3 Bodily Reform as Historical Practice ‘abt tas its abode neliher in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body as mediator of a world Hae Mores ony cee) t eee ne aera EEE LL BE stveet Sourstenn Tswana sertieMenrs dating back 0 preco- Jonial times, Mafikeng was, in 1970, a sprawl of mudbrick homesteads clustered in circular wards about a dilapidated chiefly court. Formerly the 1 of the independent Barolong boo Ratshidi (Tshidi) chiefdom, i now aburced the unfinished administrative center of a South African “eth, nic homeland,” or bantustan,!in whose imperious embrace the Tshidi were locked. At the time, a population of more than 20,000 lived in this old town clos to the South AVfrica~Botswana border, a town whose involuted, concentric forms stood in stark contrast to the tnfocused grids of square modern houses of both the homeland and the nearby “white” center. As darkness fll on the dusty skyline, the sound of children’s voices, corn fails, and cattle would be punctuated by a more urgent and rhythmic sound: the drums that proclaimed the presence of more than fifty flourishing Zionist churches. Along the radial dirt roads, figures of distinctive dress and bearing made their way to the sources of the sound, usually the humble hhomesteacs of “prophets” (baparafeza). The men in white robes and the women in tunics of an oddly Victorian cut, they would spend the night in rousing song and dance, apparently bizarre conflations of African rites and Protestant liturgy. The avowed aim of these performances was to summon the power of the Holy Spitit (maya); that it might imbue and refocm the afflicted bodies of the faithful. Bue its implicit objective, as we shal see, ‘was nothing less than to heal their troubled world itself,ETHNOGRAPHY, HISTORIOGRAPHY In the pale dawn, the dancers emerged serene from their ritual retreat, returning home to work their drought-ridden fields orto labor in the white town. By no means did all Tshidi participate in these rituals, although Zionist ranks had been growing steadily since the second decade of the century. The term “Zionist,” in fact had developed specific connotations, being associated with the most “lowly” (dalala), those “oppressed” (Patikiga) in a gencrally subjugated population. Its practices were clearly marked off from what had been objectified as “tradi “Tswana” or “Tswana ways”) and ftom the mainstream of contemporary local life, which owed as much to the culture of colonialism as to persisting. precolonial practices. To the knowing, the Zionists were people in self imposed exile,2even though they inhabited the everyday Tshidi world. AS cone observer put it, “Whether or not you are one of them, you can tell the Zionist anywhere. His dress, the way he holds his body, and the look in his eye. What he eats, whom he may marry—it’s all faid down. He's not the same person once he starts to follow the dram.” 0 Bourdicu (1977:94) has noted that social groups that “seek to produce @ stew man through a process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’” set sgreat store on the redefinition of apparently insignificant bodily habits. Why should this be? Why, for example, should the inmates of Goffman’s (1961) asylums be subject to highly ritualized cegimes that fix on such formerly reflex practices as posture, mode of dress, and eating? And why should these regimes resemble the fastidious physical refashioning often central to millenary movements, from cargo cults to chiliastic Cheistianity, Nuer prophecy to Nazism (ef. Worsley 1968; Wilson 1973; Newborn n.d.)? What accounts for the parallels between this activity and the careful “dismembering and remembering” of bodies stressed in classic accounts of initiation rites in non-Western societies, rites that confer adult status of membership of encapsulated cults and associations (see Turner 1968:56f; La Fonrrine 1972:159f; J. Comaroff 1985: Chaps. 4, 7)? ‘The concept of “remembering” seems apposite: As Bourdieu (1977:94) has noted, attempts to remake habit tend to treat the body as a “memory” in which are lodged, in mnemonic form, the organizing principles of an emibracing contest. Scrambling this code—that is, erasing the messages cattied in banal physical practice—is a prerequisite for retraining the memory, cither to deschool the deviant of to shape new subjects as the bearers of new worlds. Indeed, the universal salience of bodily reform in [processes of social transformation is strong evidence that the human frame mediates between self and society. Ie is this mediati ing role, we suggest, Bodily Reform as Historical Prastce n ‘hat accounts for its privileged place in one widespread, yet poorly under- stood mode of historical practice: namely, “untheorized” collective ac By this we mean action that, while concerted, is never explicated, action whose logic seems vested more in corporeal signs than in conceptual categories, Ofcourse, the general problem addressed here is hardly new. Both Marx (1906) and Durkheim (wich Mauss 1963) argued, ifin somewhat different terms, for a perpetual dialectic between “social” and “natural” classfica- tion, a dialectic routed through human experience, where social constructs appeared axiomatic and ineffable. From this perspective, the human body is seen to provide the “raw” material, the presocial “base” upon which collective categories and values are engraved (Van Gennep 1960; Douglas 1970; Mauss 1973; Bourdieu 1977; Turner 1980). Through socialization (both formal and informal) the “person” is constructed in the image of society, tuned, in practice, to the system of meanings lying silently within the conventions of a given world. Once they have taken root in the body and have acquired a natural alibi, goes the argument, these meanings take on the appearance of transcendent truths (cf. Barthes 1973). Physically framed experience, then, scems to resonate with the forms of “objective” reality. The body is appropriated by the “structures of the world” so that it, in turn, may appropriate the world (Bourdieu 197789) In their concern to show that bodies and persons are culturally con- structed, however, many scholars have treated the human form as a tabula, rasa (Van Gennep 1960; Mauss 1973). It becomes “a simple piece of wood each has cut and tcimmed to suit hiry” (Van Gennep 1960:72). Or, for those ofa more structuralist bent, it seems “ good to think” with because it provides a homology for a dualistic social world, typically understood in terms of unidimensional oppositions (Needham 1973) and mediating. anomalies (Douglas 1966; 1970). Either way, the body presents an order of contrasts to be arbitrarily colonized by society and culture. But the ethnographic record suggests chat physical facts have a more complex and determining effect on social constructions (cf. Ellen 1977; McDougall 1977). Sahlins ((1976b] 1977:166), for instance, has observed that the physiology of color discrimination