The Body Social

Citation preview

THE BODY SOCIAL

The body is not only a biological phenomenon, it is also a social creation of immense complexity. It is not so much a ‘given’ as a social category, with different meanings, composed, imposed and developed in each age by each individual. The attributes, functions and specific organs of the body and the senses are likewise highly controversial. The Body Social explores the history of thinking about the body and the senses, paying special attention to shifts in ways of thinking about the body over time, and to the clash of different approaches to the body today. How people think and feel about their bodies influences how they live their lives and die their deaths. This study is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how the body is conceptualized and lived. It avoids abstract discussion in favour of a down-to-earth approach to the body. The author examines particular parts of the body, including the face and hair, and particular body senses; touch, smell and sight. He also provides an up-todate and reliable survey of the literature. Written with real distinction, and displaying immense erudition The Body Social is destined to become essential reading for anyone studying the meaning of the body. Anthony Synnott is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal.

THE BODY SOCIAL Symbolism, Self and Society

Anthony Synnott

London and New York

First published in 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 1993 Anthony Synnott All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Synnott, Anthony, 1940– The body social/Anthony Synnott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 275) and index. 1. Body, Human—Social aspects. I. Title. GN298.S94 1993 391´.6–dc20 92–40461 CI P ISBN 0-203-20154-X Master e-book IS BN

ISBN 0-203-20157-4 (Adobe eReader Format) IS BN 0-415-06296-9 0-415-10359-2 (pbk)

For John-Jaspar and Nicholas

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction

ix 1

1

BODY

7

2

GENDER

38

3

BEAUTY AND THE FACE

73

4

HAIR

103

5

THE SENSES

128

6

TOUCH

156

7

SMELL

182

8

SIGHT

206

9

BODIES AND SENSES

228

Notes Bibliography Name index Subject index

265 275 296 302

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At last I can thank so many people who have helped me in so many ways—Gabriel Bar-Haim, Constance Classen, Elaine Comartin, Harvie Ferguson, Jacquie Gauntlett, Janusz Kaczorowski, Sarah O’Brien-Twohig and Michael Sullivan. Concordia has been very good to me in providing institutional support, and I would like to thank especially Charles Bertrand, Gail Valaskakis and Pieter de Vries, and also my students over the years in my courses on the body, whom I have very much enjoyed working with. Thanks also to Sharon Byer and Carole Robertson who did the typing and retyping, seemingly for ever, with such care and cheerfulness. I would also like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fragrance Research Fund for their grants, which made so much research possible, and especially Annette Green of the Fragrance Research Fund for her help and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to David Howes and Joseph Smucker in our department for all their support over the years. Friends and family have been terrific, so thank you to my brothers Timothy and Hilary, and to Jim and Daphne Hill and Suzanne Vallet, Frank and Hélène Edmonds and James and Zosha Aynsley. Special thanks to Justin Dyer, Anne Gee and Christina Tebbit, and all at Routledge, and especially my editor Chris Rojek, who made all this possible. Finally, Kathleen Murphy has been a constant source of inspiration and insight, and I want to thank her for all that and more; and Sarah and Aaron too. Last, but not least, special thanks to John Jaspar and Nicholas who have supported this project from the beginning. Several of these Chapters have been published previously in various versions: Chapters 1, 3 and 4 in The British Journal of Sociology, 1992, 43:1; 1990, 40:4; 1991, 41:1 and 1988, 38:3; part of Chapter 5 in David Howes (ed.) The Variety of Sensory Experience Toronto: University ix

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of Toronto Press, (1991); Chapter 6 in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 1991, 28:4; Chapter 8 in The International Journal of Politics, Culture and Sociology, 1992, 5:4. I would like to thank the publishers for their permission to reprint this work.

x

INTRODUCTION

Breasts, thighs, lips, eyes, heart, belly, navel, hair, penis, nipples, anus, brain, guts and balls. Body parts: but also much more. We have imposed layers of ideas, images, meanings and associations on these biological systems which together operate and maintain our physical bodies. Our bodies and body parts are loaded with cultural symbolism, public and private, positive and negative, political and economic, sexual, moral and often controversial; and so are the attributes, functions and states of the body, and the senses. Height and weight, eating and drinking, making love, gestures and body language, even various diseases, colds or AIDS, are not simply physical phenomena; they are also social. The body is not just skin and bones, an assemblage of parts, a medical marvel…The body is also, and primarily, the self. We are all embodied. Obvious though this may be, what it means in practice is not always so obvious. Controversies rage about the ownership of the body, the boundaries, its meaning, its value, the criteria of life and death, and how it should be lived, and loved. The thesis of this book is that the body and the senses are socially constructed, in various ways by different populations, as are the various organs, processes and attributes of the body. The problem is to demonstrate how the body is constructed, and why, and also why these constructions vary and change. The body is not a ‘given’, but a social category with different meanings imposed and developed by every age, and by different sectors of the population. As such it is therefore sponge-like in its ability to absorb meanings, but also highly political. Like the organs and parts of the body, the attributes of the body are eminently social. Our age, gender and colour roles are principal determinants of our lives and our social identities, the focal point 1

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of our self-concepts and group-concepts. Similarly, our unique attributes of beauty or unattractiveness, height and weight, physical handicaps, if any, not only affect social responses to the self, they also affect our life chances. The body, therefore, is the prime symbol of the self, and the prime determinant of the self. People probably think about, and worry about, the body more than any other single ‘thing’, and all the time. The alphabet of possible worries runs from AIDS, through beauty, colds, deafness and death, to face and fat and hair, to pain, sex, weight and zits. Despite the hyper-intellectualism of the Western cultural tradition, which has historically privileged mind over body, the body is irrefutably there, needing and demanding attention—but not only physical attention, sociological attention too, I suggest. As we age no doubt our somatic concerns change: we may worry more about loss of hair or sight, fertility or potency; and such losses are hardly compensated for by gains in weight and girth and the increased risk of heart attacks. Death approaches, and the self changes as, and because, the body changes; yet the body remains a central concern of the embodied self: an object to the subject, yet also constitutive of the subject. The identity of body and self is perhaps most clearly illustrated by body-change. Self-concepts change, often dramatically, at puberty, pregnancy and menopause. Body changes change the self. This selfchange is particularly evident if the body-change is sudden and unexpected: a heart attack, stroke, or mastectomy, or an accident which results in the loss of a limb, or facial scarring—for the face is a prime symbol of the self. Cosmetic surgery can work wonders on the body, but also on the mind, and the sense of self. The sense of who one is is highly dependent on the body—a point often not fully appreciated until the body changes or, of course, dies. Indeed, in the end, this identity of body and self is total: we cannot say ‘he is fine, but his body is in absolute agony’. Nor, ‘she died recently, but, apart from that, she’s in great shape!’ A second thesis of this book, therefore, is to restore the body to its central place in personal and social life. Mainstream sociology, and also history and psychology, I would add, have largely ignored the body, as many have noted; and philosophers have tended to deprecate their bodies in favour of their brilliant minds, while many theologians have described the body as an enemy to the soul. Yet, in practice, no one lasts long by ignoring their bodies. Sociology, 2

I NTRODUCTION

like other disciplines, also needs to pay as much professional attention to the body as its practitioners probably do in their personal lives. The body is strange, therefore; capable of carrying a wide range of ever-changing meanings. It is the prime constituent of personal and social identity; yet also the deepest prejudices and discriminations, for and against, accrue to the body. Bodies are highly polarized in moral terms: male/female, old/young, beautiful/ ugly, fat/thin, black/ white/red/yellow, and so on, with valences depending upon personal and cultural values. Furthermore, the body is also internally polarized, between public parts like the face and private parts like the genitals— a polarization that coincides with other conventional dichotomies: higher and lower, and in the Western tradition, to a degree, good and bad. Other cultures, however, have other values. Controversy extends not only to the evaluation of different bodies, body attributes, parts and functions, but also to ownership of the body. To whom does the body belong? Whose body is it? The individual’s or the state’s? Or both? But if both, what are the limits of ownership? The apparently conflicting rights of individual and state over the body are particularly evident in the controversies over abortion, suicide, euthanasia and prostitution, but also blood transfusion. The ‘therapeutic’ state intervenes in the body, even in the bedroom. Capital punishment: does the state have the right to take away life? Under what circumstances? There is little agreement. Some people believe that contraceptives are immoral, that masturbation is immoral, that blood transfusions are immoral, that pre-marital sex is immoral, or that extra-marital sex is not immoral…the controversies are endless. And the new reproductive technologies and advances in medical technology seem to be racing far ahead of our ethical capacities. Children today may have five parents; what rights, and duties, does each have? And when does human life begin? With conception? Or later? If later, then when? There is confusion at the other end of the life span also, for when is a person dead? Brain-dead people may be kept alive on machines, but does the state have the right to ‘cannibalize’ them for spare parts? And to sell the parts? AIDS patients: how are their rights balanced against the rights of others? There is little consensus on an ethics of the body. The body, therefore with all its organs, attributes, functions, states and senses, is not so much a biological given as a social creation of immense complexity, and almost limitless variability, richness and power. The creation and learning of the body as a social 3

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phenomenon varies from culture to culture, however; and even within ‘our own’ culture, which we can perhaps broadly describe as GraecoRoman and Judaeo-Christian, many different creations persist. Our task here is to explore this body social in some of its many variations and dynamics. The body social is many things: the prime symbol of the self, but also of the society; it is something we have, yet also what we are; it is both subject and object at the same time; it is individual and personal, as unique as a fingerprint or odourplume, yet it is also common to all humanity with all its systems, and taught in schools. The body is both an individual creation, physically and phenomenologically, and a cultural product; it is personal, and also state property. Yet, despite the personal and social salience of the body, the body has not been a central concern of sociology. Certain attributes of the body have been studied, particularly colour in race relations, gender in sex roles, and age in gerontology; but the common denominator of these three substantive areas, namely the body itself, has been largely ignored, at least until recently. Bryan Turner’s The Body and Society, which inaugurated the sociology of the body, was not published until 1984. None the less, we can, I think, usefully reconsider the body at the heart of sociology, rather than peripheral to the discipline, and more importantly at the heart of our social lives and our sense of self. This book is divided roughly into two parts: the first part on the body and the second on the senses. We begin with an overview of how people think and have thought about embodiment, noting the principal paradigms over the centuries, but very briefly, and consider how and why they have changed. The dynamics of paradigm shifts are critical to any understanding of the body social, and it does make a difference to our lives if one thinks of the body as a tomb (Plato), a temple (Saint Paul), an enemy (Teresa of Avila), a machine (Descartes), or the self (Sartre). Yet ‘the body’, in practice, is only a specific body in time and space, male or female, old or young, and so on. Perhaps the main somatic variable for most people for most of their lives is gender; this therefore is the subject of chapter 2. What does male or female embodiment mean? We discuss the most ancient construction of all, the two sexes as opposite, and examine men’s and women’s constructions of each other, in all their complexity over the years, how they, and we, have symbolized these differences, and finally the difficulties of dualism. 4

I NTRODUCTION

Focussing more narrowly on the body we go on to consider the social significance of beauty and the face, and hair. These few parts (face and hair) and attributes (beauty/ugliness, male/female) of the body must suffice for so many other parts and attributes. To study everything all at once is simply not possible. The second part, on the senses, begins with an overview of the history and philosophy of the senses, paralleling chapter 1 on the body, and indicates the various and changing constructions of the senses, and the importance of these constructions for lifestyles. We also examine the contribution of anthropology for our understanding of how ‘sensitive’ humans are. This is followed by case studies on three of the senses—space limitations prevent considerations of all five. We therefore discuss ‘the first sense’, touch, whose physical, psychological and social importance has been particularly underrated, and which is so strangely taboo in the Northern European— North American sensorium. In chapter 7 we discuss smell, the most despised and neglected of the five senses. We conclude the senses with sight, ‘the noblest sense’, as Aristotle called it, and the noblest organ of the body, the eye: the mirror of the soul, the I. Each of these senses plays important, and often unrecognized, roles in social interaction; it is time we attended to so vital a part of our social life, and ‘came to our senses’. Theorizing the body is no easy task, despite (or because of ) the 6 billion bodies on the planet, not least because anthropologists and sociologists have theorized the body so differently. The book concludes with a discussion on theories of the body up to the present. The multiplicity of theories, perspectives, concerns and interests does not even begin to exhaust the richness of the topic, nor of course its importance. An appreciation of this polyvalence of the body is one of the values of this theorizing. Two themes have struck me particularly and permeate the entire corpus. They may serve to integrate the wide range of topics. The first is how the body social negates the body physical: many of our somatic cultural norms are dangerous, physically unhealthy and self-destructive. Some are discussed below, but most are not, yet they include such behaviours as smoking and alcohol abuse, which contribute substantially to morbidity and mortality rates. Body abuse is virtually institutionalized in our culture: our eating and drinking habits have little to do with nutrition and more to do with beautification, especially slimming, celebration, being macho, self-gratification and a range of other values. Expensive and 5

TH E BODY SOCIAL

dangerous major surgery is employed for cosmetic purposes. Steroids are swallowed for bigger, stronger and faster bodies. Hair dyes are carcinogenic, and sex can be lethal. Indeed most of the principal causes of death are lifestyle-related. In this sense, our cultural norms tend to subvert our biological needs: culture and biology become opposed. The second theme is the degree to which men and women, defined since the early Greek philosophers as opposite sexes, structure their/ our lives in dualistic terms. Women and men are only one chromosome away from being men and women; yet this single chromosome divides the corporeal world like a scalpel. Almost all our symbolic and ritual somatic and sensory behaviour is different for the two sexes, and so are many somatic meanings: beauty, hair, body, touch and so on. This cultural dimorphism is discussed more fully in chapter 2, but it does weave through the entire text. Even working towards equity, we none the less institutionalize symbolic differentiation (and conflict) in our somatic behaviour. Finally, of necessity, we must be selective rather than encyclopedic. We cannot consider everything about the body social; there is neither time nor space to study all the organs, all the functions, all the attributes, all the senses, and all the possibilities. Most of the organs, and significant attributes like age, colour, height, health, and two of the senses, taste and hearing, are not discussed here; but they have often been reviewed by others, as will be apparent. The sociology of the body and the senses is a relatively new field in sociology—but it is more than that, it is also a new way of ‘looking’ at sociology and doing sociology and experiencing sociology personally; beyond that it is a new way of exploring our embodied selves and our relations with others in society. As such it is highly political and, like the body itself, very sensitive.

6

1 BODY Tomb, temple, machine and self

The body is the tomb of the soul. Plato

Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul The human body may be considered as a machine. Descartes The body is what I immediately am…I am my body. Sartr e What is the body? Opinions have differed dramatically, as the quotations above indicate. The body has been regarded as a tomb of the soul, a temple, a machine, and the self, and much more; and it has also been treated accordingly. Bodies may be caressed or indeed killed, they may be loved or hated, and thought beautiful or ugly, sacred or profane. Ideas about what the body is, what it means, its moral value and the values of its constituent parts, the limits of the body, its social utility and symbolic value, in sum, how the body is defined both physically and socially, vary widely from person to person, and have changed dramatically over time. The one word, body, may therefore signify very different realities and perceptions of reality. Our task here is to explore the range of these meanings, and to indicate how and why these meanings change. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the body as: ‘The physical or material frame or structure of man or of any other animal; the whole material organism viewed as an organic entity’. Yet even this spare definition raises questions. What constitutes, and who defines, ‘the whole’? Opinions differ. Some would include hair and nail-clippings, spilled blood and faeces, defining them as the body 7

TH E BODY SOCIAL

in another place; and some include the shadow; others would not Sartre denies that the body simply is the ‘frame or structure’ of ‘man’ or animal; for him, and for others, the body is the self. And is the body wholly physical? For Descartes, yes, it is a machine; for Saint Paul, no, it is also and even primarily spiritual. Above all, the body, defined as tomb or temple, machine or self, is normative. Here we will explore some of the principal themes in the thinking about the body from the Greeks and the Romans to Judaeo-Christian thought and practice, through the Renaissance to the present. We conclude with a discussion on the range of modern constructions. GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THE BODY AS PLEASURE OR TOMB?

