Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology_Csordas_1988

 

Hallowell prefigured an anthropological critique of the distinction between subject and object.

However, although he explicitly recognized the self as a self-objectification and the product of a reflexive mood, Hallowell cast his analysis at the level of the already objectified self. 

 

Hallowell's second concern is summarized in the term "behavioral environment." borrowed from the gestalt psychology of Koffka. (...) A theory of practice can best be grounded in the socially informed body.

It is of methodological concern that he saw the person as associated with the distinction between the world of thought and the material world as promulgated by Descartes and Spinoza, since the paradigm of embodiment has as a principal characteristic the collapse of dualities between mind and body, subject and object. 

 

Mausse les techniques du corps. ... Here again we find the themes of perception and practice as domains of the culturally constituted self;  but writing nearly two decades before Hallowell, Mauss could not yet treat them together, still less within a consistent paradigm of embodiment.

 

Two theories of embodiment: Merleau-Ponty (1962), who elaborates embodiment in the problematic of perception, and Bourdieu (1977, 1984), who situates embodiment in an anthropolocial discourse of practice. 

 

I first examine two religious healing services, interpreting multisensoury imagery as an embodied cultural process. Then I examine the practice of speaking in tongues or glossolalia as embodied experience within a ritual system and as a cultural operator in the social trajectory of the religious movement. Finally, I return to a general discussion of the implication of embodiment as a methodological paradigm. 

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Methodological Orientation to Embodiment

 

The Perceptual Constitution of Cultural Objects

 

Habitus and the Socially Informed Body

 

Embodied Imagery in Ritual Healing

- Demons and Self-Objectification

 The important distinction for our discussion is between demons as cultural objects, and their experiential manifestations as concrete self-objectifications in religious participants. As cultural objects, demons are "no more fictitous, in a psychological sense, than is the concept of the self. Consequently, [as] culturally reified objects in the behavioral environment [they] may have functions that can be shown to be directly related to the needs, motivations, and goals of the self" (Hallowell 1955:87). 

As a system of representations, the demonology is a mirror image of the culturally ideal self, representing the range of its negative attributes. (...) Self-objectification may have taken place by adopting the conventional demonic idiom. A form of self-objectification as healing. (...) In Charismatic Christian healing, the language of control/release appears to have as much or greater experiential immediacy. 

 

The metaphor of bondage simultaneously invokes a material/corporal as well as a psychological/spritual condition addressed by healing. 

 

- Image, Emotion, and Bodily Synthesis

The second healing event, described from my own observation, was conducted in the context of a Roman Catholic Charismatic intentional community. Many participants "rest in the Spirit", an experience of motor dissociation in which a person is overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit and falls in a semi-swoon, typically experienced as a relaxing and rejuvenating moment in the presence of God. Also common is the "word of knowledge", a form of revelation not acquired through any channel of human communication, but experienced as a spontaneous thought or image. 

The group leaders' enumeration of the physical accompaniments of divine power that some participants would experience (heaviness, heat, tingling) recapitulates a repertoire acquired ..

 

Body and Speech: What kind of Speaking is Speaking in Tongues?

If embodiment is to attain the status of a paradigm, it should be possible even to construct an embodied account of language, typically the domain of linguistic, semiotic, and texture analyses. With this agenda I turn to the problem of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as a cultural and expressive phenomenon. 

 

- Semiosis and Embodiment in the Gestural Constitution of Self

By a semiotic account, glossolalia ruptures the world of human meaning, like a wedge forcing an opening in discourse and creating the possibility of creative cultural change, dissolving structures in order to facilitate the emergence of new ones. 

Merleau-Ponty(1962) sees at the root of speech a verbal gesture with immanent meaning, as against a notion of speech as a representation of thought. I would argue, with Merleau-Ponty, that all language has this gestural or existential meaning, and that glossolalia by its formal characteristic of eliminating the semantic level of linguistic structure highlights precisely the existential reality of intelligent bodies inhabiting a meaningful world. In glossolalia the physical experience of utterance (parole) comes into balance with the intellectual experience of language (langue). 

Gesture, emotional expression, and language are of a piece in being superimpositions of a human world on a natural or biological world. 

The gestural meaning of language. 체현된 언어

The musical performance of tongues in charismatic ritual suggests that its temporal structure may be more akin to music than to language, and indeed it has been analogized to scat singing in jazz. 

 

- Embodied Language and Ritual Practice

If embodiment really does advance our understanding of a particualr practice, it shoud also advance our understanding of how practices are related among themselves -- this is the contribution of Bourdieu's concept of habitus. 

