Review: Making Bodies

Reviewed Work(s): The Body as Material Culture by JoannaR. Sofaer

Review by: John Robb
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 50, No. 1 (February 2009), pp. 169-170
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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169

process aspires to a momentous significance for otherly forms

of life, love, and labor beyond (trans)nationalism.
The archival turn coined by Ann Stoler in the 1990s
presaged an eminently interdisciplinary enterprise. Papailiass
theoretically informed ethnography of the forms of historical
consciousness skillfully balances between disciplines and, notably, employs linguistics as well as literary/cultural studies to
energize the relations between anthropology and history. Its
understanding of the versatility of writing modes in particular
is matched by the authors own impeccable writing. Its insights are archival in scope; were the reader to take a cue
from the case studies, he or she might solely read the books
footnotes and still generate a host of alternative histories.

Making Bodies
John Robb
Department of Archaeology, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, United Kingdom (jer39@cam.ac.uk). 20
VI 08
The Body as Material Culture. By Joanna R. Sofaer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Bodies do not just happen. They are created socially by other
bodies. This does not mean simply sexual reproduction but
many other processes: feeding and nourishing, training and
teaching, clothing and sheltering, ornamenting and modifying. We also subject the body to work and mechanical stress
and to disease, deprivation, and violence. While the body is
an ensemble of biological processes, it does not prosper or
dwindle through autonomous biology; at every step it is
formed in a matrix of social relations.
This interpenetration of biology and social relations makes
the body an extraordinarily complex object of analysis and
one for which our theoretical reflexes have rarely proved up
to the task. As Joanna Sofaer demonstrates in The Body as
Material Culture, analysts have been polarized along the lines
of a conventional dichotomy between nature and culture.
On one side stand biological anthropologists and many archaeologists. They treat the body as essentially a biological
object that may be modified socially but that has a fixed,
objectively definable universal nature. On the other side stand
social theorists, who treat the body as a social construction,
as the locus of meaning, representation, and experience specific to a particular culture or context. Foucault, for instance,
saw the modern European disciplined body as constructed
through networks of power in contexts such as hospitals,
prisons, factories, and schools. Bourdieus concept of the habitus as the locus of social reproduction provides another influential model, as does Butlers feminist discussion of gender
as a performative identity. Such constructivist approaches
have put the body on the map as an important theoretical
topic, showing how it is the key means through which people

internalize, experience, and reproduce social relations and

their understanding of the world. Yet paradoxically, the more
theorists have put the materiality of the body on center stage,
the more they have tended to lose sight of its actual physical
existence in the process. In such analyses, the body risks becoming an empty conduit for social experience, a blank canvas
to be inscribed with power relations.
This is the basic problem Sofaer explores in this book, and
it is no coincidence that she is one of the few theorists to
attempt to tackle it head on. With one foot in the biological
sciences and the other in social theory, it is impossible for a
theoretically minded osteoarchaeologist to conveniently ignore this divide as other theorists do. Sofaer begins with a
cogent and well-read critique of how archaeologists and anthropologists have addressed the body. She accurately points
out how archaeologists have split neatly into nature (skeletal
studies) and culture (gender and embodiment theorists)
camps, reproducing the divisions in the larger field. The result
is mutual incomprehension and loss of potentially valuable
insights. Osteoarchaeologists have little sense of what the important questions to ask might be. Conversely, even archaeologists writing about topics such as gender rarely trouble to
ask skeletal analysts to do more than come up with a list of
the age and sex of burials.
Sofaers solution to the problem is simple and powerfully
direct. She starts from the position that the body is biologically
plastic throughout its lifetime. It adapts continually to environmental conditions, nutrition, and stress. But since the
bodys environment is social, the body forms in response to
social conditions. Hence, the body is not a preexisting biological entity overlaid by a veneer of sociality; it is fundamentally social. For example, one might cite systematic differences in stature, weight, health, nutrition, and longevity
between different social classesnot only differences that
leave traces in the skeletal or other histories of the body but
also those that are socially salient and contribute to class hexis.
Most of Sofaers illustrations of the social plasticity of the
body deal with age and gender; she has extensive discussion,
for instance, of how male and female bodies develop differently as a result of the social construction of gender. As an
osteoarchaeologist, she argues this case almost entirely from
skeletal evidence rather than considering other aspects of human biology, a challenging choice of terrain. But while biological anthropologists may feel that the case for skeletal plasticity is overstated in places and osteoarchaeologists will admit
that the skeletal does not reflect all social contexts sensitively,
overall, she mounts a powerful argument.
Nowhere is Sofaers argument more pointed than in cutting
the Gordian knot of sex and gender. As she explains, pioneering gender theorists such as Ortner and Whitehead used
a straightforward and still widely held equation: sex refers
to innate or actual biological difference, while gender refers
to the elaboration of these differences into a cultural system.
This foundation has been the object of heated criticism from
Butler and other scholars, criticism that has had echoes within