The Greeks glorified the body. Their sculptors, painters and potters celebrated the beauty of the naked human form in stone and paint and clay. The Olympic Games, which were held every four years from 776 BC to AD 394, celebrated the power and strength of the male body, on the sacred slopes of Mount Olympus. They seem to have held relaxed attitudes to sex, at least in Athens, to judge by Lysistrata. And the Greeks were the first to develop theories of beauty (Carritt, 1962; Eco, 1986). Although Greek culture was body-centred, there was no philosophical consensus on the body. Several theories prevailed. Hedonism was asserted by Aristippus (c. 435–366 BC), the founder of the Cyrenaic school, and a friend of Socrates, who insisted that ‘bodily pleasures are far better than mental pleasures’. He practised what he preached and lived a luxurious life (in Laertius, vol. 1, 1972:219). Countervailing this philosophy were the Epicureans. Epicurus (341–270 BC), the founder of this school, stated clearly: ‘we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good’ (in Laertius, vol. 2, 1972:655). But they believed mental pleasures were superior to those of the body. For the Cyrenaics, the mind is fine, but the body is better; for the Epicureans, the body is good, but the mind is better. Neither philosophy challenged the Greek lifestyle. The third stream of Greek thought, Orphism, which began to emerge in about the fourth century BC, was radically different. It was said to have been founded by Orpheus, one of the Greek heroes and an Argonaut. According to Orphic belief, Dionysus, the son of Zeus, was killed and eaten by the Titans, the wicked sons of 8

BODY

Earth. Zeus destroyed them, but from their ashes rose the human race with a dual nature, part earthly (the Titans) and part heavenly (Dionysus, the son of Zeus). The Orphic life consisted of the cultivation of the divine nature by asceticism: abstention from meat, wine and sexual intercourse. The body was regarded as the tomb of the soul. This soma-sema (body=tomb) philosophy was most unpopular; but it did influence such leading philosophers as Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, and hence Neoplatonism and Christianity. Socrates (466–399 BC) described the soul as a ‘helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars’. He insists that the body is a ‘hindrance’ to the soul, an ‘impediment’ and an ‘imperfection, constantly interrupting, disturbing, distracting and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth’. It enslaves us and shackles us (Plato, 1963:66, 47–50). Indeed the body is ‘the grave [tomb] of the soul’ (1963:437). Body and soul are not only separate but opposed and unequal. Plato (c. 427–348 BC) maintained this dualism in his last work, stating that ‘soul is utterly superior to body …the body is no more than a shadow which keeps us company’ (1963:1503). Only in death is ‘the soul…liberated from the desires and evils of the body’ (1963:441; emphasis added).1 The conflict between body and soul is therefore built-in, permanent and total. The logical consequence of this body-negative dualism is, Plato explained, ‘purification’ and the pursuit of philosophy, but, he explains, ‘the philosopher’s occupation consists precisely in the freeing and separation of soul from body’ (1963:50); i.e. asceticism, the way to wisdom, goodness and truth. Socrates was not afraid to die; and in rejecting his bodily life, he welcomed immortal life. Even in his death, his philosophy scandalized his contemporaries. None the less, Plato was not entirely body-negative and bodydenying. He also explained that a beautiful body is the first step on the way to Absolute Beauty and God. In The Symposium, Plato suggests that there is a scale of perfection ranging from the love of physical beauty to a love of beautiful souls up ‘the heavenly ladder’ to the love of beautiful thoughts and ideas to, finally, the love of God who is Absolute Beauty (1963:561–3; see chapter 3). Thus for Plato, the body may lead to God or away from God; the beautiful body may inspire the philosopher, or hinder, contaminate, disturb, enslave and shackle the same philosopher. 9

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Aristotle (384–322 BC), a former student of Plato’s, and a keen naturalist, was enormously interested in the body; he also promptly rejected Plato’s dualism and his body-negativism. He defined the soul as ‘the principle of life’ and described it as ‘the form of the particular living body’. There cannot be one without the other. In his treatise On the Soul, he states: ‘we can dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and body are one: it is as though we were to ask whether the wax and its shape are one’ (1984:657). Hence Aristotle’s materialism. None the less, he did agree with Plato that the soul is superior to, and rules, the body, and there are elements of dualism (although without the body-negativism) in his remarks that we must take care of the body ‘for the sake of the soul’, and that ‘intellect more than anything else is man’ (1984:1989–90, 2117, 1862; his emphasis). 2 A.N.Whitehead has suggested that the history of European philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Certainly this would seem to be correct with respect to the philosophy of the body; for-these two competing views of the body—dualist versus monist, idealist versus materialist, negative and positive—have persisted in Western philosophy. Each viewpoint has been developed, in time, to its logical extremes. The Stoics developed out of Plato’s dualism and idealism, and Christian asceticism also. Dualism influenced such diverse thinkers as Augustine and Descartes, and still characterizes contemporary bio-medicine; and materialism has persisted from hedonism and Epicureanism through Marxism to contemporary existentialism. THE ROMANS: THE BODY AS CLAY, CORRU PTION AND CORPSE

Stoicism was the dominant philosophy in the Roman Empire at the turn of the millennium and exerted a strong influence over Christian thought during its formative years. Seneca (d. 65 BC) was very clear: ‘a high-minded and sensible man divorces soul from body, and dwells much with the better or divine part, and only as far as he must with this complaining and frail portion’. And again: ‘nature has surrounded our soul with the body as its cloak’ (1953, Vol. 2:187, 455). The dualism and the superiority of the soul reflect Plato, although Seneca is not so body-negative: a cloak is not a tomb or a prison, indeed it protects from the elements; but nor is it as important as the wearer of the cloak. He advised his friend 10

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in words that would not go down too well with contemporary athletes and body-builders: It is indeed foolish, my dear Lucilius, and very unsuitable for a cultivated man, to work hard over developing the muscles and broadening the shoulders and strengthening the lungs. For…you can never be a match, either in strength or in weight, for a first-class bull…whatever you do, come back soon from body to mind. (1953, Vol. 1:97–9) Epictetus (1st century) was more emphatic: both more dualistic and more negative. He says of humanity: ‘There are two elements mingled in our birth, the body which we share with the animals, and the reason and mind which we share with the gods.’ He described the body as ‘a slave to fever, gout, ophthalmia, dysentery, the tyrant, fire, sword, [and] everything stronger than itself’. He added: ‘You must treat your whole body like a poor ass, with its burden on its back, going with you just as far as it may’ (1968:11, 182, 221). And in an epigrammatic comment he states that ‘Man is a poor soul burdened with a corpse’ (Aurelius, 1964:73). Marcus Aurelius spoke in similar terms in his Meditations, describing the body as ‘but clay and corrup- tion’. He described death as ‘a release from impressions of sense, from twitchings of appetite, from excursions of thought and from service to the flesh’ (1964:55, 97). Most Romans, it may be well to remember, were not Stoic philosophers and probably did not regard their bodies as a poor ass, a little corpse, clay and corruption. Indeed many Romans, including Ptolemy and other astronomers, were firm believers in astrology, and thought of the body as cosmic.3 Also Ovid’s poems, particularly The Art of Loving, show a jaunty enjoyment of the physical body in general, and sex in particular, which perhaps began (philosophically) with the Cyrenaics, but certainly counterbalanced the Stoics. Each age seems to have a love-hate relationship with the body, from the Greeks and Romans to the Christians. THE CHRISTIANS: THE BODY AS TEMPLE OR ENEMY?

The early Christians entertained several different paradigms of the body. They distinguished between the body as physical, as spiritual and as mystical; their attitudes to the body as physical were ambiguous, however, in tension between positive and negative. At 11

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the same time, the body was a pervasive allegory of the hierarchies of society: church and family, and then state (cf. O’Neill, 1985). The Incarnation transformed the ancient philosophical debates. ‘The Word was made flesh’ (John 1:14). God became Man. Divinity was humanized, but conversely humanity, in all its fleshiness, was divinized. Christ formulated the doctrine of the mystical body in the parable of the vine and the branches: ‘I am the vine, and you are the branches’ (John 15:5). And later at the Passover meal: Jesus took a piece of bread, gave a prayer of thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples. ‘Take and eat it,’ he said, ‘this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, gave thanks to God, and gave it to them. ‘Drink it, all of you,’ he said, ‘this is my blood.’ (Matthew 26:26–7) This last supper is re-enacted ritually and sacramentally in the Mass and the Liturgy. The Christian therefore participates in the body of Christ, as Christ lives in the Christian. For the believer, therefore, the body participates in an order other than the purely corporeal: holy, sacramental and mystical, and also personal, loved and loving. Teilhard de Chardin (1964:125) suggests that ‘the sacramental action of Christ…sanctifies matter’. Saint Paul developed this doctrine further: Christ is like a single body, which has many parts; it is still one body, even though it is made up of different parts. In the same way, all of us, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether slaves or free, have been baptized into the one body by the same Spirit, and we have all been given the one Spirit to drink. (I Corinthians 12:12–13) He insisted: ‘You know that your bodies are parts of the body of Christ…Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourselves but to God; He bought you for a price. So use your bodies for God’s glory’ (I Corinthians 6:15, 19–20). This view of the body as a temple, and as part of Christ, is a far cry from the Orphic view of the body as a ‘tomb’ or the Stoic belief in the body as a ‘corpse’, an ‘ass’, or ‘clay and corruption’. Saint Paul also clearly distinguished between the body as physical and as spiritual. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body had been lived by Christ in his own resurrection—‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (John 11:25)—and pre-figured in the raising of Lazarus 12

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and Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Paul explains this idea to the Corinthians as follows: This is how it will be when the dead are raised to life. When the body is buried, it is mortal; when raised it will be immortal. When buried, it is ugly and weak; when raised it will be beautiful and strong. When buried it is a physical body; when raised it will be a spiritual body. There is, of course, a physical body, so there has to be a spiritual body. (I Corinthians 15:35–6, 42–4) In Christ’s teaching, the care of the physical body figures prominently. The Lord’s Prayer, the only prayer Christ gave to his disciples, requests: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Matthew 6:11). Furthermore, Christ instructed his disciples that on the last day the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats and he will say to the former: Come, you that are blessed by my Father! Come and possess the Kingdom which has been prepared for you ever since the creation of the world. I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you received me in your homes, naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me. (Matthew 25:34–6) Again, Christ’s miracles attest to the importance he attached to the body; most of them were concerned with healing people or feeding them: the curing of the leper, the healing of the paralysed man, the feeding of the five thousand, the turning of water into wine. Such attention to the body has been, and still is, taken to legitimate liberation theology. None the less, there is a balance. The body is important, but it is not everything. Christ’s teaching is uncompromising on this point: If your hand or your foot makes you lose your faith, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life without a hand or a foot than to keep both hands and both feet and be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye makes you lose your faith, take it out and throw it away! It is better for you to enter life with only one eye than to keep both eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell. (Matthew 18:8–9) 13

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Origen (c. 185–254) interpreted this doctrine literally, and castrated himself rather than risk being thrown into the fires, as did others; but the practice of self-mutilation was later condemned by various Councils, and a limit was therefore set to the ascetic construction of the body as enemy. None the less, throughout his ministry Christ emphasized the necessity of self-denial, fasting, watchfulness, renunciation, poverty, and even chastity; indeed he gave up his own life for his flock. Paul, too, was very aware of the danger of the body; he described his inner conflict as follows: My inner being delights in the law of God. But I see a different law at work in my body—a law that fights against the law which my mind approves of. It makes me a prisoner to the law of sin which is at work in my body. What an unhappy man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to my death? (Romans 7:21–4) This conflict between God and sin, mind and body, may reflect Platonist or Stoic philosophy; but his resolution of this conflict is within neither tradition. He assured the Corinthians: ‘I bruise my body and make it know its master, for fear that after preaching to others, I should find myself rejected’ (1 Corinthians 9:27). Again: ‘They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts’ (Galatians 5:24). Finally: ‘each one of you must learn to gain mastery over his body, to hallow and honour it’ (1 Thessalonians 4:4). Paul did not equate the body with sins and evil, nor sin with the body—as the Manicheans were to do later; yet it is one of the complex aspects of Pauline teachings that the body should be bruised, but honoured; mastered, but hallowed; crucified, but glorified; it is an enemy, but also a temple and a member of Christ. This ‘double message’ in the teachings of Christ and Paul caused a split in the early church between the ascetics and the moderates: a split which has continued through the centuries, and is strikingly evident in the deep ambivalence towards the body in general and sexuality in particular.4 In the first centuries of the church, asceticism was expressed particularly in the ideals of martyrdom, virginity and celibacy, regarded as the total dedication of the self to God. When the persecutions finished, and particularly after the Peace of Constantine 14

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in 313, asceticism took new directions. Origen’s direction had been repudiated by various Councils; but many Christians ‘left the world’, i.e. society, either to live in the new monastic communities or as hermits and stylites (pillar ascetics). Anthony the Great (c. 251–356), known as the Father of Monks, initiated the movement in the Eastern church; and Simeon Stylites (c. 390– 459) was one of the first of the pillar ascetics, living on the top of a pillar for years. These ascetics developed ingenious ways to mortify themselves: Alipius spent 53 years on his pillar, then, having lost the use of his feet, lay on his side for the next 14 years. Another spent 10 years in a tub hanging in mid-air. Still another never turned his face to the West. Their sayings and deeds were collected and distributed to inspire further heroic holiness (Ward, 1975). Attitudes to the body were distinctly negative in these movements, and followed a Pauline dualism. They were perhaps not typical; certainly only a minority of Christians were martyrs, monks, celibates or stylites. But dualism was widely assumed. John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), Archbishop of Constantinople, distinguished clearly between body and soul: ‘There is soul and body: they are two substances; there is a beauty of body and there is a beauty of soul…When thou hearest the word beauty, think not of eye, or nose, or mouth or neck, but of piety, faith, love, things which are within.’ The body is relatively unimportant: ‘The man ought to be praised and admired, not for his dress…not even for his bodily form, but for his soul.’ Indeed, ‘if you consider what is stored up inside those beautiful eyes, and that straight nose, and the mouth and the cheeks, you will affirm the well-shaped body to be nothing else than a whited sepulchre’. On the other hand, Chrysostom also praised the body, ‘leading us on by its beauty to admiration of Him who framed it’ (1956:264–5, 466, 104, 413). Here he reflects Plato’s view of ‘the heavenly ladder’ of beauty in The Symposium. Augustine (354–430) clarified this Pauline dualism, emphasizing the will rather than ‘the flesh’ in the making of moral choices. Insisting that Paul used the term flesh to mean ‘human nature’ and ‘old ways’ rather than the body itself, he argued that ‘the flesh, in its own kind and order, is good’. Generally he is more positive, even enthusiastic, about the physical body: ‘The human body is a revelation of the goodness of God and of the providence of the body’s Creator.’ He praises its ‘rhythm, poise, symmetry, and beauty’ and concludes that: ‘The whole body, inside and out, 15

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can be looked upon as a kind of organ with a music all its own’ (1958:302, 508). None the less, the soul remains superior to the body. Basil the Great (c. 329–79), founder of Eastern monasticism, is very clear on this: The soul is as far superior to the body as heaven is above the earth and heavenly things above those of earth’ (1970:28). In the second millennium of Christianity, asceticism took new directions again. First, there was the founding of the great monastic orders of the West. The Benedictines had already been founded (c. 529), but the Carthusians (1084), Cistercians (1098), Franciscans (1209) and the Dominicans (1216) were founded in swift succession. All the members of these orders took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and some, in the contemplative orders, took vows of silence. In this sense asceticism was institutionalized. The second change in asceticism, concomitant with the growing devotion to the humanity of Christ, especially in his Passion, was a new type of practice: the deliberate infliction of pain. Hitherto asceticism had involved, generally, the acceptance of physical sufferings imposed by others (e.g. the persecutions) or asceticism by omission (e.g. denying the physical needs of the body, for sleep, sex, talk, etc.); the new asceticism demanded self-denial and pain by commission. The reasons, however, remained the same: the expiation of sin, self-conquest, the intercession for divine graces and favours, and the imitation of Christ. All these are logical consequences of the belief in both the evil of the body in a dualistic philosophy, and the holiness of the physical body in the Mystical Body of Christ. Francis of Assisi (c. 1182–1226) was very straightforward in one of his letters: ‘We must hate our bodies with [their] vices and sins.’ His biographer states: ‘He used to call his body Brother Ass for he felt it should be subjected to heavy labour, beaten frequently with whips, and fed with the poorest food’ (Bonaventure, 1978:70, 222). He practised what he preached. Brother Giles, one of his first followers, was equally emphatic: ‘Our flesh is like a hog that runs eagerly into the mud and enjoys being in the mud’ (Brown, 1958:273). Many Christians felt as he did. After various outbreaks of the plague in the twelfth century arose the Flagellants: groups of Christians who practised public flagellation as a penance. The practice was prohibited by various popes, but revived particularly during the Black Death (1346–9) and continued sporadically into the 16

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fifteenth century. The practice is particularly significant as demonstrating the close spiritual relation between the physical body and the body politic, in the public realm. Health and happiness on this earth are perceived not only as individual matters within Divine Providence, but also as social and corporate. Not only can Christians reach God directly through pain-infliction, and save their own souls, but they can also save others. The body mediates.5 A certain distrust rather than hatred, of the body is evident in the medieval lyric poem Piers the Ploughman by William Langland (c. 1332–c. 1399); a lovely lady representing Holy Church explains a dream Piers has had, but warns him: Put no trust in your body, for its promptings come from the World, and the World is a liar out to betray you. And the flesh and the devil are in league to pursue your soul, and speak evil things to your heart (1959:71) In Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), however, the leading theologian of the age, there is no such hatred or distrust of the body. He rejected both Plato’s dualism and Aristotle’s materialism, and developed a new synthesis: asserting the unity of body and soul, matter and form (the theory of hylomorphism, taken from Aristotle), as well as the immortality of the soul (from Plato), and the resurrection of the body. He insisted: ‘my soul is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man’ (Spicker, 1970:10). The body therefore has intrinsic moral value; he insisted that ‘divine goodness is the good of everything corporeal’ (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1:65, 3; 1981, vol. 10:13). Thus the body in scholastic philosophy is neither tomb, nor prison, nor enemy. His fellow Dominican Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328) was less enthusiastic about things corporeal, however, stating firmly: ‘There is no physical or fleshly pleasure without some spiritual harm’ (Davis, 1976:35). The ascetic tradition was reinforced by Thomas à Kempis (1380– 1471), whose spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, was enormously influential, and indeed still is. He echoed Plato and Saint Paul when he advised that: to eat and drink, to wake and sleep, to rest and labour, and to be subject to all the necessities of nature is a great trouble and affliction to the devout man, who would rather be released