In 'Technique du corps', a person is overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit and falls in a state of motor dissociation, while retaining some awareness of the surroundings and subsequent memory of the experience. It is typically characterized as peaceful, relaxing, rejuvenating, healing, and imbued with a sense of divine presence. 

The combination of active and passive uses of the body in one practice seems to be the concrete operator that allows for experiential communion of human and divine in a speaking body. 

The perspective of embodiment can also help us understand the relation between glossolalic prayer and a second form of Charismatic ritual language, prophecy. (...) Through the medium of the body, the relation between glossolalia as prayer and as prophecy is established not as one between activity and passivity, but as one between intimacy (prayer) and authority (prophecy) in the relation between God and humans. 

From the perspective of embodiment, glossolalia asserts the unity of body and mind, establishes a shared human world, and expresses of utterance, the human world is constituted in a blend of embodied voices, and every utterance is an initiating utterance, a transcendent beginning. 

 

Collapsed Dualities: Objectivist Explanations of Religious Experience

Learning may begin to account for its transmission in response to cues, and for its culturally consistent theological meaning, but not for how it can be perceived as power in ritual practice. 

To collapse the duality of mind and body yields a phenomenology of perception and self-perception that can pose the question of what is religious about religious experience without falling prey to the fallacies of either empiricism or intellectualism. To explain this approach I must return to my earlier conclusion that certain preobjective phenomena are misrecognized as originating in God instead of in the socially informed body. 

Durkheim committed a major error of reductionism. Subsequent generations have followed him in this sociological reductionism. Thus Geertz posits a definition of religion as a system of symbols. I submit that the theoretical power to get at these moods and motivations may be found among phenomenologists and historians of religion. 

When a thought or embodied image comes suddenly into consciousness, the Charismatic does not say "I had an insight", but "That wasn't from me, how could I have thought of that. It must be from the Lord." (...) The sui generis nature of the sacred is defined not by the capacity to have such experiences, but by the human propensity to thematize them as radically other. 

The paradigmatic significance of embodiment is then to provide the methodological grounds for an empirical (not empiricist) identification of instances of this otherness. 

 

Collapsed Dualities: Psychological Anthropology and the Body in the World

(1) In my opening argument I reiterated Hallowell's concern with the subject-object distinction and showed that within the incipient paradigm of embodiment both Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu require the collapse of such analytic dualities. 

(2) In the subsequent analyses I attempted to work out some implications of embodiment in the domain of charismatic religious experience. 

(3) The hermeneutic circle of this argument is completed with a return to the subject-object distinction, which in my view frames the central methodological issue of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty's existential analysis collapses the subject-object duality in order to more precisely pose the question of how the reflective processes of the intellect elaborate these domains of culture from the raw material of perception. 

Within a paradigm of embodiment, analysis would shift from perceptual categories and questions of classification and differentiation, to perceptual process and questions of objectification and attention/apperception. 

 

First, if we begin with the lived world of perceptual phenomena, our bodies are not objects to us. Quite the contrary, they are an integral part of the perceiving subject. When the body is recognized for what it is in experiential terms, not as an object but as a subject, the mind-body distinction becomes much more uncertain. 

If we do not perceive our own bodies as objects, neither do we perceice others as objects. 

Embodiment also has paradigmatic implications for the distinction between cognition and emotion. (...) the emotions are a kind of cognition with a greater "sense of the engagement of the actor's self, ... embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that 'I am invovled'". 

Rethinking the relation between subject and object also has implications for our conceptions of objectivity as the goal of science. An essential principle of indeterminacy within human life. Merleau-Ponty sees in the indeterminacy of perception a transcendence which does not outrun its embodied situation, but which always "asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a whole perceptual future". Bourdieu sees in the indeterminacy of practice that, since no person has conscious mastery of the modus operandi which integrates symbolic schemes and practices, the unfolding of his works and actions "always outruns his conscious intentions". 

As we have seen in ritual healing and ritual language, embodied selves inhabit a behavioral environment much broader than any single event. (...) It is yet more critical with the kind of religious movement I have described, which does not exist in a taken-for-granted world, but is set instead in a contemporary world where the principle of indeterminacy holds sway in a sea of opinion. 

 

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Reprise

The argument of this paper has been that the body is a productive starting point for analyzing culture and self. 

This is suggested, as I have argued, by the way embodiment poses additional questions about religious experience and eprception beyond those typically asked in psychological anthropology.