ANTHROPOLOGIES OF THE BODY

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ANTHROPOLOGIES OF THE BODY

• Scheper-Hughes Lock the mindful body
• Phenomenology embodiment
• Bourdieu Structure, habitus, practice

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Scheper-Hughes Lock anthropology of the body

• The body as simultaneously a physical and
  symbolic artifact, naturally and culturally
  produced, anchored in a particular historical
  moment
• Four bodies individual body, social body, and
  body politic, the mindful body
• separate but overlapping units of analysis
• different theoretical approaches
• phenomenology, structuralism and symbolism,
  post-structuralism (practice theory structure
  agency)

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The Individual Body

• lived experience of the body-self, body, mind,
  matter, psyche, soul

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The Social Body

• representational uses of the body as a natural
  symbol with which to think about nature, society,
  culture

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The Body Politic

• regulation, surveillance, control of bodies
  (individual collective) in reproduction
  sexuality, in work leisure, in sickness other
  forms of deviance

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The Mindful Body

• the most immediate, the proximate terrain where
  social truths and social contradictions are
  played out
• a locus of personal and social resistance,
  creativity, and struggle
• emotions form the mediatrix between the
  individual, social and political body, unified
  through the concept of the 'mindful body.'

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PHENOMENOLOGY EMBODIMENT

• Body is not an object to be studied in relation
  to culture, but is to be considered as the
  SUBJECT of culture
• body is a setting in relation to the world
  consciousness is the body projecting itself into
  the world
• Experience not a primordial existential given but
  a historically and culturally constitutes process
  predicated on certain ways of being in the world

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STRUCTURE, HABITUS, PRACTICE (agency)

• Structure a particular class of conditions of
  existence produce habitus
• Habitus regulated and regular without being in
  any way the product of obedience to rules
• habitus can be collectively orchestrated without
  being the product of the organizing action of a
  conductor
• Social agents operate according to their "feel
  for the game" (the "feel" being, roughly,
  habitus, and the "game" being the structure).

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STRUCTURE, HABITUS, PRACTICE (agency)

• Practical sense (practice) -- proleptic
  adjustment (anticipatory) to demands of a field
  (structure)
• encounter between habitus and a field which makes
  possible the near-perfect anticipation of the
  future inscribed in all the concrete
  configurations (structure)
• the experience -- objective structures -- played
  out as the feel for direction, orientation,
  impending outcome

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Gender the individual body, the social body,
the body politic, and habitus

• Sex, sexuality, gender
• Not the same thing

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Sex the individual body

• differences in biology
• Is this a man or woman?
• How do you know?

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Sex the Social Body

• Tells us part of the story, but not all of the
  story

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Gender
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Gender

• GENDER - the cultural construction of male
  female characteristics
• vs. the biological nature of men women
• SEX differences are biological - GENDER
  differences are cultural
• behavioral attitudinal differences from social
  cultural rather than biological point of view
• Gender refers to the ways members of the two
  sexes are perceived, evaluated and expected to
  behave

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Gender Boundaries

• since gender is culturally constructed the
  boundaries are conceptual rather than physical
• Boundaries require markers to indicate gender
• the boundaries are dynamic, eg. now it is
  acceptable for men to wear earrings

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Boundary Markers

• Voice
• Physique
• Dress
• Behaviour
• Hair style
• Kinetics
• Language use

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Boundary Markers Inter-personal Interaction

• How do we react when someone seems to have traits
  of each category?
• social intercourse requires that the interacting
  parties know to which gender category the other'
  belongs

Felicita Vestvali1824 - 1880
New York opera star who specialized in singing
contralto "trouser roles."
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Women cross dress all the time. The difference
is perception. Acceptance or Rejection by society
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Blurring the Boundaries

• persistence of dualisms in ideologies of gender
• other categories - every society including our
  own is at some time or other faced with people
  who do not fit into its sex gender categories

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Third Gender

• a significant number of people are born with
  genitalia that is neither clearly male or female
• Hermaphrodites
• persons who change their biological sex
• persons who exhibit behavior deemed appropriate
  for the opposite sex
• persons who take on other gender roles other than
  those indicated by their genitals

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Third Gender

• multiple cultural historical worlds in which
  people of divergent gender sexual desire exist
• margins or borders of society
• may pass as normal to remain hidden in the
  official ideology everyday commerce of social
  life
• In some societies when discovered - iconic matter
  out of place - "monsters of the cultural
  imagination
• third gender as sexual deviance a common theme in
  N. America

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Is it possible to have a genderless society?
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Sexuality the body politic

• all societies regulate sexuality
• lots of variation cross-culturally
• degree of restrictiveness not always consistent
  through life span
• adolescence vs. adulthood
• Varieties of normative sexual orientation
• Heterosexual, homosexual, transexual
• Sexuality in societies change over time

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Sexuality as body politics

• sex acts have varying social significance and
  subjective meanings in accordance with the
  cultural context in which they occur
• as evidenced by cross-cultural variation in sex
  categories and labels
• the underlying assumption -- sexuality is
  mediated by cultural and historical factors
• distinctions to be made between sexual acts,
  sexual identities, and sexual communities.