17

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and set free from all sin…The inner life of man is greatly hindered in this life by the needs of the body. (1952:55) Not all the medievals lived such ascetic lives, however, nor held such ascetic views. The troubadours indeed praised a secular love; and The Art of Courtly Love, written in the late twelfth century, described the service of the King and Queen of Love, and the virtue of ‘the work of Venus’ (Capellanus, 1959). The rules of love were enumerated, parodying the Ten Commandments, and capsizing Christian morality. Indeed the title, and the text, were strongly influenced by Ovid’s The Art of Love. Similarly the stories of Boccaccio (1313–75) in Decameron and Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) in The Canterbury Tales show men and women thoroughly enjoying each other’s bodies. This frank admission of sensuality ran counter to the Christian tradition. Nature, i.e. Love, was opposed to reason, law and morality, in this view; and Chaucer’s nun epitomized the contradiction with her enigmatic legend ‘Amor vincit omnia’. Both Boccaccio and Machiavelli reversed the Christian tradition in their assertion of the primacy of new values: sexual love and political power. The body was more lusted after than distrusted. Attitudes towards the body varied considerably during the Middle Ages, and so did the treatment of the body, but the ascetics were presumably a minority. Indeed, popular attitudes towards the body may well have been precisely the opposite of what the ascetics and religious described. THE RENAISSANCE: THE BODY AS SECULAR AND PRIVATE

The Renaissance, beginning in Italy in the fourteenth century, rediscovered the body, and transformed attitudes towards it. Artists like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian painted the body as beautiful and in glowing colours. Cellini gave new poise to sculpture. Philosophers like Castiglione (1517/1983:330– 2) praised beauty as a ‘sacred thing’ and ‘a true sign of inner goodness’; ‘the good and the beautiful are identical, especially in the human body’. This integration of body and soul, and physical and moral beauty, would have upset John Chrysostom and others; clearly beauty was being appreciated for its own, purely secular sake, not simply as a rung on the ladder to God. The secularization of the body is indicated by Erasmus’s (1530/ 1985) treatise De civilitate morum puerilium. He discussed the social 18

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control of such bodily functions as eating and drinking, spitting, blowing the nose and so on, far more frankly than they are discussed in contemporary etiquette books. Elias (1982) has shown that as standards of refinement rose, so more and more areas of ‘instinctive’ or ‘natural’ behaviour came to be judged as indelicate and unmannerly. New notions of civility began to privatize the body. Increasingly people distanced themselves from bodily functions and indeed from the body itself, both their own and other people’s, not only ideologically but also with implements of various sorts: table cutlery, handkerchiefs, commodes, nightwear, spittoons, etc. Little had been hidden in the past, or could be hidden. Now a ‘conspiracy of silence’ begins to descend upon sexual matters, and what might be called a ‘conspiracy of invisibility’ descends upon the ‘private’ parts of the body. Elias attributed these changes in the discourse on, and the living of, the body to the rise of individualism at the Renaissance and, more specifically, to the breakdown of group identities in feudalism and in the church. Increasing social and geographical mobility and technological change facilitated the development of an egocentric universe. Other factors would later accelerate this process, notably the rise of Calvinism and Puritanism, urbanization, industrialization, and the privatization of the family; but increasingly after the Renaissance everyone is an island—which is what Descartes implied and Donne protested against. Indeed only 100 years after Erasmus’s book, the new realities of the individual as alone (divided from others), secular (divided from God) and dual (internally divided) are succinctly expressed in the Cartesian ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. The Renaissance therefore witnessed the beginning of the end of the ascetic idea of the body as enemy, and the strengthening of the idea of the body as beautiful, good, personal and private. This movement should not be over-emphasized, however. For the leper— and leprosy was endemic in Europe in the early Middle Ages—the disfigured body was a public symbol of sin, and was a visitation from God. Thus the body remained an instrument of God’s will, public or private, beautiful or leprous, friend or enemy. The Renaissance did not displace traditional ascetic ideas totally. Teresa of Avila (1515–82), echoed Paul, Francis and Thomas à Kempis when she advised the sisters of her order: The first thing we have to do, and that at once, is to rid ourselves of love for this body of ours…[By] the grace of the 19

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Lord we shall gain dominion over the body. To conquer such an enemy is a great achievement in the battle of life. (1964:90, 97; emphasis added) The theme is Pauline. Having conquered the body by exterior (bodily) mortification, the sisters were expected to subdue the will by interior mortification. This required going against one’s ‘natural’ emotional desires and needs; in Ignatius Loyola’s phrase: ‘agere contra’. This is necessary for the ‘overcoming of self’. Some examples of such ascetic behaviour: Margaret-Mary Alacoque (1647–90) filled her mouth with the diarrhoea of a sick man, and she cleaned up the vomit of another with her tongue; Angela of Fuligno described how she drank the dirty water with which she had just been washing the hands and feet of lepers: The beverage flooded us with such sweetness that the joy followed us home. Never had I drunk with such pleasure. In my throat was lodged a piece of scaly skin from the lepers’ sores. Instead of getting rid of it, I made a great effort to swallow it and I succeeded. I shall never be able to express the delight that inundated me. (In Beauvoir, 1953:676) This may seem gross, disgusting, masochistic and neurotic to some; to others it has seemed the peak of holy asceticism. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1536), the founder of the Society of Jesus, emphasized in his Spiritual Exercises that ‘we need to train ourselves to be impartial in our attitudes towards all created reality’, including the body; this is a typically Stoic idea, in a different context. And he gave clear instructions on penance, recommending that the retreatant cut down on food and sleep, and ‘chastise the body by inflicting actual pain on it. This is done by wearing hairshirts or cords or iron chains, by scourging or beating ourselves and by other kinds of harsh treatments’ (1963:22, 39–40). Contemporary Jesuits, and no doubt members of other religious orders, still practise the traditional ‘mortification of the flesh’ as Ignatius had recommended. For Ignatius, as for Paul, salvation is achieved, at least in part, by conquest of the body; for Augustine it was more a matter of the will. Loyola’s contemporary, Martin Luther (1483–1546), had a very different attitude towards the body. He enjoyed his food and drink and once remarked: ‘If our Lord is permitted to create nice, large 20

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pike and good Rhine wine, presumably I may be allowed to eat and drink’ (Friedenthal, 1970:445). And he argued persistently against the traditional clerical views of celibacy, and praised marriage. Rabelais (1494–1553) was also a contemporary of both Loyola and Luther, with very different ideas about the body. The ‘grotesque body’ which he described in Gargantua and Pantagruel is the body of the medieval folk-culture, carnivals, Hallowe’ens, comedy and satire. Bakhtin (1968:319) notes: The body that figures in all the expressions of the unofficial speech of the people is the body that fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying. In all languages there is a great number of expressions related to the genital organs, the anus and buttocks, the belly, the mouth and nose. But there are few expressions for the other parts of the body: arms and legs, face, and eyes. Boccaccio had described the ribald, fun, wild, uncivilized body before him, and Shakespeare and Cervantes would do so later; but Rabelais was hyper-realistic. ‘The essential principle of grotesque realism’, says Bakhtin (1968:19–20), ‘is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in literature.’ At the time, therefore, the grotesque body was (and indeed still is) the exact reversal of the ‘ascetic body’ of Loyola, the ‘body beautiful’ of Castiglione, and the private and secular and civilized body of the high Renaissance. The Christian body of the Renaissance and the Reformation is therefore fluid and multiple. Since Vatican II, however, modern Christians have constructed a gentler and friendlier body. A Franciscan work on spirituality advises that: The modern mortification is to start taking care of our health once more out of reverence for who we are: temples of the Spirit of God…Our mortification…does not involve punishing the body, or depriving ourselves of food and drink. It involves the dull task of eating and drinking what is healthy and lifegiving; it involves the decision to stop killing ourselves and to start loving ourselves. And moderation is the key. (Bodo, 1984:133–4) 21

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Modern theologians increasingly stress that the body is not an ‘enemy’, nor a ‘poor ass’. Thomas Merton states: ‘What is important is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body but entangled in our own mind’ (1973:90). This seems, on the face of it, to be a complete reversal of the attitudes of some of the Desert Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Indeed contemporary theologians are far more positive about the body: The Christian’s body is a redeemed body. It has been transferred to another master; it has passed from evil to good, it has returned to God’s ownership, it is no longer profane but sacred, and this change of ownership is precisely a consecration. (Mouroux, 1961:62) None the less, asceticism is not dead. Warriors, athletes, dancers, weight-lifters and others still train; and their slogan, ‘No pain, no gain’, expresses a secular asceticism. Where Christians trained to save their souls, others now train to improve their bodies. And the modern body has now come full circle back to the ancient Greek ideal of the beautiful body, an ideal symbolized by the re-opening of the Olympic Games in 1896. DESCARTES TO THE MODERNS: THE BODY AS MACHINE

René Descartes (1596–1650) has often been described as the founder of modern philosophy, and Cartesianism, specifically mechanism, has been the philosophy which has underpinned the achievements of modern science. In his Discourse on Method (1637) he formulated the first principle of his philosophy: ‘Cogito, ergo sum’—I think, therefore I am; and he went on to say that ‘this “I”, that is to say, the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body’ (1968:53–4). And what was this body? Descartes replied: ‘I considered myself, firstly, as having a face, hands, arms, and the whole machine made up of flesh and bones, such as it appears in a corpse and which I designated by the name of body’. He also compared the body to a clock, which works without a mind (1968:104, 163; cf. 1972:1–5). Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) agreed with Descartes on this, and in Leviathan (1651) he asks: ‘What is the heart, but a spring; and 22

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the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer?’ (1960:5). It is ironic that Hobbes, and others, used the inorganic metaphor of machines to explain the body, and the organic metaphor of the body to explain politics. Descartes had suggested that ‘the rules of mechanics’ are ‘the rules of nature’ (1968:72); and many agreed, including Giorgio Baglivi (1668–1706), Professor of Anatomy at Rome: Whoever examines the bodily organism with attention will certainly not fail to discern pincers in the jaws and teeth; a container in the stomach; watermains in the veins, the arteries and other ducts; a piston in the heart; sieves or filters in the bowels; in the lungs, bellows; in the muscles, the force of the lever; in the corner of the eye, a pulley, and so on. (Moravia, 1978:48) One point should be clarified, however; very few people regarded the self as only a machine. Both Descartes and Hobbes tried to explain that people were not merely machines, although animals were. Descartes (1968:74–6) said it was because animals do not and machines cannot conduct conversations, or reason; Hobbes (1960:13, 69) argued from reason also, and from religion. Bishop Butler (1950:9) announced in one of his sermons in 1726 that ‘A machine is inanimate and passive, but we are agents.’ And others argued that mechanism could not explain life, energy, growth and movement (Moravia, 1978). Descartes’ division of homo sapiens into soul and body effectively allocated the soul to the church and the body to science in a clear ‘separation of powers’. The division within the self coincided with and reflected the division within society. One of the first to attack Descartes was Benedict Spinoza, who flatly denied the Cartesian premise. ‘Descartes starts from mind,’ he wrote to Liebniz, ‘I start from God’ (1959:v). And he began his most famous work, Ethics (1677), published after his death, with the first chapter on God. ‘Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God’ (Pt 1, 15; 1959:11). Furthermore, ‘man consists of mind and body’, and ‘the human mind is united to the body’ (Pt 2, 13; 1959:47); but neither is subordinate to the other, they are merely two facets of the one reality of God. Indeed, mind and body are not separate, as Descartes had insisted; Spinoza argues that: ‘the order and connection of ideas 23

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is the same as the order and connection of things’ (Pt 2, 7; 1959:41). Yet while Spinoza’s theory of hylozoism did avoid the Cartesian problem of the interaction of the mind and the body, his philosophy did not convince his contemporaries. The French philosopher La Mettrie also rejected Cartesian dualism, but from a materialist, not a spiritualist, perspective. In his L’Homme Machine (1748), he argued that Man is a machine, just like any other animal. ‘The human body is a watch,’ he said, ‘a machine which winds its own springs’, and he described the alleged soul as a ‘chimera’, an ‘empty word’ (1961:141–2, 93, 128). During the nineteenth century, the philosophy and science of the body were in a ferment; and major contributions to the discussions were made by Feuerbach, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud in their different fields. Ludwig Feuerbach interrupted these debates about body and mind, machines and souls, and insisted on the material base of humanity: ‘The individual is an individual only in this, his corporeal life’ (1980:87). He rejected the Christian notion of immortality, ‘the belief that splits humans into an otherworldly, inconceivable, shapeless soul, which is hostile to both form and nature, and into a crude spiritless body, which is hostile to the soul’ (1980:7). Yet Feuerbach remained a philosopher, rather than an activist, and for all his interest in the body and the senses (chapter 5), he did not investigate corporeal life in practice. Marx did, and so did Engels (see chapters 5 and 9), and they both researched the destruction, mechanization and animalization of the bodies of the workers. Not only are human and animal labour interchangeable, as Marx noted in Capital. Vol. 1 (1867) but the worker ‘becomes an appendage of the machine’ in a sense never intended by Descartes (Marx and Engels, 1967:87). ‘Since the worker has sunk to the level of a machine, he can be confronted by the machine as a competitor.’ And ‘the inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death’ (Marx, 1964:69, 68). Bodies are disposable assets. Charles Darwin, born 100 years after La Mettrie, was also concerned about humans as animals, but from a biological rather than a social perspective. In the concluding chapter of The Descent of Man. Vol. 2 (1871) Darwin stated bluntly that: ‘man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World’ (1981:389). Darwin delightedly informed a friend: ‘Our ancestor was an animal who breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great 24

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swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind’ (1887, vol. 2:266). Humans, therefore, are not only animals bodily evolved from other animals, but their/our bodies are still evolving. Darwin had very effectively capsized Victorian values, for now mind was dependent on body, as with other animals, and humans were not ‘lords of creation’ over animals but descended from these animals, and bearing their animal origins in their bodies for all to see. The ancient dichotomies of mind/body, human/animal, superior/inferior, asserted from Plato to Descartes, were here not only denied, but in some senses reversed. Where Marx had described the progressive reduction of the worker to animal to body and finally to machine, his contemporary, Walt Whitman, born in the same year, rhapsodized in ‘Starting from Paumanok’ about the human body as including the soul and indeed as divine: Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul; Whoever you are, how superb and divine is your body, or any part of it. Another of his poems is entitled ‘I Sing the Body Electric’: a sizzling break with the Orphic-Stoic-Pauline-ascetic tradition. Friedrich Nietzsche also sang the body, in his own way, and rejected Christianity and the ideology of the body which he identified with Christianity, namely asceticism and negativism. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), he takes to task these ‘despisers of the body’. He himself praised the body: ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage—he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body.’ In this removal of the self from the brain and from ‘thoughts and feelings’ and in the location and identification of the Self in and with the body, Nietzsche anticipated Sartre. He added: ‘There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom’ (1969:62); this sentence not only reflects one of Pascal’s more well-known aphorisms, but it also reverses the traditional definition of the superiority of the mind over the body. Reason is now defined as pertaining more to the body than to the mind, perhaps in the sense of instinct and intuition; thus the distinctive feature of homo sapiens is no longer mind but body. Meanwhile Sigmund Freud demonstrated in his Studies on Hysteria (1895), with Breuer, that psychological phenomena can be converted 25

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into physical phenomena, and that hysterical symptoms are psychogenic. Thus body and mind are one. In his first case history ‘Dora’ (1905), he asserted that the symptoms of hysteria are both psychical and somatic in origin. Once the psychic material is analysed, the somatic symptoms disappear (1977b:73). Freud’s theory of ‘conversion’, as he called it, from mind to body seemed to be validated by the success of his therapy; but his theory also seemed to call into question traditional Cartesian dualism, and the separation of mind and body. Indeed, he was a pioneer of psycho-somatic ‘medicine’. Simultaneously, developments in medicine also initiated a reconstruction of the body. Vaccinations had been developed by Jenner in 1795 and had proved to be so effective in combating smallpox that in 1853 Parliament passed legislation making smallpox vaccinations compulsory for all children. The body politic had increased its power over the body physical. The individual body therefore now became, to a degree, state property. The year 1853 therefore marks a turning-point in the political anatomy of the body in England: i.e. in the relation between the body physical and the body politic. During the previous decades the state had slowly expanded its authority and powers over more and more sectors of the population, both public and private. Parliament had introduced legislation affecting mine and factory owners which governed the hours and conditions of labour; parish and town councils were instructed about sewage disposal, garbage tips and cemeteries; the quality of food and water became matters of law; and the reformers insisted on the close relation between the environment and health, and between the health of the population and the health of the state (Porter, 1987:55–8). ‘Filth, misery, vice, and crime are inseparably connected’, wrote one reformer in 1851 (Williams, 1965:202). The elimination of the two physical ills would, it was thought, eliminate the two moral and political ills. Physiology, politics and morality are all one. The body was therefore the last bastion to fall before the new, modern, intrusive government. There were precedents for this conquest, however. The state had always exercised the right to take away life, to inflict pain, to remove parts of the body, to tattoo or brand the body; to quarantine individuals, houses, ships and even towns in times of plague; to imprison people or banish them; and both church and state had traditionally forbidden many physical activities, as in matters of sexual intercourse, masturbation, self26

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mutilation, abortion and suicide (see Foucault, 1979). The body had never been entirely private or autonomous; it had always been under some surveillance and some control; but such control had been individual, specific and localized in time and space. The 1853 legislation was qualitatively and quantitatively different precisely because it had universal and compulsory applicability and was prescriptive for the future. Furthermore, it was legitimized by the Utilitarian doctrine of ‘the greatest good’. Also, it was the thin edge of the wedge. The Contagious Diseases Act (1866) required the compulsory examination of prostitutes, and the Vaccination Act (1871) extended the duty of vaccination to the entire population (Porter, 1987). With this new legislation, the instruments of the state now injected directly into the bloodstream of every citizen. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE MECHANICAL BODY

