without acts. These include:
the doctor says "it will be a boy"
a few days later, the parents enact a gender reveal after this news
a few months later, relatives buy blue clothes and toys
20 years later the person speaks with lower voice is encouraged to be assertive
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).
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.
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:
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 anotherFrenchman. 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?
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
Stoller’s teacher, the healer Sorko Seyni, rebuked him: “You listen, but you do not hear.” Stoller realised that recording and translating Songhay spells was not enough. He had to learn how their sounds were experienced—as forces capable of penetrating bodies, affecting spirits and transforming events.
The Songhay, or Songhai, are a major West African ethnic group living mainly along the Niger River in present-day Mali and Niger. During the 1400s and 1500s, their ancestors built one of Africa’s largest empires. Today, most Songhay are Muslim, while spirit possession and other healing traditions also remain important. To treat illness, Songhay healers may use medicinal substances, spoken spells and music.
Songhai empire
Let's skip the medicinal substances and focus on spells first. Anthropologist Paul Stoller learned that he had to move away from just focusing on the meaning of words. He also had to learn to experience the phenomenon of spoken words, how they sound to us and to spirits rather than what they mean.
Image in Stoller (1984, p. 565)
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. 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.
So to be able to really hear the spells and instruments of Songhay healers, Stoller found that he needed to get away from a Western obsession with sight and things:
“Thee eye and its " gaze, " to use the apt term of Foucault (1975 ), has had a lockhold on Western thought. ... Zukerkandi (1958 ) suggests that the majesty of vision in the epistemology of Western thought stems from our traditional stress on the observation of material things within a field of vision. From Aristotle on we have been conditioned to see colored illuminated things, not colors or light. We feel hard or smooth things, not hardness or smoothness....The gaze of Western thought has seemingly ignored the dimension of sound. “
Vision tends to position the world “out there,” as a collection of objects to be observed. Sound is different: it travels towards us, enters us and passes through our bodies. The godji “cries,” the gasi drum “clacks” and “rolls,” and praise-names are shouted into a medium’s ear. Together, these sounds connect people with their ancestors and draw spirits into human bodies.
To capture this, anthropologists need to focus on our bodily experience itself. This is the experience that philosopher Merleau-Ponty wrote about:
Merleau-Ponty (1964:164), writes that the “quality, light, color, and depth which are there before us are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.”
As anthropologists, we used to focus more on actions or their meanings, but phenomenology exhorts us to attend to the feeling.
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.
. 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'.
Words are important, but so are actions. So see if you can analyze Jackson’s use of the idea of “habitus” and “embodiment”
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. Practitioners say they need the music to perform their moves properly; the sound and the body work together as Downey expalins in his article on Capoiera.
In it, we see how 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...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 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
Anthropologists used to focus on actions and meaning. We'd look at a cock fight in Bali and try understand what it means to the Balinese, for instance. Phenomenology directs anthropologists to focus on feeling rather than meaning.
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:
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.
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. Just like jeans, at the time of writing, have been fashionable apparel for decades, phenomenology still remains 'in vogue'
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.
STOLLER, P. (1984). sound in Songhay cultural experience. American Ethnologist, 11(3), 559–570.
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' (Epoche)
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 "Epoche". 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:
An answer to Cartesian doubts about the existence of the outside world;
A new attitude towards knowledge being based on experience alone; and thus,
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).
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:
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:
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)
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.
Application: Baseball Embodiment
Let's see if we can apply the embodiment idea to a different context--baseball. 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
The embodiment concept tells us we need to fieldwork different. The argument holds:
my society and culture shapes my body
my cultural/social body shapes how I experience the word
how I experience the world defines who I am
The same applies to the people I study as an anthropologist. So if I want to research how this happens, I had better try to move around like the people I am studying.
Limitations
Embodiment tends to focus on large sections of a society. The idea of habitus changed the focus a little towards a class. The idea is that different classes have different bodily dispositions. So we'll turn to that in a later module on Field Theory & Habitus.
Further research
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, following this, we will delve further into anthropological accounts of lived experience and embodiment.
