‘Bodies are inherently social in their materiality.’ Discuss using ethnographic examples.
Bodies are seen before they are known. The way people look, move, act, is likely to affect how people view, judge, and interact with them. The body’s outer appearance is the first thing offered to the world; bodies have varying heights, weights, skin tones, they are differently groomed, more or less clean, physically abled or disabled. Bodies move and behave differently, informing people’s judgement and opinion.
This essay will assess whether bodies are inherently social in their materiality. It will first look at the existing binary between ‘physical’ and ‘social’ bodies. Then, it will focus on understandings of the body as made, acquired, learned. Lastly, it will address what is means for bodies to be social.
To assert that bodies are inherently social supposes its opposite, that is, the existence of biological and physical bodies. Arguably, a physical body could refer to the body one is born with, stripped of clothes or accessories. Yet, very quickly, ‘physical’ bodies become social insofar as people often transform their bodies, through piercings, tattoos, hair dye, shaving. People thus think of and interact with bodies that have been transformed somewhat differently, their judgements and opinions might change.
The distinction between a physical and social body is further complicated by the issue of whether there exists such a thing as a distinctly physical body. Indeed, defining what would count as a physical body is a rather contentious issue. Some people live with disabilities or malformations and might require prosthetic limbs. Does their physical body exist only in the absence of those prosthetics? When they wear their prosthetics, are their bodies any less physical than a ‘normal’ body? Here, the social and biological become enmeshed to such an extent that asserting what is and what is not a physical body becomes difficult – with prosthetics not being extensions of the body in the way clothes or accessories are, yet not quite hitting the mark of ‘real physical’ limbs. Further, if the physical body is the one people are born with, how must bodies that have received transplants be understood? Their bodies remain ‘physical’ but are entangled in a web of social relations due to the altered materiality of their bodies.
In parallel with the question of the existence of definitive physical bodies is the question of definitive bodily states. Cohn and Lynch (2017) note that a truism such as ‘either a woman is pregnant or she is not’, which would confirm the idea of some states of the body as definitive, to some extent hides the nuanced reality behind it. They highlight how ‘as one starts to reflect on an absolute definition of pregnancy it rapidly becomes more and more uncertain’ asking whether it ‘really start[s] from conception, or when a fertilised egg travels down the fallopian tube, or only once it has successfully embedded into the wall of the uterus’? Interestingly, they suggest that even if matters of scale and chronology were agreed upon, women’s perspectives are still overlooked. Arguably, from a woman’s perspective, ‘the definition of pregnancy may not be driven by some objective external criteria at the microscopic or even molecular level’, rather, she may well regard it as ‘a description of her entire state of being and, indeed, a state of potential’. This outlines how universal claims about physical bodily states inadequately reveal the varying realities and embodied experiences.
Hence, if physical bodies as well as bodily states are innately variable, this begs the question of what a body’s materiality consists of. Vilaca (2009) notes that theories of embodiment always presuppose the individual human being as starting point. However, she argues that this is only one starting point, and that for example in Amazonia the starting point differs, ‘it would have to be an extended notion of the human, including various types of animals’. This echoes Castro’s (1998) idea that every being has ‘jam’ and the capacity to ‘jamu – to change affects and adopt other habits – enabling the person to be seen as similar by other types of beings’. Vilaca suggests that widely accepted western assumptions about subjects being constituted in advance, ‘anterior to the relations that produce them’, overshadows other analytical starting points where, for instance, in Amazonia, ‘different relational contexts produce not only distinct objectifications of phenomena but different bodily constitutions of the subject’. As follows, the result of a relational context in Amazonia ‘may therefore be an India or a jaguar or a tapir’, a world of ‘unstable bodies [where] there is no stable substrate’.
in the same vein, Gibson (1979) challenged common conceptions about the mind/body dichotomy. Going against the idea of the mind as a ‘distinct organ capable of operating under the bodily data of sense’, he proposed that perception is not ‘the achievement of a mind in a body’ but of ‘the organism as a whole in its environment’. Gibson suggests that ‘if the mind is anywhere, then it is not ‘inside the head’ rather than ‘out there’ in the world. To the contrary, it is immanent in the network of sensory pathways that are set up by virtue of the perceiver’s immersion in his or her environment’. To disassociate the body from its materiality opens up new ways of studying the body and challenges broadly accepted conceptions of what bodies are materially. Ingold (2000) notes that such conceptions of the organism, built into ‘mainstream theory in both evolutionary and environmental biology’, as a ‘discrete, bounded entity’ construct and consolidate the binary between what is inherently biological and what is inherently social.