The death of Queen Victoria (1901) ended an era. The new century introduced King Edward VII and his numerous liaisons, the Castles and the Gibson girls, Isadora Duncan and the Ballet Russe, Picasso’s blue period, the tango, a cure for syphilis (1910), Sons and Lovers (1913), the Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States, Boas’ attacks on biological determinism, and demonstrations for women’s rights. Constructions of the body, particularly in the matters of morality and gender and race, were in flux. Old certainties and meanings were no longer secure. After the war came the ‘Roaring Twenties’, with jazz and the blues, the flappers, nudism and sunbathing, Josephine Baker in Paris and the ‘Ziegfield Follies’, the ‘Miss America’ Contest (1921), latex condoms and Charles Atlas (1922); Johnny Weismuller, winner of Olympic honours in 1924, became a Hollywood Tarzan in 1930, and women won the right to vote in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Havelock Ellis (1897–1929) finished his sevenvolume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1919/1928), and Bronislaw Malinowski wrote two books, startling at the time, on the anthropology of sex; both authors had been deeply influenced by Freud. At the same time Hollywood was packaging beautiful women and handsome men for mass visual consumption. The body beautiful was being institutionalized; and both the meaning and the reality of the body were changing. 27

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Co-existing with the new body-positive constructions of the body, mechanism remained the dominant paradigm in biomedicine. Indeed the rapid advances in medical science and practice confirmed the utility of the scientific perspective. The principal killers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—smallpox, typhoid and cholera—had been largely eliminated by social reforms, and improved standards of living. But two initiatives, the ‘cell’ theory of Rudolf Virchow and the ‘germ’ theory of Louis Pasteur, transformed medicine from an art into a science. The development of vaccines, anaesthetics, sterilization, the sulfa drugs and antibiotics contributed also to further lowering the death-rates. The body, therefore, became not ‘something’ to be feared, potentially dangerous, to be watched all the time, but something to be enjoyed; it can even be abused, and then ‘cured’ by a ‘magic bullet’. These medical advances have contributed to more relaxed and positive attitudes towards the body. They have also accelerated the trend from sacred to profane attitudes: the magic bullets work better and quicker than prayer. Cartesian mechanism persisted in psychology as in biology. John B.Watson, the founder of Behaviourism in 1924, asserted that ‘the human body…is not a treasure house of mystery but a very commonsense kind of organic machine’ (1966:49). Indeed Watson dismissed dualism, and dismissed the soul: ‘No one has ever touched a soul, or seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into relationship with it as he has with other objects of his daily experience’ (1966:3). The positivist philosophers had ‘dismissed’ the soul some years before; A.J.Ayer by his principle of verifiability, and Bertrand Russell by his materialism. Thus by the early twentieth century, biology, medicine, psychology and philosophy were largely agreed in their materialism: the body is all. This mechanistic construction of the body was congruent with the mechanization of society. The first Model T Fords were produced in 1908; and the automobile transformed thinking about the body. Watson indeed referred to the individual as a body, the body as a machine, and the machine as a car: Let us try to think of man as an assembled organic machine ready to run. We mean nothing very difficult by this. Take four wheels with tires, axles, differentials, gas engine, body; put them together and we have an automobile of a sort. (1966:269) 28

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This threefold reduction, man to body to machine to car, however, lost the ‘organic’ in the process. Mechanism became so powerful a philosophy that it was applied not only to the body but also to children and industrial workers. A popular work on child-care published in the United States in 1921 advised: It is quite possible to train the baby to be an efficient little machine, and the more nearly perfect we make the running of this machine, the more wonderful will be the results achieved and the less trouble it will be for the mother. (In Synnott, 1983:87; emphasis added) This was entirely congruent with the view of the worker as machine developed by Frederick Taylor, founder of the ‘scientific management’ school and of the time-and-motion study. Workers become part of the machinery of production, cogs in the wheel, numbers and units of production, scientifically studied and managed. Charlie Chaplin caricatured this reality in Modern Times. Ultimately Taylorism generated the ‘human relations’ school of Elton Mayo and others, but the contrasting orientations to workers are still reflected in corporate structures. Corporations have production departments to harness men and machines, and personnel departments to ‘unharness’ them, i.e. to inhibit or ameliorate the negative consequences of the mechanization of workers. B.F.Skinner later summarized the Behaviourist position on the body concisely, in terms that reflect existentialist philosophy: ‘The picture which emerges from a scientific analysis is not of a body with a person inside, but of a body which is a person’ (1971:199). Buckminster Fuller’s magnificent description of the body-machine in 1938 indicates the rapid pace of technological change: A self balancing, 28-jointed adapter-based biped; an electrochemical reduction plant, with segregated stowages of special energy extract in storage batteries for…thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries…the whole extraordinary complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range finders, a spectroscope, etc., the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intakeand-exhaust, a main fuel intake [etc.]. (Barnard, 1981:8) 29

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On a practical level, as Dr Jonathan Miller (1980) has noted, each new advance in science and technology has contributed to advances in medical science. This, however, has tended to reinforce the mechanistic, dualistic and reductionist constructions of the body. Even Dr. Christiaan Barnard, pioneer of the heart transplant, adopts a mechanistic perspective in his book entitled, typically, The Body Machine (1981). The book has chapters on the different ‘systems’ (reproductive, nervous, endocrine, immune, respiratory, digestive and renal) with one chapter on ‘The Chassis’, and sections entitled ‘On the Road’, ‘Body Maintenance’ and ‘In the Workshop’. Evidently how we perceive the body is a function of our level of technology; but it is also a function of how we value technology: there are, as we have seen, other values. Certainly the value of the automobile is reflected in a recent letter: My model is a 1924, and it has had the necessary periodontal work; the varicose veins have been stripped; the windshields have been replaced with bifocal models and upgraded. The paint is still the original, but the soft top has thinned, revealing the excellent hard top below. I don’t race in the Indy, but I don’t ride in the slow lane either.6 (New York Times Magazine, 19.2.84:94) Not only are physical problems seen in mechanistic terms, so also are psychological problems. The poet Robert Lowell described his manic depression as ‘some flaw in the machine’ (Time 8.10.84). The logical consequence of this instrumental view of the body as machine is the comparison of the efficiency of the human machine with other machines; and a recent study reports that: The average human body is between 16 and 27% efficient— which compares badly with several products of the human mind. But by regular exercise the body’s efficiency can be raised to 56%, which is better than many machines. (Diagram Group, 1980:183) 7 Normally, an electric motor is extremely efficient at 80%; far more efficient than even the fittest human machine; steam turbines and petrol motors are also normally more efficient, but steam engines are less efficient.

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NAZISM: THE ARYAN BODY

If mechanism has been the dominant medical paradigm of the body, the dominant political paradigm was Nazism. Having combined Darwin and Nietzsche in a strange stew of Social Darwinism and Superman, Hitler had convinced himself and others of the biological, cultural and spiritual superiority of the blond Aryan Master Race. This politicization of the body was not new; indeed it had been institutionalized previously in slavery and colonialism, sexism and racism. Nazism was simply the latest ideology of the body, an ideology based on blood as well as colour. Blood has a long history in somatology. For the Greeks, blood determined temperament: hot-blooded and cold-blooded. By the nineteenth century blood also described class. British aristocrats were ‘blue-blooded’ as distinct from the rest of us ‘red-blooded’ peasants. This dichotomy may have reference to the aristocratic propensity for being true-blue Tories, or more likely to the blue of the veins, standing out starkly against the milk-white of their delicate hands, in contrast to the scarred, tanned and dirty hands of the commoners. None the less, the term suggests a biological distinction between ‘the two nations’, as Disraeli described the nineteenth-century British class structure. Blood, or the ideology of blood, also differentiated the American race structure. Georgia defined a White: ‘White persons are only persons of the white or Caucasian race who have no ascertainable trace of either negro, African, West Indian, Mongolian, Japanese or Chinese blood in their veins’. Similarly, Alabama defined a Black as ‘any person who has in his or her veins any negro blood whatsoever’ (Montagu, 1965:421). One drop, a trace, defines the social reality. The ideology of blood is therefore linked to the politics and economics of class and race; and in the twentieth century was most clearly articulated by Hitler, and institutionalized in the concentration camps. In Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler wrote his autobiography and his political platform, beginning with his belief in the supremacy of the Aryan race: ‘he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term: MAN. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark has at all times flashed forth’ (1942:164). Blood constitutes the state: ‘The state is a racial organism, and not an economic organization’ (1942:93). This one Volk, one

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Reich, one blood must fulfil its biological and sacred duty, which is world conquest, and is historically inevitable. The only threat to this future, in Hitler’s view, was miscegenation. History proves this: ‘All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.’ Hitler returned to this theme again: ‘The adulteration of the blood and racial deterioration conditioned [by racial mixing] are the only causes that account for the decline of ancient civilizations’ (1942:163, 167). ‘The sin against blood and race is the hereditary sin in this world’ (1942:142). This ideology of blood-purity spilled rivers of blood, with about 40 million dead, and many nations ruined, including Germany. Ultimately Nazism was countered, not so much by another ideology as by the very violence which Hitler had lauded as ‘the will of Nature’ (1942:161) and by, in Churchill’s immortal words, ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. Where Hitler had seen the body as the basis of the state, Sartre described the body as the self; for one, the body is a political tool, for the other it is life. EXISTENTIALISM: THE BODY AS SELF

Tombs and temples, clocks and cars—all these metaphors imply a distance between the body and the self. In Being and Nothingness (1943), however, Sartre insisted that the body is the self, and that the self is the body: ‘I live my body…The body is what I immediately am …I am my body to the extent that I am’ (Sartre, 1966:428– 60). Sartre’s monism contrasts sharply with Descartes’s dualism; furthermore his materialism capsizes Cartesian idealism, for where Descartes had referred to ‘the mind, by which I am what I am’ (1971:54), Sartre insisted that the ‘body is what I immediately am’. The new philosophies of the body developed by Nietzsche and Sartre were major reconstructions: from self as mind to self as body; from body as enemy or as ‘despised’ to body as self; from mind as spiritual to mind as material. Mind and body have changed places in the popular scale of values. None the less traditional Christian values still do persist; and not everyone subscribes to the new materialist existentialism.8 Furthermore, those with stigmatized bodies, to borrow Goffman’s phrase, are fully aware that the body is political, central to personal identity and life chances. People judged by their 32

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bodies do not take them for granted, and may love or hate their bodies—not for philosophical but for political and very practical reasons, whether they are judged by their physical handicaps, age, colour, gender, or aesthetics (Goffman, 1963; Murphy, 1987). Malcolm X explained: [The Whites] very skilfully make you and me hate our African identity, our African characteristics. You know yourself that we have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our heads, we hated the shape of our nose, we wanted one of those long dog-like noses, you know; we hated the color of our skin, hated the blood of Africa that was in our veins. And in hating our features and our skin and our blood, why, we ended up hating ourselves. And we hated ourselves. (1966:169) This body hatred and self-hatred began to end, said Malcolm X, with African nationalism and independence movements, and Black nationalism in the United States, and culminated in the new pride in ‘Black is Beautiful’. Blacks blame Whites, and women blame men. Germaine Greer points out that women are ‘brain washed about the physical image they should have’. She insists that: The universal sway of the feminine stereotype is the single most important factor in male and female woman-hatred… Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men: following the lead of men, they are often most disgusted with themselves. (1971:261–2) Attitudes to the body, individual and collective, persist even after death; and indicate how powerful these attitudes are. In every culture, the dead body is treated with respect and with ceremony; and the body remains the symbol of the self. Indeed people have rights in their bodies after death (Feinberg, 1985). Medical students are particularly traumatized when they first have to dissect cadavers: this becomes a rite of passage into the profession (Lella and Pawluch, 1988). Perhaps the Irish essayist Robert Lynd best illustrated the close connections between the body and the self: ‘I know a man who said that he would hate to be buried in a certain graveyard 33

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because it was “very damp”. But then he was subject to rheumatism’ (1951:258). RECENT PARADIGMS: THE BODY AS PLASTIC, BIONIC, HOLISTIC…

Political and philosophical constructions of the body co-exist with scientific constructions, and recent advances in medical science have reinforced mechanistic and materialist constructions of the body. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery is one of the fastest growing specialties in medicine in the United States, with over two million operations performed annually. The body is no longer ‘given’ (meaning, traditionally, a gift of God); it is plastic, to be moulded and selected at need or whim. For mechanists, no problem; but Christian fundamentalists argue that such surgery desecrates the temple of the Holy Spirit: a clash of constructions. The body is not only plastic, it is also bionic, with cardiac pace-makers, valves, titanium hips, polymer blood vessels, electronic eye and ear implants, collagen fibre and silicon rubber skins, and even polyurethane hearts. Furthermore, we are increasingly dependent upon machines: diagnostic machines of various sorts, CAT scans, heart monitors, ultra-sound; and even for our lives: incubators soon after birth, dialysis machines and iron lungs, and respirators and life-support systems towards the end. Finally, the humans/ machines may be ‘unplugged’ or ‘switched off’. The line between human and machine is blurred, so is the fine line between life and death. The braindead can be kept ‘alive’. The body is also communal and interchangeable in its parts. Hearts, livers, pancreas, kidneys, corneas and bone marrows are all transplanted, alone or in various combinations. Xenografts, or transplants between different species, are routine. Baby Fae lived for 20 days with the heart of a baboon. The mechanistic implications are clear: just as cars are cannibalized for spare parts, so now humans and animals are also being ‘cannibalized’. The ethical implications are not so clear. Recently in the United States a baby was conceived solely to be the purveyor of bone marrow to her big sister, afflicted with chronic leukaemia: a ‘biological re-supply vehicle’. A Time poll asked if this was morally acceptable: 47 per cent of Americans said yes; 37 per cent said no (Time, 17.6.91). 9 Increasingly the body is engineered. The first trials in gene therapy in humans have already been launched in the United States; and 34

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as the genetic code is further deciphered the health benefits for those suffering, or potentially suffering, from the 3,000 or so diseases with a genetic base are obviously high. Again, however, is the body just a machine? Ethicists have raised concerns about ‘designer babies’, made to order; about the dangers of tinkering with the reproductive or germ-line cells and human cloning—mice and cows have already been cloned; and about the dangers of invasion of privacy from genetic testing, and the creation of a genetic ‘under-class’ of ‘inferior’ humans. The body may also be chosen, selected from a wide range of possibilities in sperm and ovum bank catalogues. The new reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, surrogate motherhood, embryo freezing, the research into artificial wombs and embryo implantation in men are raising a host of ethical problems about the body, and humanity. Children may now have five parents: a sperm donor, an ovum donor, a surrogate mother (a rented womb) and two social parents, quite apart from additional parents acquired by fostering, adoption and re-marriages. Children’s rights to know their genetic parents are in question, women are being commodified as gene or ovum producers or embryo-carriers; there are possibilities of ‘harvesting’ babies from petri dishes; embryo experimentation is increasing…the ethics of the body remains critical (Corea, 1985, 1987; McDaniel, 1989). While the benefits of the bio-medical model of the human body have been clearly appreciated over the last 350 years, increasingly the limitations of the model are now being perceived for three types of reasons. First, the effectiveness of placebos and hypnosis seems to indicate the role of mind over body. Second, a deeper appreciation of non-Western medical approaches to, and paradigms of, the body has developed. And third, disease is known to be related to emotional and mental states, particularly stress. Society, mind and body are all linked in ways that are still being discovered. The very phrase ‘psycho-somatic illness’ implies that the etiology of illness is, or often is, both psychological and physical—sometimes one more than the other. The medical profession has increasingly come to appreciate the utility of yoga, bio-feedback, acupuncture, relaxation techniques, macrobiotic diets, meditation, massage, aerobic fitness, visualization techniques and other health phenomena, which have traditionally been largely ignored by Western medical science; and research has indicated the therapeutic value of plants, pets, music, colour, views 35

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from windows and even laughter, and especially tender loving care, positive attitudes and the will to live. Holistic thinkers, as those who emphasize the total context in the etiology of disease are sometimes known, have expressed concern that in Western societies mind and body are so compartmentalized as to be treated by different, disciplines: psychology and psychiatry for the mind, medicine for the body. Furthermore, the American Medical Association now recognizes 24 distinct specializations within the profession. Thus the illness is increasingly ‘removed’, first by dualism and then by specialization, from the individuals who are ill, and from the physical, psychological, social and environmental contexts in which they become ill. Such reductionism, it is often argued, has created a flawed medical science, based on a false model of health, and may result in the treatment of symptoms rather than the person. These concerns need not be overstated, perhaps. Westerners on average have never lived so long, nor in such good health. The prevalence of holistic thought is indicated by one survey which found that 87 per cent of the 25,000 people surveyed agreed that ‘most problems of the body are strongly influenced by problems of the mind’. And some expressed beliefs as dualistic as ever, but with reversed poles, i.e. disease is perceived as primarily emotional or mental, not physical, in etiology. A 41-year-old cancer patient stated: ‘I accept the responsibility of getting cancer—I’ve had a lot of stress in the past few years—and I also accept the responsibility of curing myself.’ In these views, ‘it’s all in the mind’; the body merely reflects the symptoms of the mind (Rubinstein, 1982:36). Thus victims ‘blame’ themselves. This is precisely the opposite of the ancient Western tradition, and a quite different construction of the body. The body is not a problem for the mind, as Plato had argued; the mind is a problem for the body…or either may be a solution for the other in the new mind/body medicine (Moyers, 1993). CONCLU SION

Despite centuries of debate about the meaning of the body, there are no signs of universal agreement. Each new age seems to create and re-construct the body in its own image and likeness; yet at any given time there are likely to be many paradigms of the body: 36

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competing, complementary, or contradictory. And no doubt the redefinitions of corporeality will continue in the twenty-first century. Mary Douglas’ dictum that ‘the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived’ (1973:93) is particularly apposite, for both the social body and the perceptions of the physical body are constantly changing, and are infinitely various. However, the perceptions presented here have been, almost exclusively, male. Women have often defined the body differently, as we consider in the next chapter. Similarly, other cultures have ‘other bodies’, as the anthropologists have shown (see chapter 9). The physical body therefore is eminently social. In sum, the body has been, and still is, constructed in almost as many ways as there are individuals; it seems to be all things to all people. Thus the body is defined as good or bad; tomb or temple; machine or garden; cloak or prison; sacred or secular; friend or enemy; cosmic or mystical; one with mind and soul or separate; private or public; personal or the property of the state; clock or car; to varying degrees plastic, bionic, communal; selected from a catalogue or engineered; material or spiritual; a corpse or the self. Any construction of the body, however, is also a construction of the self as embodied; and, as such, influences not only how the body is treated but also how life is lived. Some love the body, some hate it; some hide it, some flaunt it; some ‘bruise’ it (Paul) and others pamper it with ‘nice, large pike and good Rhine wine’ (Luther). One may be a libertine or a puritan or a mechanic. Indeed the implications are immense, affecting virtually all areas of one’s life. At present, there is no consensus on the meaning of the body and, in a pluralistic society, no consensus can be expected. Constructions reflect the values not only of the culture, but also of the sub-culture, and of the specific individuals, and they are everchanging. Thus the discourse continues, debating whether and to what degree, and in what ways, the body is tomb or temple, loved or hated, personal or state property, machine or self.

