몸의 기술_마르셀 모스_1973

 

Marcel Mauss (1973) Techniques of the body , Economy and Society, 2:1, 70-88_ translated by Ben Brewster

 

I was well aware that walking or swimming and all sorts of things of the same type, are specific to determinate societies.

'miscellaneous' 

There is a complete change in technique of the body. Every technique properly so-called has its own form.

But the same is true of every attitude of the body. Each society has its own special habits. 

The positions of the arms and hands while walking from a social idiosyncracy, they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely psychical arrangements and mechanisms. There exists an education in walking, too. 

 

Hence I have had this notion of the social nature of the 'habitus' for many years. Please note that I use the Latin word habitus. It does not designate those metaphysical habitutdes, that mysterious 'memory', the subjects of volumes or short and famous theses. These 'habits' do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties. 

The constant relations between the biological and the sociological leaves but little room for the psychological mediator. 

Triple viewpoint: mechanical and physical - psychological - sociological.

In all these elements of the art of using the human body, the facts of education were dominant. The notion of education could be superimposed on that of imitation. What takes place is a prestigious imitation. The individual borrows the series of movements which constitute it from the action executed in front of him or with him by others. 

 

It is precisely this notion of the prestige of the person who performs the ordered, authorised, tested action vis-a-vis the imitating individual that contains all the social element. 

 

The psychological phenomenont I am reporting at this moment is clearly only too easy to know and understand from the noraml point of view of the sociologist. But what I want to get at now is the confidence, the psychological momentum that can be linked to an action which is primarily a fact of biological resistance, obtained thanks to some words and a magical object. 

 

I call technique an action which is effective and traditional ( and you will see that in this it is no different from a magical, religious or symbolic action) There is no technique and no transmission in the absence of tradition. 

The body is man's first and most natural instrument. The constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical or chemical aim is pursued in a series of assembed actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself alone but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it. 

 

 

Two things were immediately apparent given the notion of techniques of the body: they are divided and vary by sex and by age. 

The techniques of the body can be classified according to their efficiency, i.e. according to the results of training. As a result I could to a certain extent compare these techniques, them and their transmission, to training systems, and rank them in the order of their effectiveness. This is the place of the notion of dexterity, so important in psychology as well as in sociology. 

 

Transmission of the form of the techniques... The teaching of techniques being essential, we can classify them according to the nature of this education and training. To know why he does not make a certain gesture and does make a certain other gesture neither the physiology nor the psychology of motor asymmetry in man is enough, it is also necessary to know the traditions which impose it. But reflections of this and other kinds can be applied whenever there is a social choice of the principles of movements. 

 

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examples....)

There are techniques of giving birth, both on the mother's part and on that of her helpers, of holding the baby, cutting and tying the umbilical cord, caring for the mother, caring for the child. 

Rearing and feeding the child..Weaning..The weaned child...The big moment in the education of the body is, in fact, the moment of initiation... To list techniques of adult life(sleep, waking, while waking, rest, activity) we can run through the various moments of the day among which co-ordinated movements and suspensions of movement are distributed.

Things we find natural are historical. 

 

Techniques of sleep. Waking. Techniques of activity, of movement. Walking. Running. Dancing. Jumping. Climbing. Descent. Swimming. Forceful movements. Techniques of care for the body. Rubbing, washing, soaping. Care of the mouth. Hygiene in the needs of nature. Consumption techniques. Eating. Drinking. Techniques of Reproduction. techniques of the care of the abnormal: massages, etc. 

 

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What emerges very clearly from them is the fact that we are everywhere faced with physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions. These actions are more or less habitual and more or less ancient in the life of the individual and the history of the society. 

These series are assembled by and for social authority. In group life as a whole there is a kind of education of movements in close order. In every society, everyone knows and has to know and learn what he has to do in all conditions. 

On the other hand, since these are movements of the body, this all presupposes an enormous biological and pysiological apparatus. 

 

There are two big questions on the agenda for psychology: the question of individual capacities, of technical orientation, and the question of salient features, of bio-typology, which may concur with the brief investigations I have just made. 

Biologico-sociological phenomena. 

 

I believe that this whole notion of the education of races that are selected on the basis of a determinate efficiency is one of the fundamental moments of history itself: education of the vision, education in walking--ascending, descending, running. It consists especially of education in composure. 

The resistance to emotional seizure is something fundamental in social and mental life. It seperates out, it even classifies the so-called primitive societies; according to whether they display more brutal unreflected, unconscious reactions or on the contrary more isolated, preciese actions governed by a clear consciousness.

 

socio-psycho-biological study should be made. I even believe that all the recent discoveries in reflex therapy deserve our attention, ours, the sociologists', as well as that of biologists and psychologists ... much more competent than ourselves.