Hence, where do bodies start and where do they end? Latour (2004) also ‘extends’ human bodies beyond their materiality and biological make up. Using the example of odour kits used in the training of ‘noses’ in the perfume industry in France, he highlights how in these training processes, ‘the kit becomes co-extensive with bodies [producing] a transformation in the body of the person and in the universe of which they are part, one element articulating another, one affecting the other’. Insofar as the odour kit itself has already been set up through ‘publications, conferences, documentation, conventional materials [and the] practices of the chemists and engineers who made it’, trainees, by using this kit, learn to be affected by ever more subtle distinctions. However, he outlines that it is not here a question of a more and more accurate ‘representation of odours that are already there in the world’ but rather a process of mutual articulation; the more ‘sensitive the bodies the trainees acquire, the more the world offers them – in this instance, the subtler fragrances they smell’. As such, bodies appear not to be fixed entities but instead readily changeable, affected by objects and things of the world in such a way that it becomes more than its biological make up as it becomes refined, modelled, newly receptive.
As such, there is a blurring of the distinction between the biological and the social. In fact, as Mauss (1973) highlights, the biological can become social through imitation. He notes that people, children and adults alike, imitate actions which have succeeded and which they have seen as ‘successfully performed’ by people in whom they have confidence and who have authority over them. Thus, the action is imposed from [above] even if it is an exclusively biological action’. Individuals, by borrowing these biological actions, integrate them into social interactions. Conversely, the social can become biological. Low (1994) exemplifies this through the condition of nervios in Costa Rica, Guatemala and elsewhere. She claims that in ‘situations of poverty, migration and discrimination [the] illness of nervios occurs – with sufferers shaking, feeling dizzy, week and feeling unable to sleep’. She contends that nervios must not be understood as a metaphor about or imposed on the body, rather, it is ‘real, it is embodied, it is a condition in which what we might want to see as the ‘social’ emerges in bodily experience’.
Moreover, what is social can become naturalised, believed to be biological. A surprising example is the fact of spitting. Mauss recalls how this one little girl did not know how to spit, making every cold she had much worse. After some inquiries he soon found out that in the little girl’s father’s village and in her father’s family, people did not know how to spit. Mauss began to teach her how to spit, giving her ‘four sous per spit’, and, consequently, she was the first person in her family to know how to spit. Here, a biological function that is taken for granted by many actually reveals itself to be, to some extent, a learned disposition rather than an innate reflex. This echoes Bourdieu’s (1990) work on the habitus (a notion which he developed from Mauss). To him, habitus referred to a ‘system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions’. He argued that individuals were ‘socialised’, which he viewed as the inculcation of dispositions and generative schemes, which enabled bodies to develop ‘automatisms’. Thus, although one talks, eats, sits, and writes in particular ways at particular times most people don’t consciously notice this, to the extent that it becomes, in a sense, naturalized.
Csordas (1990) outlines how ‘gesture, emotional expression, and language are of a piece in being superimpositions of a human world on a natural or biological world. He quotes Merleau-Ponty (1962) noting that because of a ‘genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man… behaviour creates meanings which are transcendent in relation to the anatomical apparatus, and yet immanent to the behaviour as such, since it communicates itself and is understood’. Thus, a smile, while grounded in the ‘same anatomical apparatus’, transcends it by being appropriated or thematized; for example, as friendship for the American, and anger for the Japanese (Ekman 1982).
The biological and the social thus appear intrinsically linked and in a relation of mutual influence.