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2 GENDER Dualism and the opposite sex

We define men and women not simply as biologically different, but as ‘opposite’ sexes; we even refer on occasion to ‘the battle of the sexes’. Men and women are polarized in our culture, as opposite, unequal, and at war in a classic example of dual symbolic classification. This is an old theory, rooted in Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian culture, and was clearly formulated by Aristotle and re-formulated by Aquinas. Plato, however, argued that the sexes are different, but complementary, and (relatively) equal, and framed an egalitarian tradition which has persisted, and connects with, the egalitarian tradition in Christianity. The debates about theorizing gender have sharpened recently as liberal feminists have argued that women are equal, are due equal rights, and are not opposite but identical, save for one chromosome. Dualism is denied. Radical feminists, however, have sometimes asserted dualism, insisting that women are superior to men, by various criteria. Thus traditional dualism is reversed in the attack on patriarchy. The fifth and final theory of gender is biological. Each human body cell contains 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. One chromosome of each pair is contributed by the mother and the other by the father. Females have a pair of XX chromosomes, males an XY pair. The mother contributes the X chromosome, the father either an X or a Y. So only one chromosome out of 46 determines gender. This amounts to a 2.17 per cent chromosome differentiation (Oakley, 1981; Miles, 1991:17–19). Biologically, therefore, men and women are 98 per cent chromosomally identical. We are one chromosome away from being of the ‘opposite’ sex.

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How did this virtual biological identity become converted into dualism, opposition and battle? The answers take us back to the ancient creation myths. ADAM, EVE AND PANDORA

Durkheim and Mauss have insisted that: ‘Every mythology is a classification’ (1963:77); and the Genesis myth of creation is an ideology of gender. The story is too well known to need re-telling; but the salient points for our purposes are that Adam was created first, also Eve was created from him, rather than vice versa, so Adam was, in a sense, the creator of Eve; then again Eve was created ‘to help him’, so he was the social superior, the boss. Also Adam was morally superior, for Eve sinned first—thus Eve is the origin of evil, and the reason for the Fall and the expulsion from Eden. Finally, in cursing Eve, God commanded her to be ‘subject’ to Adam— and reprimanded Adam for listening to Eve (Genesis 2 and 3). Bluntly, therefore, the creation myth has legitimized Christian patriarchalism and even misogyny, male dominance and the subjection of women. Unhappy with this traditional interpretation of the politics of Eden, many theologians now insist that the myth should not be interpreted literally, that it only reflected contemporary ideas of the time and should not be translated into contemporary practice, and that the creation myth in Genesis 1 refers to the simultaneous creation of male and female in the image or likeness of God (Daly, 1975; Ruether, 1983; Pagels, 1988). Thus the two genders are equal. Furthermore, Lilith, who played a prominent role in Jewish and Gnostic creation stories, was a tough character who eventually left Adam; and evil does not originate with woman in the Jewish tradition (Phillips, 1984; Daly, 1978:86). None the less, the gender ideology of Eden was reinforced in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions by the masculinity of the Lord God. The commanding figures of Jewish history are male: Adam, Noah, Moses, Solomon, Abraham, David, Isaiah. And the Messiah in the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ, is male. The traditional interpretations of the creation and temptation myths have proved immensely powerful in the construction of gender—all the more so since they have been congruent with the Greek tradition. In the beginning, according to Hesiod, there were only males, relatively weak and powerless compared to the other well-armed 39

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and armoured animals of creation. To help them, one of the Titans stole fire, the property of the gods, from the sun. Zeus, bitterly offended, decided to punish mankind i.e. males, and so created an ‘evil’, ‘the lovely curse’, ‘the hopeless trap, deadly to men’, the first woman: Pandora. Pandora was beautiful, with ‘a face like an immortal goddess’, but she opened the cask in which all the troubles, pains and evils of the world had been stored; only hope remained. Zeus was revenged. She was the ‘ruin of mankind’ (Hesiod and Theognis, 1973:41–2). The similarities between the two myths are apparent. Eve and Pandora are both created by male gods; they are both created for men, one to help, the other to ruin them; and both are the origin of evil in the world. And the myth-makers were both male. The ideological ground was now ready for Greek philosophers and Christian theologians. DUALISM AND EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY

The dualist notion of opposites has been a central theme in Greek philosophy. First proposed by Anaximander, the theory was that the conflict between the four opposite elements, hot and cold, wet and dry, was the driving natural force of the cosmos. Later theorists debated the details, but retained the theory of binary conflict. Pythagoras, however, and then Parmenides and to a degree Aristotle, institutionalized the theory of the two sexes as opposite. Pythagoras and his school declared, according to Aristotle, that ‘there are ten principles, which they arrange in two columns of cognates’, as in Table 2.1. The most important points about Table 2.1, for our purposes, are that for the first time male and female are explicitly defined, not just as different, but as opposite. Furthermore, they are opposite not only in the matter of gender, but in all the other dimensions also. The notion that male is good and female is bad reflects the Pandora myth of the Hesiod tradition (as well as the Eve myth); but the identification of male with good, right, light and one (which is a metaphor for God), and that of female with bad, left, darkness and plurality (which is an absence of unity), create a powerful symbolic equation, for the meanings overlap. Also the reverse equations apply: good is male, right is male, light is male, and so on. Parmenides’ table of opposites was in many ways very 40

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Table 2.1 The Pythagorean table of opposites

similar (Guthrie, 1965:77–80). Gender, therefore, is not simply a matter of biology, but is entangled with notions of cosmology, number, unity, direction, mobility, state, colour, morality and shape. Gender connects to everything, and everything is gendered. Plato, however, was more complicated. Some of his personal views seem fairly stereotypical. He believed that men are ‘wiser’ than women, and that the female sex ‘is generally predisposed by its weakness to undue secrecy and craft’. The masculine is ‘the majestic and whatever tends to valour’, while the feminine is ‘order and purity’ (Cratylus 392; Laws 6:781; 7:802; 1963:430, 1356, 1374). The great theoretical advances over the ideas of his predecessors are, however, first the fracturing of the binary mould; he concedes that: ‘Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things’ (Republic 5:455; 1963:694). The genders overlap; therefore, they are not opposite. And second, his radical recommendations for a common education system and a common military training for women and men, and the admission of women’s right to stand as guardians of the state. His recommendations are all the more surprising given the patriarchal society he lived in, and his overall inegalitarianism in a rigidly stratified republic (see especially Bks 3 and 9). Plato also told two creation stories; an egalitarian one in the Symposium, and a notoriously sexist one in Timaeus. In the beginning, according to the Symposium, humans were originally of three sexes: male, female and mixed, descended from, respectively, the sun, the earth and the moon; they were globular in shape, with four arms 41

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and four legs, two faces on the one head, and two sets of genitals, and so powerful and arrogant that they tried ‘to scale the heights of heaven and set upon the gods’. Zeus decided to cut them down to size, literally, and sliced them in half. This bisection left each half with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each other’s necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one…we are all like pieces of the coins that children break in half for keepsakes…and each of us is seeking for the half that will tally with [complete, complement] himself. (1963:543–4) Love, in this myth, is the search for that ‘primeval unity’ which we once had, but lost for our sins, the sins of revolt against the gods. But the salient feature of this myth is that the two sexes love each other, men and women are equal, and complete and complement each other. Furthermore, both homosexual and heterosexual love are explained. The story in Timaeus is different. Plato explains that initially only males were created. (This of course is compatible with Genesis 2 and Hesiod.) How were women created? Plato suggested that if the man lived a good life, after death he would ‘dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence’. But if he lived an evil life he would be changed into a woman in the second generation or rebirth. A woman is therefore an evil man who has died. And if that woman still lived an evil life, she would be changed into a ‘brute’ (Timaeus 42, and cf. 90; 1963:1171). Woman is therefore intermediate between man and animal in the scale of being; and woman is the reincarnation of an evil man, as the brute is the reincarnation of an evil woman. Plato’s writing about gender is therefore mixed: both egalitarian and patriarchal; but on the whole it is his philosophy of education and politics in the Republic, rather than the creation myth in Timaeus (which is contradicted by the message in the Symposium anyway, and in which the gender-theory is peripheral poetry rather than his creed) which seems more significant. Aristotle, on the other hand, was relatively egalitarian with regard to society, but patriarchal with regard to gender. He defined men and women as ‘contrary’, but not as different species: they differ in body (form) but not in substance (Metaphysics 1058; 1984:1672). In his Politics, however, it becomes clear that these 42

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body differences have substantial implications. After a long discussion of slavery Aristotle concludes that: The male is by nature superior and the female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, applies to all mankind’ (1984:1989–90). The equations of the Aristotelian table of opposites are simple and clear, the nature of male to female is that of superior to inferior, ruler to ruled, soul to body, mind to passion, humans to animals and free to slave. Females are ‘marked out for subjection’, in his words, from the hour of their birth, which, coincidentally or not, is precisely the same message as in Genesis. (Presumably it is not a coincidence: simply the same ideology of patriarchy.) Aristotle returned to gender in Economics (1:1343–4), affirming a series of binary oppositions: men are stronger, women weaker; men courageous, women cautious; men acquire possessions outside, women preserve them inside the house; one sex is adapted for outdoor activities, the other for a sedentary life; and although both share in the procreation of children, women serve by nurturing, and men by educating them (1984:2131). These oppositions in politics and economics reflect biology. Men, not women, are the creators of life, according to Aristotle, for ‘the principle of soul’ is emitted in and with the semen. In several celebrated passages Aristotle explained that ‘the woman is as it were an impotent male’, and that ‘females are weaker and colder in nature, and we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency’ (Generation of Animals 728, 737, 775; 1984:1130, 1144, 1199). Impotent, mutilated, weaker, colder, deficient from the norm of male perfection, Aristotle’s theory of women deeply influenced the Christian tradition, particularly Aquinas. Evidently while Socrates and Plato wore polarizing lenses for soul-body, Aristotle wore them for male-female. DUALISM AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Christianity, like many other faiths, has been and still is, a religion of dualism: God-Devil, heaven-hell, good-bad, life-death, lightdarkness, truth-falsity, freedom-slavery, right-left…to name just a few of the more well-known polarities.1 But two points should be noted. First, the close identity between the Pythagorean and the Christian tables of opposites. The Christian and the Greek traditions 43

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therefore reinforce each other. Second, despite the similarities, there is one major difference: the absence of a male-female opposition. Christ did not define males and females as opposite, still less as superior-inferior, good-bad. Indeed various theologians have commented on Christ’s rejection of the traditional patriarchy of his time, citing his friendships with women and his behaviour towards women, both of which were revolutionary for his time and place (Daly, 1975; Ruether, 1983). None the less, Christianity has been described as patriarchal, both in its theology (God the Father, God the Son), its social structure (male papacy, episcopacy and priesthood), and in much of its misogynistic teaching (including Paul, Tertullian and Aquinas). Men and women worship a male God, ‘Our Father’, in a male-dominated church which has taught the Eve myth for centuries. 2 Christ taught about women by example, Paul taught by precept; and his teaching is quite explicit: I want you to understand that Christ is supreme over every man, the husband is supreme over his wife, and God is supreme over Christ…A man has no need to cover his head, because he reflects the image and glory of God. But woman reflects the glory of man; for man was not created from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for woman’s sake, but woman was created for man’s sake. (I Corinthians 11:3, 7–9) A Pauline ‘table of opposites’ suggests that man’s supremacy over woman is like a husband’s over his wife, Christ’s over every man, and God’s over Christ. Peter reiterated the same message: ‘You wives must submit to your husbands’, and he instructed husbands to understand that their wives are ‘the weaker sex’ (I Peter 3:1, 7). The traditional teaching of the church is therefore clear. Yet two points must be noted. First, recent scholarship suggests that many or all of the passages in the Epistles in which Paul insisted on the submission and silence of women may not in fact be genuine (Phillips, 1984:121–6). Also, there were other traditions extant at the time, with positive evaluations of woman, in Islam, Jewish mysticism and Gnosticism (Phillips, 1984:148–69; Pagels, 1988). Second, there is a countervailing egalitarian theme in Paul’s teaching, in the doctrine of the Mystical Body: ‘There is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free men, between men and women; 44

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you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). But this unity has often been interpreted in a spiritual rather than a secular sense. Dualism and male hegemony were therefore built into some of the earliest teachings of the church; this sometimes became misogyny. Tertullian (c. 160–230) was perhaps the most misogynistic of the early Church Fathers. In this sermon he addressed women: Do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. (In O’Faolain and Martines, 1973:132) John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), Archbishop of Constantinople, was equally hostile to women: ‘What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colors?’ (in Phillips, 1984:22). Augustine reminded his flock that it was ‘by a woman that the first sin was committed, the one which brought death to us all’ (The City of God, Bk 15:20; 1958:359). The Christian husband therefore is almost schizoid: ‘He loves the fact that she is human, and hates the fact that she is a woman’ (in Ranke-Heinemann, 1990:96). A very difficult love-hate balancing act! Albert the Great, a Father of the Church, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, was even more venomous towards women: Woman is less qualified [than man] for moral behaviour… Woman knows nothing of fidelity…Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison with his…one must be on one’s guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil…Her feelings drive woman towards every evil, just as reason impels man toward all good. (In Ranke-Heinemann, 1990:178–9) The last word on the Christian construction of gender goes to Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), who was named the official theologian of the Catholic church by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. His teaching on gender was extremely influential over the centuries, and still influences debates on abortion, contraception, the priesthood, the family and so on. His fundamental problem was to synthesize the 45

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Aristotelian tradition of women as misbegotten with the Genesis tradition of women as created by God and therefore good. He achieved this synthesis by distinguishing between the ‘individual nature’ and ‘universal human nature’. As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex…, [but] as regards universal human nature, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature’s intention as directed to the work of generation. (Summa Theologiae, 1:92, in O’Faolain and Martines, 1973:131)) The Angelic Doctor was by no means egalitarian; and in the next question he asserts that ‘the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and the end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature’ (Summa Theologiae, 1:93, 4; 1981, vol. 13:60). The Angelic Doctor was well-named; for him, sex is bestial: ‘In sexual intercourse the human being becomes similar to the beast’ (Summa Theologiae 1:98, 2; 1981, vol. 13:156). This statement is congruent with a long tradition in Christian thought, again going back to Paul, (or the traditional interpretation of Paul), developed by both Augustine and Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory declared that: ‘Sexual pleasure can never be without sin’ (in Ranke-Heinemann, 1990:141). These long-standing traditions of women as sinful and sexual pleasure as sinful provide the preconditions for the persecution of the witches in Europe and North America from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The witches were not the only populations persecuted in the second millennium: the list includes the Arabs, the Moors, the Jews, the Cathars and the Albigensians, and later the Huguenots, the Hussites and, of course, the Catholics and Protestants.3 The witches, however, had this distinctive characteristic: that they were almost all women (Trevor-Roper, 1969). The hunt began with the ‘Witches Bull’ of 1484 when Pope Innocent VI II appointed two Dominicans as inquisitors, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Institoris. They published Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, literally evil-doers, in 1486, which set out their rules for finding witches. In one chapter they address the question of why most witches are women. There are 46

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many reasons, and the inquisitors explained that ‘since women are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come under the spell of witchcraft’; and ‘the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations’; furthermore, ‘a wicked woman is by her nature quicker to waver in her faith, and consequently to abjure the faith, which is the root of witchcraft’. A woman is a ‘liar by nature’, ‘a wheedling and secret enemy’ and ‘more bitter than death’. Finally they conclude: ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable…. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils.’ And reflecting a tradition going back through Chrysostom to Eve and Pandora, she is ‘beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep’ (1970:44–7). This misogyny is ‘supported’ by analyses of the women of the Old Testament and history, for their wickedness. The book was the bible of the zealous witch-hunters, went through 30 editions in the next 200 years, and seemed to many to justify the torture, burning and hanging of thousands of people, the vast majority of them women, before the movement died out in the early eighteenth century.4 Some have described this ‘war against women’ as gynocide and linked it with violence against women around the world: Chinese foot-binding, Hindu suttee, Asian female infanticide, wife-burning in India, genital mutilation in parts of Africa and the Near East, the restrictions of women’s rights in fundamentalist Islam, the tolerance of male ‘crimes of passion’ in defence of their ‘honour’ in Brazil, American gynaecology and the physical violence against women in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Some see this long list as basically one phenomenon of misogyny (see Millett, 1971:64; Daly, 1978:221; French, 1992); others, however, separate the issues. During the Reformation, the scholastic definition of woman as imperfect man was challenged. Luther emphatically rejected it, describing the proponents of the doctrine as ‘monsters and the sons of monsters’ (not the happiest of phrasing!); but he seems to have believed it himself: [Although] Eve was a most noble creation, like Adam, as regards the image of God, that is, in justice, wisdom and salvation, she was none the less a woman. For as the sun is more splendid than the moon (although the moon is also a most splendid 47

