Goffmans's #2

Chapter 6

[ ... ]

Marcel Mauss

TECHNIQUES OF THE B0DY 1

From M. Mauss (1973 [1936]) 'Techniques of the body', translated by Ben

Brewster, Economy and Society 2: 70-88.

W H EN A NATU R AL SCIENCE makes advances, it only ever does so in the direction of the concrete, and always in the direction of the unknown. Now the unknown is found at the frontiers of the sciences, where the professors are at each other's throats, as Goethe put it (though Goethe was not so polite). It is generally in these ill-demarcated domains that the urgent problems lie. Moreover, these uncleared lands are marked. In the natural sciences at present, there is always one obnoxious rubric. There is always a moment when, the science of certain facts not being yet reduced into concepts, the facts not even being organically grouped together, these masses of facts receive that posting of ignorance: 'Miscellaneous'. This is where we have to penetrate. We can be cer- tain that this is where there are truths to be discovered: first because we known that we are ignorant, and second because we have a lively sense of the quantity of the facts. For many years in my course in descriptive ethnology, I have had to teach in the shadow of the disgrace and opprobrium of the 'miscellaneous' in a matter in which in ethnography this rubric 'miscellaneous' was truly heteroclite. I was well aware that walking or swim- ming, for example, and all sorts of things of the same type, are specific to determinate societies; that the Polynesians do not swim as we do, that my generation did not swim as the present generation does. But what social phenomena did these represent? They were 'miscellaneous' social phenomena, and, as this rubric is a horror, I have often thought about this 'miscellaneous', at least as often as I have been obliged to discuss it and often in between times.

[ ... ]

An example will put us in the picture straight away: us, the psychologists, as well as the biologists and sociologists. Previously we were taught to dive after having learnt to swim. And when we were learning to dive, we were taught to close our eyes and then to open them under water. Today the technique is the other way round. The whole training begins by getting the children used to keeping their eyes open under water. Thus, even

74 MARCEL MAUSS

before they can swim, particular care is taken to get the children to control their dan- gerous but instinctive ocular reflexes, before all else they are familiarised with the water, their fears are suppressed, a certain confidence is created, suspensions and movements are selected. Hence there is a technique of diving and a technique of education in diving which have been discovered in my day. And you can see that it really is a technical educa- tion and, as in every technique, there is an apprenticeship in swimming. On the other hand, here our generation has witnessed a complete change in technique: we have seen the breast-stroke with the head out of the water replaced by the different sorts of crawl. Moreover, the habit of swallowing water and spitting it out again has gone. In my day swimmers thought of themselves as a king of steam-boat. It was stupid, but in fact I still do this : I cannot get rid of my technique. Here then we have a specific technique of the body, a gymnic art perfected in our own day.

But this specificity is characteristic of all techniques . An example: during the War I was able to make many observations on this spcificity of techniques. E.g. the technique of di99in9 . The English troops I was with did not know how to use French spades, which forced us to change 8000 spades a division when we relieved a French division, and vice versa. This plainly shows that a manual knack can only be learnt slowly. Every technique,

LJ.: roperly so-called, has its own form.

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

[". J

A kind of a revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked . I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walk- ing in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. The positions of the arms and hands while walking form a social idiosyncracy, they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely psychical arrangements and mechanisms. For example: I think I can also recognise a girl who has been raised in a convent. In general she will walk with her fists closed. And I can still remember my third-form teacher shouting at me: 'Idiot! why do you walk around the whole time with your hands flapping wide open?' Thus there exists an education in walking, too.

Another example: there are polite and impolite positions for the hands at rest. Thus you can be certain that if a child at table keeps his elbows in when he is not eating he is English . A young Frenchman has no idea how to sit up straight; his elbows stick out side- ways; he puts them on the table, and so on.

Finally, in runnin9, too, I have seen, you all have seen, the change in technique. Imagine, my gymnastics teacher, one of the top graduates of Joinville around 1860, taught me to run with my fists close to my chest: a movement completely contradictory to all running movements; I had to see the professional runners of 1890 before I realised the necessity of running in a different fashion.

Hence I have had this notion of the social nature of the' habitus' for many years. Please note that I use the Latin word - it should be understood in France - habitus. The word translates infinitely better than 'habitude' (habit or custom), the 'exis', the 'acquired ability ' and 'faculty' of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). It does not designate those

br dan- e water, ements l diving educa-

e other .

y day t I still

, War I

~ue of 1 which 1 d vice nique,

rpecial

pered think how alk-

1anks 'ands llrely ile: I walk me:

1en?'

you 'e is "de-

iue. cght

all the

ase rd

red ose

~ ~ v»' V"' TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY 75

metaphysical habitudes, 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, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties.

( ... ]

Another series of facts impressed itself upon me. In all these elements of the art of using the human body, the facts of education were dominant. [ ... ] The child imitates actioris of adults, which have succeeded and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence and who have authority over him. The action is imposed from without, from above, even if it is an exclusively biological action, involv- ing his body. 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 ele- ment. The imitative action which follows contains the psychological element and the bio- logical element. But the whole, the ensemble, is conditioned by the three elements indissolubly mixed together.