challenges both the arbitrariness of the sign and the sui generis character of culture. For basic color terms in natural languages follow a universal perceptual logic; physiologically derived contrasts and combinations do seem to determine the formal structure of perceptual categories as they enter into socal discourse, Yet as Sahling ((1976b] 1977:179) stresses, these categories are themselves just one of a series of available imaginative “implements.” Whedher they will be selected and how they will be used in any context is clearly a fanction ‘of culture rather than nature, He thus concludes that itis only through the interplay of natural facts and semantic projects that we can account for ae sbi ivensn potenti tata72 THEORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, HISTORIOGRAPHY “the presence in culture of universal structures that are nevertheless not universally present.” ‘The same is true For the universal effects of bodily form upon the social imagination. There is plenty of ethnographic evidence that certain contrasts and combinative sequences recur in diverse cultural systems, appearing ro bbe rooted in physical constraints on human perception. This suggests 2 need for analytic schemes capable of acknowledging “bodily facts” and requires us to explore the processes through which they engage with specific systems of meaning. For culture is made and remade in a complex fusion (of natural and social forms; itis never a matter of simple determination, sither concrete or conceptual. In confronting this process here, otr concern is not so much with the mechanisms through which the body, as a sensory ‘and cognitive instrument, frames the material grounds for human percep- tion (see, c.g. Merleau-Ponty 1962; T. Turner 1990). We are more inter- ested in the implications of actual bodily experience for imagining and acting upon the forces of history. It is in this respect that projects of physical reform become especially revealing, for they represent efforts 10 rework the physical grounding of conventional realities, efforts to intervene in the dialectic ofthe person and the world. ‘The body, patently, isa complex constellation of relations and processes, some of which we experience as more or less stable, others as perpetually in flux. Relatively enduring physical structures persist for a lifetime and often become synonymous with social durability itself; such fixed forms provide paradigmatic relations of contrast (left/right, front/back, head / foot, inside /outside, center/ periphery, male/female) and combination {the taxonomies that order simple contrasts into hierarchical series). Much ‘existing discussion of the human frame as metaphor in anthropology focuses on static anatomical classifications that are treated as ideal models of, and for, unchanging social orders (Griaule 1965; Ellen 197; Ohnt ‘Tierney 1981). Although they reveal important mechanisms through which culture is essentialized, these studies themselves often essentialize dynamic processes, treating the body a idealized inmage rather dian as a medium for the construction of fluid social /material realities. Less attention has been paid to the relation of physical structure to bodily process, to the containment of anatomical taxonomies in the transformative processes crucial to material life. Yet such processes map out syntagmatic principles, the combinations through which corporeal categories engage with each other and with elements of the outside world, In many non-Westem contexts, such processes take the place of the static structures privileged in the Westecn anatomical tradition: In indigenous Chinese medicine, for cone, bodily form is constantly being recreated in the flow of elements whose interplay gives rise to life itself (Farquhar 1987). Such flows, both ‘endogenous and interactional, are distorted when reduced to neat concep- Bodily Reform as Hiszorical Practice 2B twal oppositions or rigid taxonomies. Whereas reductions of this sort may bbe a frequent trope of ideology in the making—vide the place of binary oppositions in our own and other cultures (see Chapter 6)—they are inaeguat 2s an analyte acount ofthe ie of ideology in the sca world A growing literature on the meaning of everyday practice provides the basis fora comparative investigation of how cultures pur complex bodily implements to use. In respect of the perception of shape and space, for ‘example, Friedrich ((1970] 1977:392) has argued that certain obligatory telations, apparently rooted in physical experience, operate in all grammars: among them, the complex concept of “orifice,” or curved edge; the trichotomy of long, flat, and round—or what is one, two, and three dimensions; and the abstract construct of “body” itself as a model of physical interconnection, He concludes that these qualities of shape are fundamental ideas in grammar, on a par with other basics such as “time” and “aspect.” ‘What we have here, then, is linguistic evidence of contrasts and combi- nations that universally mediate human perception. The ethnographic record permits us to explore how these forms engage with penticalar semantic fields the world over. Take Friedrich’s first obligatory category’ many cultural accounts (¢.g,, Devisch 1984; Douglas 1966; Loudon 1977), including our own Freudian discourse, testify to the elaboration of cate. sories associated with the perception of “orifice.” The latter is not merely ‘universal marker of the threshold between “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “other”; it is also a mctonym of controlled (that is, social) process— by contrast to unbounded, asocial flux. The regulated but irreversible passage of substance through bodily orifices by means of ingestion, defe- ‘ation, and sexual ejaculation serves widely both to make and mark social status. Although they may be given varying emphasis in different contexts, the uncontrolled orifices of childhood and senility and the unmediated flow of menstrual blood widely signify infrasocial states of being and a less than optimal containment of the person within his/her bodily margins On the other hand, bodily closure signals a clearly distinct, centered ieotity andthe capacity to engage in stable exchange relations with other ngs and substances in the world (see Devis 5 Hugh: tes an (see Devisch 1984; Hugh-Jones Lack of closure is a widely perceived characteristic of female bodies: Women are seen, in many cultures, to be “naturally” open, most markedly during their childbearing years and at the time of menstruation. Where thisis the case, i typically cals forth efforts to contain their unruly bodies. While menstruating, for instance, they are frequently prevented from interacting with others, especially those whose own status is liminal and who are hence physically vulnerable. Females are also often restricted in their access to communal space and to delicate transformative processes