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170

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009

archaeological theory. The basis of these critiques is that sexual

difference is not a simple objectively existing fact but is itself
the result of social categorization and representation. Medical
practitioners, for instance, are taught to prioritize genotypic,
endocrine, or phenotypic criteria in identifying sex at different ages and to categorize some genotypes and phenotypes
as normal and others as aberrant. As Sofaer argues, while
these critiques theoretically acknowledge the material basis
of the body, they focus instead on the materiality of the
body (e.g., on how a particular culture constructs its understanding of what the body is as a physical object). To Sofaer,
this tends to make the actual body vanish in an infinitely
regressing chain of representation. As she argues, biological
difference is understood through social representations, but
that does not mean it is infinitely malleable and can be reduced to those representations. As a solution to a long-standing theoretical problem, Sofaers path will not please all parties
in archaeology and anthropology, but it may prove much
more useful than the assumption that all cultures construct
their understanding of sexual difference in a way entirely
unconstrained by the bodys material basis. As she notes, in
discussing osteoarchaeological methods for sexing skeletons,
it is possible to acknowledge that the particular notion of sex
is a social construct without suggesting that the observable
differences between men and women are some sort of irrelevant mirage . . . sex has a material reality; it is not simply
a representation (p. 96).
The two final chapters of The Body as Material Culture
apply this perspective to the study of sex and age. For each
topic, Sofaer discusses how the concept has been constructed
through anthropological and archaeological methodologies
and reviews skeletal evidence for the social plasticity and development of the body, showing clearly how skeletons come
to be socially gendered and to develop in a social biography.
While these chapters review a broad range of concepts and
interpretations, it is clear that they are also manifestos for a
field still in its infancy in which much of the seminar work
remains to be done. Indeed, the principal limitation of The
Body as Material Culture is simply that this elegant and lucid
argument, which should be read by all osteoarchaeologists
with ambitions to escape from the ghetto of the specialist
report in the appendix, really cries out for one more chapter.
It would be wonderfully supplemented by a really thorough
case study that takes members of a single communityone
thinks of Roses Cedar Grove (Arkansas) ex-slaves or Molleson and Coxs Spitalfields weaversand explores their social
world through their bodies. Perhaps such a chapter will be
found in the next edition.

Correcting the Record

Kathleen Sterling
Archaeology Program and Department of Anthropology,
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A. (sterling@post.harvard.edu). 20 VI 08
Distorting the Past: Gender and the Division of Labor in the
European Upper Paleolithic. By Linda R. Owen. Tubingen:
Kerns Verlag, 2005.
The subtitle of Linda R. Owens book, with the word gender
in it, should not scare off those who believe that gender in
the Upper Paleolithic is inaccessible. Distorting the Past, the
result of her habilitation thesis, contains a wealth of information for anyone interested in hunter-gatherer subsistence,
perishable technologies, and, yes, gender in Magdalenian
southwestern Germany.
Owen opens by describing the familiar stereotype of Upper
Paleolithic life: strong men engaged in a dramatic battle
against big game while meek women wait patiently at the
cave, maybe scraping hides or holding babies. Men have to
travel long distances to bring home the bacon, all the while
defending their families from the dangers lurking around every corner. Women, burdened by pregnancy and motherhood,
pick berries close to camp, never straying far lest they get lost.
These images are so common that despite being a historically
situated fiction, they permeate the interpretation of highly
mobile hunter-gatherer groups, even when gender is not explicitly on the agenda. Owen explains that her intent is to
focus on the division of labor as a means of investigating
gender within the limits of the archaeological record and using
carefully applied ethnographic analogy.
Before applying ethnographic analogy, Owen spends a good
deal of time in the first chapter examining the sources and
uses of ethnography in the interpretation of hunter-gatherer
cultures, particularly those of the Ice Age. The most common
sources for this information are Murdocks Ethnographic Atlas
(1967), Lee and DeVores Man the Hunter (1968), and individual ethnographies of northern-latitude groups. The Ethnographic Atlas is a compilation and summary of the ethnographies of 862 societies that, among other things, assigns
relative importance to five subsistence activities (gathering,
hunting, fishing, pastoralism, and agriculture) within any
given group as well as the degree of specialization by sex.
Gathering consists of obtaining wild plant products, animal
products such as honey and eggs, and insects and small lizards.
Fishing consists of obtaining any aquatic animal resources,
and hunting consists of obtaining any terrestrial animal resources by any means. However, when the source ethnographies become part of the larger sample, something is lost.
Womens contributions to subsistence end up representing
little to nothing. In addition, Murdocks definitions of subsistence tasks are not universal. In some ethnographic accounts, the use of snares or nets is not considered hunting

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