Ways of thinking, speaking, and moving that embody cultural notions of personhood; the study of such corporeal dispositions and their symbolic import. The body, corporeality, embodiment, the self, thought, mind, and the relationships among them are construed differently in different cultures. Each culture engenders practices and discourses that encode its own understandings of what it is to be a body. Consider, in this vein, the nature of embodiment in American culture. The American body is, from its inception, a cultural artifact, not a natural object. No brute, material, literal, physical, biological given precedes our conceptions of it. Experience of the body, and the conceptions that inform it, comes into being with embodiment. For instance, the body American that biomedicine invents is instantiated in its practices. No other more fundamental body lies beyond medical discourse. Rather, the medical body simply is the body as it is experienced in medicine (Young 1993). The body is not merely culturally shaped; rather it takes shape, it comes into being, it materializes, within a culture. Beyond the discourses into which the body is inscribed—in which it takes shape and is experienced—is neither the Platonic form of the body nor its crude substance. The body is constituted by its discourses. The real body is not lurking behind the medical textualizations that humanize as well as dehumanize it (Ritchie 1993). The American body, the ethnic body, the gendered body, my body is the body. It might be clearer to think of multiple embodiments, shifts in the ontological status of the body, instead of hypothesizing a fundamental, essential, or prior body. The proliferating lore of the body investigated under the aegis of bodylore makes visible this cultural construction. The term bodylore was coined by Katharine Young for the 1989 American Folklore Society meetings to position the body as a locus of inquiry in folklore. Bodylore condenses into one subfield an array of folkloristic interests in such corporeal matters as the uses of obscene-photocopy lore in American corporations (Roemer 1994); initiations, both sacred initiations into Cuban American Santeria (Mason 1994) and the profane initiations of the bachelor party (Williams 1994); issues of the flesh and the spirit with respect to the bodies of clergywomen (Lawless 1994); the sensual properties of Native American pots (Babcock 1994); kinaesthetic analysis of Hasidic body movement in a New York synagogue (Sklar 1994); American women’s tattooing traditions (Attie, Monroe, and Wellner 1989); the analogy between President John F.Kennedy’s corpse and the body of the king (Zelizer 1993); American quilts as corporeal discourses (Przybysz 1993); rituals of purification in American spas (Slyomovics 1993); and body metaphors in American folklore (Neustadt 1994). These inquiries are by no means new wrinkles. The body has been explicitly examined in American folklore in movement analysis, gender studies, gesture or body language, feminist theory, studies of ritual and taboo, cosmological systems, creation myths, clothing, food, manners, and elsewhere, and implicitly examined in studies of bodily practices from folk speech to the law. Bodylore puts forward as the central term of discourse a metaphysical idea that hovers in the background of these studies: the body.
Close examination makes it clear that the body is not simply the inarticulate, uninflected, primordial ground of its discourses. The discourses invent the body. In American spas, for instance, the body is regarded as a continent object sealed off from the threat of contaminating influences by its skin (Slyomovics 1993). In European spas, by contrast, the skin is regarded as a pervious membrane through which benign influences pass into the body. The body in water appears as the incarnation of a cultural disposition. Likewise, consider the peculiarly American inflection of the king’s body as the body politic given to Kennedy’s corpse (Zelizer 1993). Over the course of its several examinations, the condition of the body is perceived to reflect the condition of the society And American quilts, taken as the quintessence of femininity, have been reconstituted by feminist theorists as ecriture feminine, in Helene Cixous’ term, womens genres that carry the possibility of dismantling the category of the feminine (Przybysz 1993). Quilts materialize a shifting sense of the self in American culture. Persons participate in multiple discourses and experience their bodies differently in each. Transferring from one discourse to another, in the gesture phenomenologists call realmshift, can entail a transformation of bodily state. In the traditional hazing on the eve of their weddings, American bachelors are obliged to experience their bodies as at once intensely sexualized and emasculated, so that they find themselves acutely aware of their corporeal selves at just the moment