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body), so also woman, although the most beautiful handiwork of God, does not equal the dignity and glory of the male. (In MacLean, 1980:9–10) He comments confidently on the politics of gender: The rule remains with the husband, and the wife is compelled to obey him by God’s command. He rules the home and the state, wages wars, defends his possessions, tills the soil, builds, plants, etc. The woman, on the other hand, is like a nail driven into the wall. She sits at home…Just as the snail carries its household with it, so the wife should stay at home and look after the affairs of the household. (In Phillips, 1984:105) The point I am trying to establish is not simply the patriarchalism and even misogyny of some early Christians, but the polarized and dualistic structure of thought; and how easily it meshed with Greek thought to create an enormously powerful ideology of male supremacy, while purporting to be the quest for salvation and divine love on the one hand, and truth and wisdom on the other. Both systems ‘camouflaged’ what many today perceive to be the oppression of women, but what then was considered to be divine ordination, in the case of Christianity, and nature, in the case of the Greeks. There were, however, egalitarian counter-traditions in both Greek and Christian thought, which must be mentioned. These traditions include the Proverbs/ Solomon tradition in the Old Testament, Platonism, the Pauline doctrine of the Mystical Body, also Mariology (Warner, 1976) and some aspects of courtly love (Capellanus, 1959). They did not redress the balance, but they perhaps alleviated the totalitarianism. Finally, the secular literature of the Christian era—Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Cervantes and Rabelais—seems to show a far more harmonious, sometimes loving, sometimes wild, but always highly variable, relation between the two sexes than the dualistic and occasionally misogynistic literature of so many philosophers, theologians and ecclesiastics. Without wishing to polarize secular and religious authorities, the latter should probably be taken in the context of the former, as the former with the latter. Also, there were great queens as well as great kings—Isabella of Spain, Elizabeth of England—and saints, founders of religious orders, mystics and generals (Boadicea, Joan of Arc)…although it remained 48

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largely a man’s world, and a woman’s home. These separate spheres of power perhaps counterbalanced patriarchy, to a degree. Furthermore, the gender structure was always cross-cut by the class structure. The gender picture therefore has been a mite too complicated to fit into simple dualisms; none the less, dualism persisted.5 THE MODERNS

Modern thinkers have built on the foundations of the Greek and Judaeo-Christian traditions. While we cannot consider everyone, we can select some highlights, before we consider the attack on these constructions of gender. Milton, the Puritan, was one of the last to insist on the old unequal Christian ideals: ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ (Paradise Lost, Bk 4, 259). Eve eventually understands this: ‘Unargu’d I obey; so God ordains. God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise’ (Paradise Lost, Bk 8, 232–3). Wish fulfilment, perhaps, but Milton was unhappily married. Two hundred years later, Byron is more secular and captured gender dualism in two famous lines in Don Juan: Man’s love is of man’s life, a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence. A poem by Tennyson, ‘The Princess’, echoes the thought of Aristotle and Paul: Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion. Rousseau, perhaps surprisingly, echoed these sentiments. The ideologue of the French Revolution, he began The Social Contract (1762) with the famous words: ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.’ Yet some chains are apparently natural, for in Emile Rousseau believed that ‘the law of nature bids the woman obey the man’ (1984:370). He argued that: A woman’s education must therefore be planned in relation to man. To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and 49

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love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young. (1984:328) Hegel was deeply influenced by Rousseau, and he too expresses the consensus from Aristotle through Paul to Rousseau, with multiple dimensions of polarity: [Man] is powerful and enterprising, [woman] passive and subjective. Hence man has his essential life in the state, in learning, and in the like, as well as in work and struggle with the outside world and with himself…[W]ithin the family, is where woman has her true definition…Men and women differ much as do animals and plants. Men and animals correspond, just as woman and plants do, for women develop more placidity and retain the principle of an indeterminate unity of feeling or sentiment. When women stand at the head of government, the state is immediately plunged into danger because they conduct affairs not by the standard of universality but in accordance with random opinions and inclinations. Women acquire learning—we know not how—almost as if by breathing ideas, more by living really than by actually taking hold of knowledge. Man, on the other hand, achieves his distinction only by means of advancing thought and much skilled exertion. (In O’Faolain and Martines, 1973:290) The conventional wisdom is reiterated by John Ruskin in his essay ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’: Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war and conquest…But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, and her intellect is not for invention or recreation, but sweet ordering, arrangement and decision…By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter all peril and trial—to him therefore the failure, the offence, the inevitable error; often he must be wounded or subdued, 50

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often misled, and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this. (Ruskin, 1871:84–5) The queens have their gardens, and the kings ‘the open world’. None the less, Ruskin did insist that neither sex is superior to the other, simply complementary and opposite: ‘Each has what the other has not: each completes and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike’ (1871:84). Ruskin’s chivalry is in sharp contrast to John Stuart Mills’ feminism (The Subjection of Women was published in 1869), and also to Schopenhauer’s abusiveness. In his essay ‘On Women’ (1870), Schopenhauer described women as: ‘that undersized, narrowshouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged race… Instead of calling them beautiful, there would be more warrant for describing women as the unaesthetic sex.’ Furthermore ‘the whole sex have never managed to produce a single achievement in the fine arts that is really great, genuine, and original, or given to the world any work of permanent value in any sphere’. Women are ‘childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word they are big children all their life long— a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man’. Shades of Aristotle! Also, the list continues, women have ‘no sense of justice’, they are ‘defective in the powers of reasoning’, crafty and cunning, and this ‘gives rise to falsity, faithlessness, treachery, ingratitude, and so on’. ‘[W]omen exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species.’ Schopenhauer concluded that: [Women] form the sexus sequior—the second sex, inferior in every respect to the first…When nature made two divisions of the human race, she did not draw the line exactly through the middle. These divisions are polar and opposed to each other, it is true; but the difference between them is not qualitative merely, it is also quantitative. (1935:434–47) So Schopenhauer did not like women. Nietzsche was even more vituperative in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). A series of epigrams: Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy… The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. 51

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Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly… The man’s happiness is: I will. The woman’s happiness is: He will. Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip! (1969:91–2) Charming! Such invective tells us more about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than about women, no doubt; but not all philosophers expressed the same negative opinions. Feuerbach described ‘the superiority of the woman’ in an epigram: ‘The man must sweat to attain what he should be/But the woman already is by nature what she should be’ (1980:249). The four principal paradigms on gender are therefore all apparent in these few years: equal but opposite and complementary in the chivalry of Ruskin; equal and the same in the feminism of John Stuart Mill; opposite and female-inferior in the invectives of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and the superiority of women in Feuerbach. Anthropology also entered these equations. Paul Broca, a French surgeon and founder of the anthropological society of Paris, determined that male brains weighed, on average, more than female ones. He commented: But we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less intelligent than men…We are therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority. (In Gould, 1981:104) Gustave Le Bon, an otherwise distinguished sociologist and author of a well-known text, The Crowd (1896), fully agreed: All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any 52

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monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently we may neglect them entirely. (In Gould, 1981:104–5) Two-headed gorillas might well be entirely neglected, but to compare ‘distinguished women’ with such monstrosities was hardly scientific, and not very polite either. The point is that the body is highly political, and so is science, and despite scientific advances over 2,000 years, Le Bon’s sociology did not differ much from Aristotle’s philosophy. The numbers game can be played by both ‘sides’, however, and what is obvious to one is simply silly to another. Maria Montessori, impressed by research which seemed to suggest that differences in brain weight were less than differences in size would seem to warrant, concluded that women, not men, were the intellectually superior sex, as they were also morally superior: ‘Perhaps…the reign of women is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honor’ (in Gould, 1981:107; emphasis added). Montessori was one of the first women to reverse the values of the traditional dualism, and to assert the superiority of women. Others would develop this view further. In The Descent of Man (1871, ch. 19), Charles Darwin suggested that: The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than women can attain…We may also infer…that if men are capable of decided eminence over women in many subjects, the average standard of mental power in man must be above that of woman. (1981:327) We are talking averages here, which is quite different from the polar dualism of some of Darwin’s contemporaries, notably Nietzsche; plus Darwin concedes a ‘greater tenderness and less selfishness’ to women. Darwin and many others may have mistaken cause for effect; women were first prevented from achieving eminence, and then described as intellectually deficient for their ‘failure’: classic examples of Catch-22 and blaming the victim.

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While Broca and Le Bon argued the inferiority of women from cranial capacity, and Darwin and Nietzsche from ‘eminence’, others argued from the womb. The womb was not only the source of disease, but also, because of its connection to the brain, the cause of feminine insanity. Dr. Direx, author of Women’s Complete Guide to Health (1869), stated authoritatively: Women are treated for diseases of the stomach, liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, etc.; yet in most instances, these diseases will be found on due investigation, to be, in reality, no diseases at all, but merely the sympathetic reactions or the symptoms of one disease, namely a disease of the womb. (In Ussher, 1989:3–4) Such beliefs must have simplified medical practice; but contemporaries believed that the womb caused not only physical diseases, but also mental illness. G.Blandford, the author of Insanity and its Treatments (1871), asserted: Women become insane during pregnancy, after parturition, during lactation; at the age when catamenia (menstruation) first appear and when they disappear…The sympathetic connection between the brain and the uterus is plainly seen by the most casual observer. (In Ussher, 1989:4–5) Such frequent insanity would plainly disqualify women from eminence, from the suffrage and from access to higher education. Biological science ‘reinforced’ medical science; in 1890 the English biologist Patrick Geddes explained that males were dominated by active, energetic, katabolic cellular functions, and females by conservative, passive, anabolic functions; thus ‘males are more active, energetic, passionate and variable; the females more passive, conservative, sluggish and stable’ (in Martin, 1989:33). This conclusion is almost identical with Aristotle’s over 2,000 years earlier, although the rationale is different. It is noteworthy that each discipline, philosophy, theology, poetry, anthropology, sociology, psychology, medicine and biology, managed both to describe and to explain female inferiority.

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THE TWENTIETH CENTU RY

Freud was one of the first to attack the notion of dualism, and to insist on the anatomical and psychological bisexuality of the genders. In ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (1930), Freud suggests: Man is an animal organism with (like others) an unmistakably bisexual disposition. The individual corresponds to a fusion of two symmetrical halves…We are accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and female impulses, needs and attributes…[and] each individual seeks to satisfy both male and female wishes in his [a Freudian slip!] sexual life. (1985:295–6) Yet Freud remained not only a dualist but also a believer in male superiority. Women are, in his view, castrated males, and suffer from penis envy. Furthermore, ‘women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization’, except perhaps plaiting and weaving; and they have little sense of justice but are dominated by envy. Such are women: a ‘riddle’, an ‘enigma’ and a ‘problem’, even to themselves—as men are not (Freud, 1973:45– 69). Freud once said: ‘The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ (in Jones, 1954:468). A strange question, given its implicit assumptions that someone only wants one thing, and that different people might not want different things; but it is even stranger in that for 30 years he had argued persistently and consistently that women wanted a penis! But perhaps the question reflects what his disciple and biographer called his ‘obstinate dualism’ (Jones, 1954:469–70). 6 This dualism is particularly apparent in his proclamation that ‘Anatomy is destiny’, which seemed to give scientific legitimation to the restriction of women for all eternity to ‘children, kitchen and church’—and to reinforce gender stratification. Freud’s dualism (but not his hierarchism, I think) was echoed by his former disciple, Carl Jung: The conscious attitude of woman is in general far more exclusively personal than that of man. Her world is made up of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and 55

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children…. The man’s world is the nation, the state, business concerns, etc. His family is simply a means to an end, one of the foundations of the state, and his wife is not necessarily the woman for him (at any rate not as the woman means it when she says ‘my man’). The general means more to him than the personal; his world consists of a multitude of coordinated factors, whereas her world, outside her husband, terminates in a sort of cosmic mist. (Jung, 1966:209–10) Cosmic mist? His wife might have accused him of being in a cosmic mist about people, and especially herself; or, since this is Switzerland in the twenties, just laughed and agreed that she knew nothing about politics and economics. Jung’s contemporary, Nobel Prize winner Jean-Paul Sartre, was openly contemptuous of women, womanizer though he was: The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open’. It is an appeal to being as all holes are…Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the penis—a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration. The amorous act is the castration of the man; but this is above all because sex is a hole. (Sartre, 1966:782) Freud and Sartre seem to agree that someone is castrated, but one said women, the other said men. Perhaps it was neither. Gender dualism, and sometimes misogyny, persists in novels, with probably a broader impact. Kate Millett (1971) has made this point brilliantly with her analysis of the novels of Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, D.H.Lawrence and others. Her point is that these novels are sexual politics, and that sex equates with male power and dominance over women. The beginnings of gender dualism, and the socialization process itself, can be seen in the pink and blue blankets and name-tags in the hospital nurseries; and dualism continues with nursery rhymes: What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice. 56

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‘Vive la différence!’ say the French—perhaps in the happy conviction that the two sexes are complementary and need and love each other, as Plato had suggested in the myth of creation in the Symposium. Opposites attract. But by now it is clear that this slogan, and this ideology, also have the latent function of legitimating male supremacism, patriarchy and even misogyny, and of camouflaging the oppression of women. The slogan also legitimizes the norm of heterosexuality: a practice which is increasingly challenged by homosexuals and bisexuals, as well as some libertarians. This male-female dualism is intersected by another male-created female-female dualism; not only are there two types of people, men and women, it is said, there are also only two types of women, good and bad. This virgin/whore dichotomy is symbolized by the two paradigmatic figures of the Christian tradition, Mary and Eve, or, in a different metaphor, the woman in white and the Scarlet Woman. Adrienne Rich has commented that: Two ideas flow side by side: one, that the female body is impure, corrupt, the site of discharges, bleedings, dangerous to masculinity, a source of moral and physical contaminations, ‘the devil’s gateway’. On the other hand, as mother, the woman is beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing; and the physical potential for motherhood—that same body with its bleedings and mysteries—is her single destiny and justification in life. (In Ussher, 1989:15) Similarly, in English teenage male slang, girls are polarized into two categories: ‘the slags who’d go with anyone and everyone (they were alright for a quick screw, but you’d never get serious about it) and the drags who didn’t, but whom you might one day think about going steady with’ (in Ussher, 1989:26–7). In sum, in much of men’s thinking about women there is first a polarization of women from men, and second, a further polarization of good from bad, slags and drags. Yet even the drags are a drag. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t. Attitudes and gender thinking are not totally divorced from behaviour. Thoughts determine action. And the battle of the sexes is not only evident in poetry and philosophy, novels, economic and political inequalities, attitudes and the struggle for equity; it is also physical. 57

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Even today our newspapers are spattered with stories of serialkillers, mass-murderers, and other men who prey on women. The long list of men who have killed only women includes Jack the Ripper, still unidentified, who killed six women in London in 1888; the Boston Strangler, Albert De Salvo, who strangled 13 women in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964; Richard Speck, who killed eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966; Ted Bundy, who killed perhaps dozens of women in the seventies; the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who killed 12 women in 1980; and Christopher Wilder who murdered between 10 and 13 women across the United States in 1984. Furthermore, in the Green River killings, over 40 women have been murdered since 1981 from Seattle north to British Columbia, and in 1989 in Montreal, Marc Lépine killed 14 women, and wounded 12 more and two men before killing himself, in the largest mass shooting in Canada and the first to target only women.7 TH E WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. Kate Millett described it as ‘the first document asserting the full humanity of women and insisting upon its recognition’ (1971:65). Wollstonecraft demanded JUSTICE for one-half of the human race’ (1985:89). She summarily dismissed the ancient opinion that woman was created for men as a ‘poetical story’ (1985:109), and proceeded to apply the doctrine of inalienable human rights developed by Rousseau and Paine to women. ‘I love man as my fellow; but his sceptre, real or usurped, extends not to me’ (1985:121). She deplored the state of women, and offered a radical critique with passion, humour and a clear eye. On beauty: ‘Taught from their infancy that beauty is women’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison’ (1985:131). On men: ‘[Woman] was not created to be the solace of man’, but for perfection, truth, reason and God; yet man is ‘ever placed between her and reason’ (1985:142–3). Women, however, are the ‘slaves of power’ and the ‘slaves of injustice’ (1985:282, 313). She described ‘the tyranny of man’, but looked forward to the day when women will be ‘free in a physical, moral and civil sense’ (1985:318–19). Meanwhile in France the Constituent Assembly had proclaimed the Rights of Man in 1789. Two years later Olympe des Gouges 58

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published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman: ‘Woman is born free and her rights are the same as those of man.’ The Declaration demanded equality before the law and in the making of law; equal eligibility for all public offices, positions and jobs; freedom of speech; and the vote.’ [Women]…have the right to go to the scaffold; they must also have the right to go to parliament’ (in O’Faolain and Martines, 1973:307). She was guillotined two years later. In the United States the beginnings of the movement are usually ascribed to the first Women’s Rights Convention held at Seneca Falls in 1848. Their Declaration of Sentiments reflected the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal…The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over her. The document went on to list a series of grievances and to demand the franchise. A few men also joined in what Wollstonecraft had described as ‘the state of warfare which subsists between the sexes’ (1985:285), on the side of women’s rights. Karl Marx, most well known for his analysis of class warfare and the battle between capital and labour, also criticized the exploitation of women by capital and by men: a double jeopardy of capitalism and patriarchy. In The Origin of the Family (1884), Engels deprecated the inequality in the family, which others had thought so natural: ‘The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife…Within the family he [the husband] is the bourgeois and his wife represents the proletariat’ (1985:105). And John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women in 1869 calling for equality of rights. Women increasingly organized themselves during the second half of the century, with some success. In the United States the suffrage was granted first in Wyoming on its inception as a state in 1889, and after that the suffrage was extended in other states. In the United Kingdom, Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragettes overcame initial resistance by pioneering non-violent protests, which generated widespread publicity. Finally the suffrage was extended to women after the end of the First World War in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Russia and Germany; it was extended later 59