( ... ]

I made, and went on making for several years, the fundamental mistake of thinking that there is technique only when there is an instrument. I had to go back to ancient notions, to the Platonic position on technique, for Plato spoke of a technique of music and in particular of a technique of the dance, and extend these notions.

I call technique an action w!:!!ch is ~<;_tj_v~ ~cl tr~~i!io~;!] ( and you will see th~ -~~ it is no different from a magical , religiQU.l,.QI §~P2lic_ acti,22). It has to be effective and tra- ditional. There is no technique and no transmission in the absence of tradition. This above all is what distinguishes man from the animals: the transmission of his techniques and very probably their oral transmission.

Allow me, therefore, to assume that you accept my definitions. But what is the dif- ference between the effective traditional action of religion, the symbolic or juridical effective traditional action, the actions of life in common, moral actions on the one hand and the traditional actions of technique on the other? It is that the latter are felt by the author as actions ef a mechanical, physical or physico-chemical order and that they are pursued with that aim in view.

In this case all that need be said is quite simply that we are dealing with techniques ef the body. T~ body is man's first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man's first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body. Immediately this whole broad category of what I classified in descriptive sociology as 'miscellaneous' disappeared from that rubric and took shape and body: we now know where to range it.

Before instrumental techniques there is the ensemble of techniques of the body. [ ... ] The constant adaption to a physical, mechanical or chemical aim (e.g. when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself ~e but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it.

76 MARCEL MAUSS

Moreover, all these techniques were easily arranged in a system which is common to us, the notion basic to psychologists, [ ... J of the symbolic life of the mind; the notion we have of the activity of the consciousness as being above all a system of symbolic assemblages.

I should never stop if I tried to demonstrate to you all the facts that might be listed to make visible this concourse of the body and moral or intellectual symbols. Here let us look for a moment at ourselves. Everything in us all is under command. I am a lecturer for you; you can tell it from my sitting posture and my voice, and you are listening to me seated and in silence. We have a set of permissible or impermissible, natural or unnatural attitudes. Thus we should attribute different values to the act of staring fixedly: a symbol of politeness in the army, and of rudeness in everyday life.

[" . J

What emerges very clearly ... is the (act that we are everywhere faced wi~sio- psycho-socio1ogical assemblages of series of actions. These actions are m9re or le~itual ana more or less ancient in the life of the individual and the history of the society. - - Let us go further: one of the reasons why these series may more easily ~embled in the individual is precisely because they are assembled by and for social authority. As a corporal this is how I taught the reason for exercise in close order, marching four abreast and in step. I ordered the soldiers not to march in step drawn up in ranks and in two files four abreast, and I obliged the squad to pass between two of the trees in the courtyard. They marched on top of one another. They realised that what they were being made to do was not so stupid. 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. Naturally, social life is not exempt from stupidly and abnormalities. Error may be a principle. The French Navy only recently began to teach its sailors to swim. By example and order, that is the principle. Hence there is a strong sociological causality in all these facts.

On the other hand, since these are movements of the body, this all presupposes an enormous biological and physiological apparatus. What is the breadth of the linking psy- chological cog-wheel? I deliberately say cog-wheel. A Comtian would say that there is no gap between the social and the biological. What I can tell you is that there I see psycho- logical facts as connecting cogs and not as causes, except in moments of creation or reform.

[".]

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: edu- cation of the vision, education in walking - ascending, descending, running. It consists especially of education in composure. And the latter is above all a retarding mechanisms, a mechanism inhibiting disorderly movements; this retardation subsequently allows a co-ordinated response of co-ordinated movements setting off in the direction of a chosen goal. This resistance to emotional seizure is something fundamental in social and mental life. It separates 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, precise actions governed by a clear consciousness.

It is tha unconsciow the certaini unconsciou sailors to le

[" . J

Note

This I, publis. pp. 2'i by Cl. pp. 36

hmon to I

~tion we inblages. e listed

re let us lecturer gtome \natural symbol

•ity. As four

and in in the being

ion of

in all rror . By

'ty in

s an psy-

is no ho- or

the du- ists

n

ital

to

TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY 77

It is thanks to society that there is an intervention of consciousness . It is not thanks to unconsciousness that there is an intervention of society. It is thanks to society that there. is the certainty of pre-prepared movements, domination of the conscious over emotion and i"iiiconsciousness. It is right that the French Navy is now to make it obligatory for its sailors to learn to swim.

( ... ]

Note

This lecture was given at a meeting of the Societe de Psychologie, May 17th, 1934 and published in the Journal de psychologie normal et patholigique, Paris, Annee XXXII, 1935, pp. 271 - 93 . Reprinted in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie (with introduction by Claude Levi-Strauss), 4th edition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968, pp. 364-86.