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GENDER POWER

• gender roles - tasks activities that a culture
  assigns to sexes
• gender stereotypes - oversimplified strongly held
  ideas about the characteristics of men women
  third sex-third gender
• gender stratification - unequal distribution of
  rewards (socially valued resources, power,
  prestige, personal freedom) between men women
  reflecting their position in the social hierarchy

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Gender the Social Order
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Social Stratification Gender

• Gender is an important dimension of social
  inequality
• Gender stratification frequently takes the form
  of patriarchy whereby men dominate women
• Do women in our society have a second class
  status relative to men? If so How?

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universals versus particulars

• universal subordination of women is often cited
  as one of the true cross-cultural universals, a
  pan-cultural fact
• Engels called it the world historical defeat of
  women
• even so the particulars of womens roles,
  statuses, power, and value differ tremendously by
  culture

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The Poetics Politics of Bodies

• Body image as text/representation
• The poetics of the text/representation
• identify aesthetic elements, narrative
  structures, epistemology
• The politics of text/representation
• Behavior (structure) controls perception
• the body image experienced in perception
  approximates that anticipated by the cognized
  behaving self.
• the use of the body-as-symbol and the distortion
  of the body image for communicative purposes
• Images of our bodies is a basic component of our
  concept of our self and our personal identity.

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Some Observations of Bodies in N. America

• media's increasing use of slim female models and
  images of nearly unattainable body measurements
• young women are subjected to images of the
  perfect female body and are subsequently
  distorting their own body images
• Complaints about body fat have become normal
  discourse among females
• This pattern of body image distortion is
  considerably more pronounced and more common in
  women than in men, to the point that it is
  considered a characteristically female phenomenon
  (1999).
• new field of social aesthetics

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Western Male Bodies Taiwanese Male Bodies

• Body image disorders appear to be more prevalent
  in Western than non-Western men
• Previous studies have shown that young Western
  men display unrealistic body ideals and that
  Western advertising seems to place an increasing
  value on the male body
• Do Taiwanese men exhibit less dissatisfaction
  with their bodies than Western men?
• Does Taiwanese advertising place less value on
  the male body than Western media?
• Am J Psychiatry 162263-269, February 2005

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Men Poetics/Politics of Male Bodies
advertising self

• Taiwanese men exhibited significantly less body
  dissatisfaction than their Western counterparts.
• In the magazine study, American magazine
  advertisements portrayed undressed Western men
  frequently, but Taiwanese magazines portrayed
  undressed Asian men rarely

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Conclusions

• Taiwan appears less preoccupied with male body
  image than Western societies.
• This difference may reflect
• Western traditions emphasizing muscularity and
  fitness as a measure of masculinity
• increasing exposure of Western men to muscular
  male bodies in media images
• greater decline in traditional male roles in the
  West, leading to greater emphasis on the body as
  a measure of masculinity
• These factors may explain why body dysmorphic
  disorder and anabolic steroid abuse are more
  serious problems in the West than in Taiwan.

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Discourse, Subjectivity, Power

• Discourses
• a system of representation
• Codes and conventions
• rules and practices that produce meaningful
  statements and regulate discourse in different
  historical periods
• "Discourse, Foucault argues, constructs the
  topic.  It defines and produces the objects of
  our knowledge.  It governs the way that a topic
  can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned
  about.

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Concepts of the Individual, self, person in
anthropology

• Individual as member of humankinde (biologistic)
• Self as locus of experience (psychologistic)
• Person as agent-in-society (sociologistic)

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Identity and Subjectivity

• Social order -- arrays of identifications
  jockeying for position, gaining and losing
  strength, clashing with others, aligning with
  still others, and defining the texture of social
  action in their activity.
• Subjectivity complex negotiation of
  representation experience
• constructing the subject, constructing agency,
  constituting subjectivity

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Discourse, Subjectivity, Power

• Discourse -- the bearer of various subject
  positions
• Subject positions -- specific positions of agency
  and identity in relation to particular forms of
  knowledge and practice
• Subjectivity --produced within discourse,
  subjected to discourse.
• subject position--for us to become the subject
  of a particular discourse,  and thus the bearers
  of its power/knowledge we must locate ourselves
  in the position from which the discourse makes
  most sense, and thus become its 'subjects' by
  subjecting' ourselves to its meanings, power and
  regulation.

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Discourse, Gender, Power

• sexuality and the body -- sites of power and
  politics
• socially imposed structures that objectified
  sexual identity and gender differences
• socially imposed structures that shape gender
  relations and behavior