Bodies are made; they are learned, acquired, shaped, modelled. McDonald (2018) notes that ‘we are, in priority, embodied: we are of the world and it is only through this that we can think and reflect, and know who we are. The world is a fundamental part of the constitution of what it means to be human, and inherent to the constitution of any ‘self’’. Further, subjectivity presupposes intersubjectivity, the relations that produce a self. Toren (1998) highlights that ‘[one is] born into a set of relations with others and the ideas held by those others and the practices with which they are associated have informed, and continue to inform, the process [of] becoming’. Intersubjectivity, through which we recognise one another as human beings, is a fundamental condition of human life. Toren outlines that the ‘core of our understanding of one another is our common knowledge of the fundamentals of human existence, of heat and cold, day and night, hunger and satisfaction, laughter and sex … birth and death, pain and joy’. Yet, interestingly, while there may be a form of fundamental human existence, it varies greatly. Csordas (1994) underlines that ‘bodily processes like breathing [(for example, the sigh)], blushing, menstruation, birth, sex, crying and laughing are of interest in their cultural variations’. As follows, such the cultural variations of ‘natural’ bodily expressions have fostered claims that there is value in thinking not of a universal body, but rather, located bodies. Ingold (2000) encapsulates this in his notions of ‘enskilment’ and ‘dwelling’. He argues that skills become ‘incorporated into the modus operandi of the developing human organism through training and experience in the performance of particular tasks’; tasks which depend on people’s modes of ‘dwelling’, which can refer to their modes of travelling, of recreational activity or their means of subsistence or earning a living. Echoing Latour’s idea of bodies being able to progressively fine tune their perceptions, Ingold contends that enskilment is done through ‘observation and imitation’ in order to learn how to ‘feel this, taste that, or watch out for the other thing’. As such, bodies become attuned to their environment, reflecting the widely adhered to social practices of where they are. McDonald (2018) even goes to suggest that ‘in an important sense, bodies are environments – and they embody their environments … embodiment may mean that you are what you eat or how you dwell, or the person your relatives and environments make you, and that you make, too. There is no universal ‘human body’ on which relational embodiments depend’. Here we move away from the view of a fixed body, an ‘it’, to a performing, active and lived body. Hence, instead of any ‘fixed, habitual dispositions, and instead of ‘the body’, [emerges] a world of bodies that are constituted and reconstituted through an inherence in their environing world’.
this can be illustrated by Mauss’ (1973) inquiry into the techniques of the body. He observes that the ways in which people use their material bodies are first and foremost social insofar as they are learnt. For instance, during the War he noticed that the English troops he was with did not know how to use the French spades, forcing them to change ‘8,000 spades a division when [reliving the] French division, and vice versa’, showing that ‘a manual knack can only be learnt slowly’. In the same vein, being hospitalised in New York, he felt that the way the nurses walked was familiar to him. It dawned upon him that he had previously seen this walk at the cinema. Interestingly, when he returned to France, he realised how common this gait was, notably in Paris, thus suggesting that the American walking fashion had begun to arrive in France due to the cinema. This led him to claim that ‘the positions of the arms and the hands while walking form a social idiosyncrasy, they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely physical arrangements and mechanisms’. Further, variations in how people sleep – lying down or standing up, as is the case of the Masai – and give birth – again, lying down, standing up, or even on all fours – attest to how biology is socially interpreted and understood. Toren (1998) summarises this by saying that ‘concepts of biology … have a history [and as such] our biological descriptions of what it is to be human cannot be taken to be transparently true’. This social tinge to biology enables more fluid conceptualisations of the body.
Of interest is the claim that the body can no longer be considered a ‘bounded entity’. Featherstone (1991) contends that in the milieu of ‘late capitalism’ and ‘consumer culture’, with its multiplicity of images stimulating needs and desires and corresponding changes in material arrangements of social space, ‘the body/self has become primarily a performing self of appearing [and] display’. This performative body actively transforms itself to better fit societal standards. Bordo (1990) highlights that dieters’ techniques are not directed primarily towards weight loss, rather, they serve the purposes of ‘social mobility’. Likewise, Csordas (1994) stresses how ‘the aestheticism of inner body discipline is no longer incompatible with outer body hedonism, but has become a means toward it; one not only exercises to look good, but wants to look good while exercising’ with some women, for example, applying makeup before their workouts. Thus, increasingly, bodies in their materiality – in how they move, how they look, how they perform – become socially relevant, encouraging transformations of ‘biological’ bodies into social ones.
It would seem then that, to a large extent, bodies are social in their actions, reactions and interactions. But what does it mean for bodies to be social? Above all, bodies are social visually. Benson (1997) writes that ‘the body is the medium through which messages about identity are transmitted’ insofar as it is the flesh that is made available to the social world; it is through managing the flesh that we make visible not only to others but also to ourselves our ‘inner intentions, capacities, and dispositions’. Bodies are always read and interpreted, made part of social life. Wacquant (1998) quotes a boxing referee claiming he can predict the outcome of a fight based on a detailed inspection and comparative hermeneutic of the physique of the two contestants; ‘how they’re build, y’know, how they look physically, it tells me, it tells me seventy-five percent who’s gonna be the winner’. That bodies are social allows for change. For instance, the assumptions held and judgment of people with disabilities would be paralysing if the body could not be remodelled and revalued through social interactions.