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in France (1944) and Italy (1945), and later still in Switzerland (1971). The acquisition of the vote ended the first phase of the movement; but women soon realized that the vote did not guarantee equality, justice or liberty. The women’s movement accordingly adopted new and broader goals of reform and societal transformation in the second half of the century. The second stage of the women’s movement began with the 1968 protest against the ‘Miss America’ Beauty Pageant, the first largescale public demonstration against the objectification of women, as the pageant was defined, and more broadly against the roles and relations of women in North America. This coincided roughly with a series of consciousness-raising books by women, particularly Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1971) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1971). In 1966 Friedan cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW); and feminism had its first modern organizational base. Since then feminist organizations and ideologies have multiplied, with various political, economic and social agendas (see Walby, 1990). Today these goals include economic parity, equal pay for work of equal value, legislative reform, the provision of shelters, increased political representation; in sum, the total transformation of patriarchal society. Tactics include self-defence courses, consciousness-raising groups, assertiveness training seminars, the development of women’s networks, media watch groups, the formation of women’s publishing houses and journals, women’s studies programmes, the use of the courts, and so on. Humour has also played a role. Just as sexist jokes define women, so do feminist counter-sexist jokes define men, and women too. Bumper stickers are particularly adept at laughing at men: ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’; ‘Women who want to excel over men lack ambition’; ‘I suffer from PMS: Putting up with Men’s Shit’; ‘When God created man she was only kidding’; and, more direct, ‘Men are like diapers, always on my ass and full of shit.’ In sum, men are unnecessary, inept, a joke and full! Nicole Hollander’s cartoon has been widely distributed: ‘Ma, can I be a feminist and still like men? Sure…just like you can be a vegetarian and like fried chicken!’ Over the years feminists have effectively challenged the male definitions of women as inferior and unequal over the last two 60

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millennia, and they have rejected the legitimacy of patriarchy. Feminists have also systematically detailed the oppression and exploitation of women, the objectification, infantilization, degradation, trivialization, fragmentation, victimization and violation of women, and discrimination and prejudice against women; and they have also protested the idealization, glamourizing, romanticization and ‘pedestalization’ of women. Similarly women have reconstructed men. The ancient paradigm of man as the image of God, and the apex of creation, has been summarily dismissed; and its consequence and expression, patriarchy, has been declared illegitimate. A two thousand year old tradition has been exploded in two hundred years. Germaine Greer was one of the first to ‘identify the enemy’: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them…Men do not themselves know the depth of their hatred’ (1971:249, 271). At the same time Kate Millett (1971) condemned the patriarchal family in a patriarchal state, maintained by a patriarchal faith, and a lurid misogynistic literature. Indeed men are now being defined as ‘the problem’. Newsweek (28.5.90:62) recently expressed this reversed dualism: Women, after all, are not a big problem. Our society does not suffer from burdensome amounts of empathy and altruism, or a plague of nurturance. The problem is men—or, more accurately, maleness. More specifically, the problem is male violence, and especially male violence against women. Rosalind Miles has discussed this violence in her hard-hitting work The Rites of Man (1991). She refers to men as ‘the death sex’, a term coined originally by a man, and she added firmly: ‘To explain violence is to explain the male. The reverse is also true’ (1991:8, 12). From this fairly explicit statement about the moral inferiority of men she moved on to ‘what biologists acknowledge to be “the natural superiority of women”. She cites one authority who states that males begin life ‘at a biological disadvantage’, for the Y chromosome provides little genetic and hereditary protection against disease. So biology really is destiny; Freud was right, but for the wrong reasons and in the wrong polarity. Another expert comments that ‘you can think of maleness as a type of birth defect’ (1991:18–19). So Aristotle and Aquinas were wrong; it is men, not women, who are defective. 61

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The old gender ranking is now being reversed. Paul Theroux affirms: I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful…Even the expression ‘Be a man!’ strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient and soldierly, and stop thinking. (In Miles, 1991:100) Glenn Close spoke in similar terms: Men have always been at the mercy of women, and still are. We are emotionally and spiritually stronger than men, and more ruthless: men are more vulnerable (In Miles, 1991:131) There seems to be a groundswell of opinion that women are, or may be, biologically, emotionally and spiritually superior to ‘pitiful’, ‘stupid’, ‘violent’ (and other such epithets) men. Miles’ final chapter is entitled ‘Killer Male’, in which she asks: ‘What remedy for men, maleness, masculinity, manhood?’ (1991:234). Death, presumably. Not only are men the problem, so are the patriarchal societies they have created, according to some. Mary O’Brien (1989:299; cf. 25) affirms: Patriarchy is not healthy. It legitimates violent solutions to historical problems in ways which casually destroy whole species, the natural environment and the well-being of individuals; it is pre-occupied with death and infatuated with power; it claims to transcend contingent nature while it invents sexism, racism, and genocide. In the past women were, and indeed still are, negatively defined. In the present the pendulum is swinging and the sexes are polarizing as men are negatively defined by women. Marilyn French’s latest book The War against Women (1992) documents male physical, legal, political, marital etc…atrocities. Susan Faludi’s book, Backlash, is subtitled ‘The Undeclared War against American Women’ (1992). In Canada the Standing Committee of the Department of Health and Welfare presented its report entitled The War against Women (Canada 1991). The war is not only physical but also economic, legal, political, cultural, in the media, medicine, business… 62

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But not all women agree, about men, patriarchy, capitalism and the definition of the problems and the solutions. Camille Paglia argues: One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for ‘patriarchal society’, to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture. We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics, and disposable diapers. We enjoy fresh, safe milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime poetry…If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. (1991:37–8) The only solution, according to the women’s movement, is feminism and the transformation of society. Thus the polarities of dualism have been reversed. Adam, not Eve, is the problem; and Eve, not Adam, is the solution. THE MEN’S MOVEMENT

‘What do men really want?’ This was the title of the lead article in a recent issue of Newsweek (24.6.91). How times change! The question simply reversed Freud’s famous question of 60 years earlier. The men’s movement began, according to Newsweek, in 1990 with the airing of Bill Moyers’ documentary on the poet Robert Bly and the publication of his book Iron John. It is still too early to see what the effects of the movement have been, or may be in the future. Suffice it to say that Bly rejects the negative definition of masculinity: ‘It is important to be able to say the word masculine without imagining that we are saying a sexist word’ (1990:234); and he describes American men as ‘soft’: nice, gentle and sensitive, but unhappy, anguished and lacking in vitality. This he attributes to the absence 63

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of fathers, absent by work, death, divorce or separation; so the mothers socialize their sons into their male roles. Other spokesmen have been more concerned about male destructiveness and self-destructiveness. Some men may dominate the pinnacles of power; but others (sometimes the same ones) also dominate the prison populations. Men also commit suicide about three times more often than women, although women attempt suicide more often than men. Despite the attention paid to male violence against women, men are much more likely to be murdered than women. Violence is much more of a problem for men than for women. Furthermore, men die more often in traffic accidents, industrial accidents, domestic accidents and others than women. Alcoholism rates are much higher for men than for women, and so are drug abuse rates. For all the leading causes of death, male death rates are higher in North America and the United Kingdom. Their mortality rate is about 40 per cent higher than women’s, which translates into about eight years of the lifespan. Some have called this mortality pattern ‘androcide’, and portray men (rather than women) as victims of culture and/ or biology. Miles and many others argue that men must learn from women. Bly suggests that men learn from men. LIVES AND DEATH S

The debates continue. Are we all one? Or are we at war? Are we equal? Or is one sex superior to the other? If so, which? And by what criteria? Or are we complementary? The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights (1967) states that: ‘All human beings are born free and equal’, and lists a series of rights. Admirable though this declaration is as a statement of moral principle—and it is a major conceptual advance over patriarchal definitions from Aristotle to the French Revolution and beyond— it is not a statement of empirical fact. The structural inequality of women and the paramount salience of gender has been extensively demonstrated in North America, Europe and elsewhere. This raises the obvious questions: Are boys and girls born different? Are women and men biologically programmed for different lives and deaths? Or are all the differences cultural? The nature-nurture debate is old and bitter, and the consensus seems to be vague: it is not clear exactly what the behavioural 64

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differences are between the two genders; nor is it clear whether such differences as do seem to exist are due to biology or culture. Natural scientists tend to argue that biological differences—genetic, hormonal and/or brain laterality—determine gender differences in behaviour, thinking, aggression, sexual patterns—virtually all human activity (Wilson, 1979; Moir and Jessel, 1991; Kimura, 1992). From the side of the womb to the side of the brain in 2,500 years: the more things change! Social scientists have usually stressed gender similarities, believing that the differences are caused by socialization, starting with pinks and blues in the nursery. Boys learn to be masculine and girls to be feminine (however these attributes are defined in different cultures or eras) from many sources: parents, schools, peers, media, advertising, churches, and from toys and birthday cards to fairy tales, movies and video games. The two points most experts seem to agree on are, first, that such average differences as do exist are the result of the interaction between biological and social factors; and second, that the range of variations within each gender is far greater than the range between them. Yet we are not merely passive victims of biology or society. We also choose our identities from a wide range of possibilities and options. Neither biology nor culture determines Madonna, Boadicea, Curie, Thatcher and Mother Teresa. Despite the range of possibilities, women and men still live out lives in conventional dualistic styles, in almost every domain. We express and reinforce the very dualism which so many have found oppressive, and inaccurate. Gender norms still permeate the universe, and the universe is still gendered, as it was for the Pythagoreans. In dress and colour, make-up and hair-styles, the hands and the feet, cosmetic surgery and body-builds, we symbolize our opposite sexes. The rituals of the body are also gender-specific. We eat and drink different products, very often, and in different styles: the steak versus the light salad, the large scotch or pint of bitter versus the glass of white wine or lager and lime, the gobble or the nibble, the chug or the sip. All these patterns, and others, typically and stereotypically symbolize masculine and feminine. We even smoke differently. Women do not usually smoke cigars or pipes; and specific brands of cigarettes are often targeted to one gender: Virginia Slims versus Marlboro. Techniques of smoking also vary: James Dean’s style was not Marilyn Monroe’s. 65

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Dancing, too, socializes women differently from men. Ballroom dancing again reflects the opposing gender ideals. The male fittingly ‘leads’ the female, who walks backwards into the future. She is entirely dependent on the male’s vision of the path ahead (Okely, 1978:569). Furthermore, it is usually the man (taller and stronger) who flips and swings his partner, whether in rock and roll, ice-skating or ballet Sports and hobbies often are also gender-polarized, but not totally. Body contact sports and high-risk leisure activities are usually the male domain: rugby, car-racing, hang-gliding, horse-racing, parachuting…although there are female mountaineers, jockeys, bodybuilders and round-the-world yacht racers. Both sexes may play tennis, paint in oils, ski and enjoy gardening or walking, but few men do needlepoint or crochet. One may emphasize the similarities or the differences. Magazines, books, TV shows and films—they are all as gendered as the sports, hobbies, lifestyles and values they reflect. Women and men tend to have different preferences—indeed magazine stores are often divided like the old Berlin into different sectors: women, men, children, general. Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Ms in one, GQ, Playboy, Angling Times in another. Books are similarly gendered: westerns and war books as against Harlequin romances and Danielle Steel— not all books, of course, but enough to make the point The Rambo, Terminator, Bruce Willis and Bruce Lee films are usually preferred by men, and such as Thelma and Louise, The Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind by women. TV too: the game—soccer, baseball, almost any game as long as there is beer—versus the soaps. The points are sufficiently obvious not to require statistical quantification, I hope; but, generalizations though they may be, they are not trivial in their cumulative impact. Men and women even speak differently. We speak different ‘genderlects’, says Deborah Tannen, we have different conversational styles and goals; and failure to understand this results in endless confusion, anger, pain, and misunderstandings (1990, 1986). This stems in part from our different values and needs: Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their life-blood ran in different directions.’ A vivid enough biological metaphor. Men see the individual in a hierarchical world order: ‘Life, then, is a contest, a struggle to preserve independence and avoid failure.’ Women, however, tend to see themselves ‘as an individual in a network of 66

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connections…Life, then, is a community, a struggle to preserve intimacy and avoid isolation’ (1990:24–26). So men and women tend to talk at cross-purposes: the same language with different meta-messages, and different intents. They deal with problems differently: women tend to seek empathy and reassurance, Tannen notes, while men tend to want solutions; again, men tend to talk more in public, women in private, which Tannen describes as reporttalk and rapport-talk, and they have very different ideas of what is important. Men’s silence in the home is as notorious as women’s chattiness, which women regard as connecting. Furthermore, since it is conversational styles and goals which differ, it is very difficult to solve these communication problems by talking! The solution, insofar as there is one, lies in recognizing that the two genders do indeed speak in different genderlects. Gloria Steinem, however, has a number of practical suggestions for challenging ‘the politics of talking, and listening’ (1983a:176–90). Do women and men even think differently? The question is highly political, and opinions vary. Men used to believe they were complimenting women in saying, ‘You think like a man’; which suggests that many men believed that they thought differently from women: men think logically, women are emotional and can’t think ‘straight’. This conservative view was challenged in practice by the rise to political power of such women as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, and the numerous Nobel Prizes won by women, from the two won by Marie Curie in 1903 and 1911, in two different disciplines—physics and chemistry. The monistic theory of the sixties, that the two sexes think the same, as members of the same species, was soon itself challenged. Some feminists suggested not only that men and women did think differently, but that women thought ‘better’. ‘Masculinist’ thinking is characterized as linear (straight), role-oriented, impersonal, cold, dominant, competitive—compared to the lateral, holistic, personal, warm, contextual and connected thinking of women, caring and nurturing rather than oppressive (see Chodorow, 1978; Gilligan, 1982; Fee, 1983; Ruddick 1989). Even in bed, men and women are, supposedly, different and more or less problematic. ‘Are men uninformed about your sexual desires and your body?’ ‘Yes’, most men are, replied 69 per cent of the respondents in The Hite Report; ‘No’, said only 15 per cent, with another 16 per cent giving mixed responses (Hite, 1976:620). Hite did not ask quite the same questions of both sexes, but she 67

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reported that most men said that women do not want sex often enough: only 11 per cent were fully satisfied with the frequency of sex (Hite, 1981:599). Evidently all is not well in the bedroom: men are uninformed, and women are unwilling—a vicious circle. According to one journalist, in a classic dualistic statement: ‘Men compartmentalize their feelings. They can be casual about their sex lives. For women it’s more of a bonding experience. Men use intimacy to get sex. Women use sex to get intimacy’ (Time 9.4.84:91). Of course women can also be casual and men can want intimacy. But there is a consensus on what one might describe as ‘gendered sex’. Ann Oakley asserts: …the basic issue is this: that sex doesn’t have the same meaning for women as it does for men; women don’t have the same meaning for men as they do for women; men don’t understand gender—or sex. Sex doesn’t have the same meaning for men as it does for women, because personal relationships don’t have the same value for the two sexes, and this lack of parity in turn proceeds from the early differentiation of the two sexes into the two genders within the family. (1992:200–1) Or this lack of parity may proceed, according to anthropologist Helen Fisher, from differential bio-chemistry, a heritage of our genetic background and human evolution. Men sleep around ‘for variety’, which spreads their genes, in Fisher’s Darwinian view, while women sleep around ‘for goods and services’, which protects their genetic future—but ‘both men and women seem to exhibit a mixed reproductive strategy: monogamy and adultery are our fare’ (1992:95). Publicizing this work of Fisher and others in its ‘Happy St Valentines Day’ issue, Time’s cover story on the ‘Chemistry of Love’ argued that ‘romance is a biological affair’ with each sex often wanting different things in sex, love and marriage (15.2.93). After the sex and the loving, the issue of birth arises. The abortion issue sharply divides men and women in North America, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere; also controversial are the new reproductive technologies, home birthing, Caesarians and the utility of episiotomies. 68

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And after the birth, there is the naming of the baby; and this too is political. As Gloria Steinem says: ‘It is political that women bear men’s names and children bear men’s names…The power of naming is a very political power’ (1983a:17–18). Furthermore, the selection of particular names may themselves socialize into gender-polarity. Most names may not carry emotional or moral overtones, but women are far more likely to be named after pretty and fragrant flowers, virtues, precious gems and the warm months of the year: Daisy, Rose and Violet; Charity, Chastity and Prudence; Pearl and Ruby; April to Julie (but not dandelion, lust, granite or February). Although friendly diminutives can be found in both sexes—Kathy and Tony—women’s names socialize differently from such monosyllabic noises as Nick, Dick and Rick; Bill, Will and Phil; Tim and Jim; Jack and Jock; Don and Ron and John. Individually, all these polarized gender differentials may not seem to amount to much. What’s in a name? It can always be changed. And there are always exceptions and overlaps; the compartments are not watertight. Women do eat steak, and men do sip white wine; and both drink Perrier; and to polarize high heels and workboots as gender-attributes may seem to smack of the stereotypical rather than the proverbial ‘insightful generalization’. Cumulatively, however, the total packages of these symbols and rituals of the body, over the entire life span, in virtually every social domain constitute very different lives. Names, colours, beautification, dress, eating and drinking, smoking, dancing, walking and talking, and hawking too, sitting, shaking hands or kissing them, hairstyles and finger-nails, eyes and size, sex, preferred reading, films and television, sports, hobbies and leisure time activities, not to mention occupational apartheid and income differentials… they all say male or female, opposite. Not surprisingly, the studies of gender stereotypes show major differences between men and women and express, by definition, common-sense ideas about gender. Archer and Lloyd have summarized these stereotypes in their ‘gender table of opposites’ (see Table 2.2). The significant features of this table are not only the oppositions but also how similar the stereotypes are to Aristotle’s descriptions of gender 2,500 years ago! This may of course reflect the similarity of gender status in society: the stereotypes have not changed because gender roles have not changed, much. 69

