SOCCUL6

J E N N I F E R L . G R A V E S , M . A .

Culture & The Body

Culture & The Body

Humans are cultural as much as biological beings, and this fact has profound ramifications for how we live our everyday lives.

Cultural forces are at work in how one uses one’s body, how that body feels to one, and how others respond to one’s body.  Ex: Human ideas of what counts as sexually attractive are not fully

determined by biology. How one’s body is perceived is a matter of culture. How one’s body shape and look are culturally defined can have large ramifications.

 Can you think of other examples of the influence of culture on the body?

Thus the body is as much a cultural phenomenon as a biological one.

Culture Against Nature

Hobbesian View: Human nature is anarchic and unruly. Left to our own devices, without the guiding constraints of

culture, each of us would run riot. Without culture, life would be nasty, brutish and short.

By regulating and controlling our emotional drives (which are potentially violent and always unpredictable), culture works to ensure that everyday life is possible by allowing for regularity, predictability and order.

Proponent  Sigmund Freud (1957): Civilization relies on a renunciation of instinctual gratifications… and urgencies.  Cultural norms and values make humans give up their

natural dispositions towards promiscuous sex, unregulated defecation and urination, and random acts of violence.  Primary Method: Shame

Toilet Culture An Example of Culture Taming Instinct

Excretion of waste has become culturally regulated. All societies have a toilet culture that dictates ways of thinking about and enacting the excretion of waste.

Western society has a particularly strict toiletry culture in which we are disgusted by defecatory materials and have stern rules about the legitimate times and places for excretion.

Cultural Definitions Are at Work: It is only because cultural contexts have decreed things one way that we see them that way (ex: feces as dirty).  Ex: Hygiene and Symbolism  Ex: Colored TP  Ex: Terminology for Bathrooms

Are you familiar with different toilet cultures?

Toilet Culture An Example of Culture Taming Instinct

Example: Capitalism and Toilet Rules – Cultural Norms  Impose Upon Bodies  The capitalistically organized workplace is centered around a

search for profit, and workers’ bodies are controlled accordingly. The natural rhythms of their bodies (like need for a toilet) do not fit with the required tempo of work, because the body must keep working in the pursuit of profit, no matter what.

 Point: In everyday life there is as antagonism between cultural expectations and bodily capacities and desires.

 Other examples of this antagonism?

The Cultured Body

Cultural forces do not just control the human body (see above), they also shape it.

Cultural contexts profoundly shape how we make use of our bodies – walking, talking, running, throwing, lifting and so on.

Primary Theory: Mauss’ Body Techniques & Habitus

Examples: Gender & Class

Body Techniques

There is no completely ‘natural’ way for a person to use their body.  Ex: Positions of the arms and hands while walking.

We learn how to use our bodies.  Mostly through imitation.  Each generation passes on a body culture to its offspring

comprised of a number of body techniques. Each human body is sculpted by the particular

cultural context a person is brought up and lives within.

Body Techniques

Body Techniques – forms of bodily movement and action that are expressive of the cultural life of the group  Experienced and enacted unconsciously.  Felt as natural, but actually created by the culture of the

group.  Body techniques involve both activities and what we think

about those activities.  Expressive of cultural norms.  What is acceptable in one culture may not be in another. The

same is true within a culture in different social contexts.  Ex: Belching at a Meal  Other examples?

Habitus

Body techniques are part of a group’s habitus or distinctive lifestyle, which is produced by the particular social conditions of the group.  The habitus is made up of particular ways of thinking,

feeling and acting that are characteristic of the group.  The habitus is embodied – culture is instilled into the

minds of group members and onto their bodies. Put simply, culture shapes how we move,

how we act, and how our bodies look.

Gender & Body Techniques

We all must learn to be male or female (DeBeauvoir 1972).  People conform to the cultural norms regarding male

and female behavior set by the social context in which they live.

 We see our gender norms as natural, but they are entirely culturally derived and are thus mutable.

 Corporeality is one aspect of this – the ways in which we move and experience our bodies.

Gender & Body Techniques

Cultural forces shape bodies in specifically gendered ways.

Culture socializes women to move in certain ways and teaches men to move in other ways.

Thus boys learn different bodily skills and capacities for movement than do girls.  Shapes the way people experience their bodies.

Examples:  Hillary vs. Bill Throwing First Pitch  Sports (Young 1990)

 Males are defined and trained to be physically competent; female are not.  So through socialization the female has been discouraged from reaching

out in a confident manner toward the space around her.  Ex: Expectation of Daintiness

Gender & Body Techniques

Meeting (or not meeting) cultural expectations about the body can have profound effects on people.  People who do not operate in ways congruent with the

norms of bodily behavior generally experience the disapproval of others who think that a departure from these norms is unnatural.

 Examples? Thus body values and norms are both enabling

– in that they teach us to move in socially acceptable ways – and restricting – in that we must conform to them or risk social sanction.

Class & Body Techniques

Bourdieu (1992) investigated how a particular habitus (Mauss) and set of corresponding body techniques shape the life-world (Husserl) of people in particular class groupings.

Three Class-Based Groups:  Working Class  Lower Middle Class  Upper Middle Class

Each has its own habitus and thus its own distinctive set of body techniques (e.g. ways of eating drinking, walking, talking, etc.).

The habitus of each class is derived from the social conditions of each class.

Class & Body Techniques

Upper Middle Class – Life of Ease  High Economic Capital – financial resources  High Cultural Capital – knowledge about highly

respected forms of culture  Outcome: distance from practical urgencies, at ease with

themselves, unshakable confidence, no one is superior to them

 Body Techniques: ideals of ease and elegance  Orients them toward certain types of sporting activities like

fencing and polo.

Class & Body Techniques

Lower Middle Class – Highly Aspirational  Look up to and admire the upper middle class.  Look down on and despise the working class.  Outcome: Want to distinguish themselves from the

working class and be more like the upper middle class.  This desire is doomed because the UMs will always look down

their noses at the LMs.  Thus they have a contradictory social position.

 Body Techniques: less elegant and authoritative  Sports: Jogging and Yoga

 These are aspirational in nature, attempting to make the body better.

Class & Body Techniques

Working Class – Taste of the Necessary  Low Economic Capital  Low Cultural Capital  Outcome: faced with the pressing problems of existence  Body Techniques: unpretentious and straightforward;

functionality; bluntness  Sports: physical strength and aggressiveness via sports like

weightlifting and boxing Critiques of Bourdieu:

 Tending towards caricaturing.  Now out of date.

What are your thoughts?

Conclusion

Central Theme: The ways in which people use, display and understand their bodies in everyday contexts are far from being reducible to biologically determined behaviors.  Examples: tattoos/piercings; eating disorders; obesity

Apparently natural phenomena – like toilet behaviors – are thoroughly bound up with cultural forces.  Other examples?

Social hierarchies – like gender & class – are culturally inscribed onto our bodies.  Other examples?