of their transformation (Williams 1994). The body itself appears in different material densities in American culture. It may be solidified by medical discourse, the male gaze, or the bourgeois sensibility, each of which is concerned to construct the body as a kind of object in order to preserve, respectively, detachment, otherness, or propriety. This solidification of the body is not unique to these discourses. Medicine, for instance, is a condensation of our cultural drift toward the objectification of the body and its estrangement from the subject (Young 1993). We are all heir to Cartesian dualism. In other discourses, the metaphysical idea of the body may not have material instantiation. Spirit bodies, for instance, are etherealized enough to permit such New Age phenomena as astral projection—or, the self may be able to slough off the substance of the body, either transiently, in out-of-body experiences, or persistently, in the form of ghosts. The obtrusiveness of the corporeal self is at issue with respect to the religious body in which spirituality, conceived as a rarification of the flesh, is set against sexuality, conceived as a manifestation of the flesh. This issue is especially acute in the face of the increasing ordination of American women, whose bodies are taken incorrigibly to obtrude their sexuality (Lawless 1994). Shifts in the material constitution of the body in these different discourses challenge any presumption of its inherent substantiality. The body incorporates, corporealizes, culture. For that rea-son, entering into a new discourse requires educating the body. Irritants in his ablutions make the initiate into santeria uncomfortably aware of his scalp just as he is about to receive an oricha, a deity who rules the head (Mason 1994). Bodily inscriptions attest to this corporealization of culture. Literal inscriptions on the body’s surface, body painting, tattoos, surgical incisions, and likewise their erasure through such practices as shaving, plucking, bleaching, or surgical excisions, literalize the sense in which culture is metaphorically inscribed on the body. The intent of face painting in American practice, for instance, appears to materialize the imaginary, to make up the face. Tattoos, supplements of the body as well as apertures into it, both exscribe and overwrite the inscription of culture on the body (Attie, Monroe, and Wellner 1989). Breaches of the boundaries of the body constitute transgressions. In a doubling of this transgressiveness, obscene-photocopy lore, itself an expression of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the grotesque body, is deployed as an assault against the corporate body in which it is produced (Roemer 1994). Breaches of body taboos, by implication, locate the boundaries of the proper body. But the body is not just inscribed into its discourses; it takes up its discourses. Gestures and postures modulate into attitudes and inclinations, at once the imprints of external pressures on the body and the expression of internal states out of the body. Immersing oneself bodily in the practices of Hasidic Jews provides us intelligence of a corporeal kind about the nature of the religious life (Sklar 1994). The rhythms of ritual may arouse emotion in the body or emotion may transpire as a body rhythm. From the outside, the body appears as a perceptible object; from the inside, as an experiential locus. Body image is composed at the intersection between visual apprehension and kinesthetic sensation. The body is the source as well as the site of discourses. It has been made the scale for separating discourses of the minute from discourses of the magnificent (Stewart 1984). Body puns, body metaphors, and body symbols inform the body of state, the corporate body, and nature of knowledge. The predominance of visual metaphors in epistemological discourse since the Enlightenment has sustained the estrangement of perceiver from perceived in Western thought. Lingual metaphors reincorporate thought as bodily knowledge (Neustadt 1994). Corporeal discourses extruded off the body invest corporeality in material culture as well. The pots Native American women produce bodily are also held to reproduce them bodily, so that objects take on the sensuous properties of subjects (Babcock 1994). Bodylore relates investigations of the cosmological body of myth, of ritual acts, religious bodies and body taboos, of emotion, spirituality, and intellection as bodily phenomena, of bodily substances and insubstantial bodies, of the fluid body, the solid body, and the spirit body, of the domesticated body and the transgressive body, of the private body and the body politic, to ongoing investigations of the body in other fields of inquiry. Katharine Young
References
Attie, Barbara, Nora Monroe, and Maureen Wellner. 1989. Skin and Ink. New York: Women Make Movies. Film. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.