What is more, as Cohn and Lynch (2017) note, to think of bodies as social enables us to ‘explore the assumption that scientific knowledge is universally applicable’ – leading for example, to ‘the idea that human biology is inescapably a local concern and inevitably contingent on a wide variety of social, physical and physiological circumstances’ (Lock 2001). To a certain extent, biology is neither universal nor timeless, rather it is particular and inscribed in a temporality. Cohn and Lynch (2017) take the example of tuberculosis, arguing that tuberculosis as we conceive it today is infinitely different to what Hippocrates described as something called phthisis. Further, ‘tuberculosis’ is not exactly the same all over the world. Indeed, ‘whilst there may be good grounds to assert sufficient similarity to warrant a standardised biomedical conception of the disease, there may alternatively be valid claims: that the micro bacterium varies; that the resulting pathology takes different forms; that dissimilar treatments shape the condition very differently; or that the illness experience is so varied, that a singular term fails to acknowledge the inherent variation’. Hence, as Toren (1998) points out ‘given our different ideas of the body and of what constitutes health and illness, it follows that Chinese medicine differs significantly from Ayurvedic medicine and orthodox Western medicine’. As such, because biological conceptions of the body are more social than they may appear, not only is the body inherently social but also the practices and methods concerning the body.
Yet, while bodies are always social, are they only social? Arguably, they are not. In Toren’s (1998) words, ‘you are a biologically social being and because you are, you cannot help but engage others in the process of becoming yourself: indeed, throughout infancy others were necessary to keep you alive, but even when you were an infant, these others could not entirely determine what happened to you, nor did they have absolute control over the relations between you. Because, even in infancy, even as a new-born, your responses to others were just that – your responses, and as such they contributed to the precise nature of the intersubjective relations in which you were engaged’. Ultimately, while an individual’s interactions may be manifold, introducing them to certain aspects of the world, it is still them, at the end of the day, making meaning out of the meanings they are presented with. Toren thus deems humans to be ‘autopoietic’, that is ‘self-creating or self-producing’ insofar as despite the pervasiveness of the social, it can only influence, not determine the meaning made by individuals. Further, while bodies are social yet individual, they are also political, notably through the proliferation of political violence of all types; ‘ethnic violence, sexual violence, self-destructive violence, domestic violence, and gang violence’ (Csordas 1994) to name a few.
Lastly, an interesting manifestation of the inherently social nature of bodies is death, encapsulating the ambivalence of purely biological or social bodies. Through their work on dissection and memorialisation of the dead, both Hallam (2017) and Olejaz (2017) show how hard it is to dissociate bodies in their material and physical form from the social world it is embedded in. For instance, Hallam (2017) outlines that bodies do not automatically become biological entities upon death. This is illustrated by the existence of ‘strong public expectations with regard to the appropriate treatment and disposal of human remains by the medical profession’. That legislation such as the Human Tissue Act of 2004, which aims to ensure the ‘informed consent of donors and tighter licensed control of the procurement, use, and disposal of human tissue’, exists denotes the inherent sociality conferred to human biology as opposed to, for example, animal biology. Olejaz (2017) notes that this identification with the cadavers is the most challenging part of anatomical dissection insofar as ‘moments when the distance between cadaver and student is somehow breached by shared flesh materiality or when the traits of the cadaver remind people of themselves or a dear loved one … the latent personhood of the cadaver [not] only reminds the students that the cadaver was once a sentient being, it also reminds them of their common materiality’.
Thus, even after death, bodies remain social in important ways. Olejaz (2017) refers to dead bodies’ ‘postvital-life’ which she understands to mean ‘instances where human bodily material lives on after the person dies and thereby carries with it traces of this person into new social arenas, affecting the lives of those who engage with it’. Hallam (2017) emphasises the importance of memorialisation, given this ‘social life’ beyond life, with many universities installing memorials for the donors. Cardiff’s school of Biosciences’ memorial for instance was designed by the artist Tom Philips and on it was inscribed ‘Alive we thought beyond our lives to give our bodies as a book for you to read’. This enables, to some extent, a bridging of the gap between cadavers and the people they were.
To conclude, bodies transcend their biology; they are malleable, variable, multiple. Perhaps, as Haraway (1991) suggests, ‘neither our personal bodies nor our social bodies may be seen as natural, in the sense of existing outside the self-creating process called human labour’. Thus, seeing bodies as social implies that they are not fixed, that meanings and understandings can change and be negotiated.
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