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Table 2.2 A gender table of opposites: contemporary stereotypes of men and women

Finally, we die of different things at different times all through the life cycle. Men in all age groups are much more likely to die from accidents, including car accidents, as well as from homicide and suicide. Such mortality is caused by lifestyle or is lifestyle related. Some male vulnerability seems to have a genetic base, however. About 130 male embryos are conceived for every 100 female embryos, but due to differential rates of spontaneous abortion and still-births, only about 106 of these are born; and once born only 95 baby boys leave the hospital for every 100 baby girls. Then in their first year of life, the usual infectious diseases of childhood kill about one-third more boys than girls (Miles, 1991:18–19). Finally, in old age, men also have higher mortality rates for almost all the degenerative diseases: strokes, heart attacks, cancers, respiratory diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, etc. The cumulative consequences of all these differential mortality rates in infancy, and in youth through to old age, is that women tend to have a higher life expectancy than men: they live about eight to ten years longer than men, on average. 70

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Men and women, therefore, live very different lives, die rather different deaths, and are not only socially defined as ‘opposite’, in defiance of biology, but also create themselves in symbols and rituals, and ideologically, in opposition to each other. There are two traditions in Greek thought about opposites: the Platonist one in the Symposium that opposites attract and are mutually complementary, and the majority tradition, rooted in Greek cosmology and humoural science, that opposites battle. Given the gender inequality, we might expect conflict to prevail, particularly since the emergence of the women’s movement, and its challenge to patriarchy and male power and culture. We might be right Attitudes seem to have hardened in recent years, although the data are incomplete. A recent Roper poll of women’s attitudes to men in the United States found that only half of the 3,000 women surveyed agreed that ‘most men are basically kind, gentle, and thoughtful’: down from two-thirds in 1970. And 42 per cent described men as ‘basically selfish and self-centered’ (Globe and Mail, 26.4.90). CONCLU SION

Gender, then, is not just a biological given but a struggle for power. We have seen that what people believe to be male and female has varied over the centuries, ranging from positive to negative, equal to unequal, opposite to complementary. What is a man? What is a woman? We can see that the answers are historically relative; and we know from anthropologists, particularly Margaret Mead, that the answers are culturally relative; but whatever they are, the contemporary women’s and men’s movements seem to be polarizing the two genders, but with opposite valences. Symbolic and ritual dualism seems to be as strong as ever; structural and economic dualism appears to be declining, slowly, as economic differentials are reduced, and as occupations are integrated; but attitudes are hardening and may become more antagonistic as both sexes compete for scarce resources. Men have justified their hegemony and women’s inequality, in numerous ways and in every discipline. But times change, and so do societies. Now men are being defined as the problem: killers, rapists, racists, imperialists, death-oriented and genetically deficient The battle is not only verbal, however, it is also physical and structural. 71

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Dualism, as a confining and dichotomizing ideology, is itself problematic. It has both ‘legitimated’ male dominance, and, more recently ‘legitimated’ the women’s movement. In the past it used to be considered part of the problem perhaps; now, some consider it to be part of the solution—a necessary ideology, until structures are equalized and humanized. Gender remains therefore a critical attribute of the body politic, like colour and age, and also like beauty.

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3 BEAUTY AND THE FACE Truth and goodness, mirrors and masks

What is the face? The face, as unique, physical, malleable and public, is the prime symbol of the self. It is unique, for no two faces are identical, and it is in the face that we recognize each other, and identify ourselves. Our faces are pictured in our passports and identification papers. The face is physical, and therefore personal, yet it is also ‘made up’, ‘put on’ and subject to fashion. It is public, but also intensely private and intimate. And it is malleable; with its 80 mimetic muscles, the face is capable of over 7,000 expressions. Furthermore, the face indicates the age, gender and race of the self with varying degrees of accuracy; also our health and socioeconomic status, our moods and emotions, even perhaps our character and personality. The face is the location both of four of our five senses—sight, taste, smell and hearing—and for our intakes of food, drink and air. It is also the source of verbal communication, and an important source for non-verbal communication. Gloria Swanson once said: ‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.’ Moreover the face is also the principal determinant in the perception of our individual beauty or ugliness, and all that these perceptions imply for self-esteem and life chances. The face indeed symbolizes the self, and signifies many different facets of the self. More than any other part of the body, we identify the face as me or you. Nothing indicates the significance of the face more than the failure to recognize faces and facial expressions. Dr Sacks has described one such person, a victim of Korsakov’s syndrome, who, during the medical examination, apparently mistook his wife for a hat, and, literally, tried to pick her up to put on his head; not surprisingly, he could not recognize facial expressions either. Yet another patient, horrifyingly, could not recognize his own face in a mirror (1987:11– 13, 21). 73

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Even more horrifying was Tommy, afflicted with amniotic band syndrome, who had no face: no eyes, no nose, three horns protruding from his head, and a ‘gaping hole’ for a mouth; he also had no higher cortical functions (Marion, 1990:92–3). The immense and increasing social significance of beauty in general and the face in particular can be seen in economic terms. In the United States sales of beauty aids increased from $40 million in 1914 to $18.5 billion in 1990 (Raines, 1974; Standard and Poor, 1992: H40). The economics of cosmetics and toiletries are probably proportionately similar in the United Kingdom and Canada (cf. Coleman with Coleman, 1981; Canada, 1989). But this represents only a small fraction of the appearance and beauty industry. Many, perhaps most, purchases require aesthetic considerations for the presentation of the self as a physical and a social phenomenon. The beauty industry impinges particularly on the clothing industry, the hairdressing industry, cosmetic surgery, the food industry, the fitness business, and certainly the media and the advertising industries. Virtually every sector of the economy, except perhaps the defence industry, is affected to a greater or lesser degree by aesthetics. The power of beauty, and ugliness, in society is indicated clearly in the research data. One major study reported that: ‘Students thought good looking persons were generally more sensitive, kind, interesting, strong, poised, modest, sociable, outgoing and exciting than less attractive persons. Students also agreed that beautiful persons are sexually more responsive than unattractive persons’ (Berscheid and Walster, 1972:46, 74). This ‘halo effect’ which the researchers described has its corollary, the ‘horns effect’ of ugliness. The impact of physical appearance is pervasive. Attractive children are more popular in school and achieve higher grades; parents and teachers have higher expectations of attractive people, and more positive evaluations of their personality. The more unattractive the individuals, the greater the probability of their being perceived as mentally ill or disturbed; and the less favourable their prognosis once diagnosed. In simulated court cases, the more attractive accused were usually recommended the more lenient sentences. Again, attractiveness elicits more and speedier helping behaviours in experiments in subways, highways, on the street (when allegedly bitten by a rat) and in hospitals. Attractiveness is the prime predictor of romantic attachment for dating; and attractiveness opens doors for jobs, for higher salaries in jobs, and for higher evaluations of 74

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work done. And so on. These effects apply not only in attitudinal and behavioural terms, but also in psychological terms, for the ‘effects’, positive or negative, are likely to be internalized by the target populations through the self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for self-esteem and happiness, in a virtuous or vicious circle (Patzer, 1985). Patzer, who has written the definitive review of the research, concludes: The picture is not pretty. Physical attractiveness touches practically every corner of human existence and it does so with great impact The research thoroughly documents the advantages of higher physical attractiveness and the disadvantages of lower physical attractiveness’ (1985:255). And he describes the degree of discrimination and prejudice against the unattractive as an ‘atrocity’ (1985:5). This aesthetic discrimination, parallel to the more well-known gender, class and race discrimination, is so widespread as to be a cultural norm; yet it is so taken-for-granted as to be almost invisible. The beauty mystique may not be fair, but it does explain the vast investment of time, money, energy and pain in beauty.1 Beauty is more important for women than for men. One indication of this is cosmetic surgery. About 664,000 cosmetic surgery procedures were performed in the United States in 1990, the latest year for which statistics are available, and about one and a quarter million reconstructive procedures. This is a 70 per cent increase over 1981, making plastic surgery one of the fastest growing specialities in medicine in the United States. The vast majority (87 per cent) of aesthetic procedures were performed on women, and the proportion has remained constant over the last 10 years. Men are having more operations, and new types of surgery, including calf implants and pectoral implants, but women still outnumber men 7 to 1. The most frequent cosmetic procedures for women are, in order, liposuction, breast augmentation and collagen injections; for men they are nose reshaping, eyelid surgery and liposuction. The face would seem to be relatively more important to men, and women are more concerned about more areas of the body: hips and thighs, and breasts, as well as the face. These figures understate the true number of procedures, since they include only those performed by registered members of the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons (1992). The figures do give some rough indication, however, in quantitative terms, of the relative salience of beauty by gender, and of the increasing importance of beauty. 75

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Two surveys provide additional evidence of this increasing power of appearance, and indicate dramatically increased levels of dissatisfaction with the body from 1972 to 1987. For example, 13 per cent of men and women were dissatisfied with their height in 1972, but this rose to 20 per cent and 17 per cent respectively in 1987; about 10 per cent were dissatisfied with their face, but this doubled to 20 per cent in 1987. Weight was even more problematic: 35 and 48 per cent of men and women were unhappy about it in 1972, but this increased to 41 and 55 per cent in 1987. These are high levels of dissatisfaction with the self. ‘We’ve become a nation of appearance junkies’, says Rodin (1992a); and increasingly unhappy ones at that. The emotional power of the beauty mystique (and its negative consequences) therefore seems to be accelerating. The first modern beauty contest, apart from the judgement of Paris in Greek mythology, was conducted by Phineas T.Barnum in the USA in 1854, with the people as judges.2 The ‘Miss America’ contest was staged in 1921 and was followed by ‘Miss World’ (1951) and ‘Miss Universe’ (1952). Quite apart from the thousands of local competitions, in municipalities, universities, football teams, etc., the national pageants in the USA now include ‘Miss Black America’, ‘Miss Teen USA’, ‘Little Miss America’, ‘Mrs America’, ‘Miss Wheelchair America’, ‘Miss Pork Queen’ (sponsored by the Pork Industry), ‘Miss Nude World’, the ‘World’s Most Beautiful Tattooed Lady’, and ‘Miss Man Made’ (for transsexuals). There are relatively few competitions for men, but these include ‘Mr Olympia’, won by Arnold Schwarzenegger seven times, and ‘Mr Gay America’ (Banner, 1983:249–70; Russell, 1986:20, 168; Burwell and Bowles, 1987:3–14). In the United Kingdom, the competitions include the ‘Face of the Eighties’, ‘Miss Lovely Legs’, ‘Long and Lovely’ (for hair), ‘English Rose’ and ‘Miss Pears’ (soap). In 1983 Poland was the first Eastern bloc country to send a contestant to the ‘Miss World’ competition. In 1985 the first beauty contests were held in Hungary and China. And in 1988, under the auspices of glasnost, Moscow had its first beauty contest. Only Muslim countries do not hold such contests. Thus the beauty mystique is increasingly being institutionalized around the world, particularly for women. Beauty none the less remains controversial. In 1984 it was expected that one-third of the population of the USA would watch the ‘Miss America’ beauty contest on television; but in the same year in the Old World, the BBC decided to stop televising beauty 76

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contests, deeming them ‘anachronistic and almost offensive’ (New York Times, 11.9.84; 25.11.84). And in 1992 the ‘Miss Canada’ pageant was cancelled as sponsors withdrew their support (Globe and Mail, 4.1.92). The most conclusive evidence of the socio-economic significance of beauty and ugliness is presented by Kaczorowski (1989), in his elegant study of the Canadian Quality of Life panel survey of 4,000 full-time workers conducted by York University in 1977, 1979 and 1981. The researchers requested the interviewers to do two things not usual in surveys: to assess the sincerity of the respondents, and to assess their physical attractiveness on a scale from one to four: homely, average, good looking and striking. This was therefore the first national survey on aesthetics ever conducted. Kaczorowski has demonstrated that physical attractiveness has a positive and substantial effect on socio-economic achievement, with respect both to income and to occupational prestige. Thus 37 per cent of those considered attractive (the top two categories) had high incomes compared to only 27 per cent of the ‘homely’. In economic terms, the good looking (about one-third of the sample) earned 75 per cent more, on average, than the unattractive; and the unattractive (or ugly) earned on average 57 per cent of the incomes of the good looking. The average looking were evenly distributed through the income range. These income differentials are not drastically different from male-female income differentials in the United Kingdom and North America, nor from White-Black income differentials in the United States. The semiotics of appearance begin to seem as economically significant as the semiotics of gender and colour. Furthermore, the good looking were almost twice as likely as the ugly to be in high-status occupations, and almost half as likely to be in low-status ones. The average looking were, again, evenly distributed across the range. Canada, therefore, is an aesthetic stratification system. But this raises some obvious questions. Are they wealthy because they are good looking, or good looking because they are wealthy? Are they poor because they are ugly, or ugly because they are poor? The answer, one might suppose, is a bit of both. But it isn’t. Since this was a longitudinal survey, Kaczorowski was able to show, using regression analyses, that the degree of attractiveness is the cause of differentials of wealth and status. How? One explanation is precisely the halo and horns effects demonstrated by earlier researchers. The good looking were far more likely to be judged 77

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‘sincere’ than the ugly; 81 per cent of the good looking were said to be sincere compared to only 59 per cent of the ugly; and 41 per cent of the ugly were thought insincere compared to only 19 per cent of the attractive—more than twice as many. Obviously, given these judgements, the ugly are less likely to be upwardly mobile (Kaczorowski, 1989). Looks do matter. And what is inside may not count quite as much as we had thought. Although there has been some research on the socio-economic and legal dimensions of such related areas as height (Keyes, 1980; Miller, 1987), obesity (Millman, 1981; Baker, 1982), and physical handicaps (Murphy, 1987), clearly far more research is needed on aesthetics in the United Kingdom and the United States. Are there also aesthetic stratification systems? But why is appearance so important? Where does the halo effect come from? Should aesthetics be so significant in social interaction? And why is the face the symbol of the self? For answers we have to turn to our roots. THE GOOD: PLATO AND BEAUTY

The beauty mystique, in its simplest form, is the belief that the beautiful is good, and the ugly is evil; and conversely that the morally good is physically beautiful (or ‘good looking’) and the evil is ugly. Thus the physical and the metaphysical, body and soul, appearance and reality, inner and outer, are one. Each mirrors the other. The belief is most ancient. In The Iliad, Homer equated evil and ugliness in his description of the loathed Therstis: He was the ugliest man that had come to Ilium. He had a game foot and was bandy-legged. His rounded shoulders almost met across his chest; and above them rose an egg-shaped head, which sprouted a few short hairs. (Bk 2; 1983:45) He looked like the villain he was, and not unlike an Ian Fleming villain. Similarly in The Odyssey, the only villain, apart from Penelope’s suitors, was the one-eyed giant, Cyclops. Odysseus, on the other hand, was ‘radiant with comeliness and grace’ (1981:108). These are the first indications of the identification of the good and the beautiful, the evil and the ugly. Plato, however, established the beauty mystique on a metaphysical base which is now an intrinsic part of Western culture. In the 78

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Symposium (211) Plato develops the theory that there is a scale of perfection ranging from individual human beauty up the ‘heavenly ladder’ to absolute Beauty, which is Love: Starting from individual beauties, the quest for the universal beauty must find [the candidate] ever mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is. (1963:562–3) Socrates adds that ‘all my life I shall pay the power and the might of Love such homage as I can’ (Symposium 211–12; 1963:562–3). Beauty therefore is not only primarily physical—it is also identical with Good and Love, and with happiness, wisdom and truth and knowledge. Indeed beauty, like the body, is a central theme in Plato’s philosophy. Conversely, ugliness equates with the opposite qualities in another table of opposites: evil, ignorance, lies and hate, unhappiness, waste and destruction (1963:373, 493–5, 670, 1549). Beauty and ugliness are not merely physical, but metaphysical; and here lie the philosophical origins of the halo and horns effects. The Greeks loved beauty, as their architecture, statuary, pottery, coins and mosaics show; and they loved the beauty and power of the male body competing, nude, in the Olympic Games for a thousand years. Aristotle even said that beauty is ‘the gift of God’ (Laertius, 1972:461), which surely implies that ugliness is, or may be, a punishment from God. If the one is positive, the other is negative. Yet many Greeks were sceptical about beauty. Theophrastus, who succeeded Aristotle at the Peripatetic school, described beauty as ‘a mute deception’; and Theocritus said it was ‘an evil in an ivory setting’ (Laertius, 1972, vol. 1:463). Euripides, often a critic of his society, spoke strongly against beauty in Orestes (lines 126–7) (408 BC), when Electra blames the beautiful Helen for all the deaths in the Trojan War: Oh, what a vileness human beauty is, Corroding, corrupting everything it touches. 79

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THE FACE AS MIRROR: ARISTOTLE AND PHYSIOGNOMICS

Aristotle did not develop Plato’s theory of beauty as goodness, indeed he distinguished between them, for goodness ‘implies conduct as its subject, while the beautiful is found also in motionless things’; but he did define beauty: The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness’, or proportion in other translations (Metaphysics 1078; 1984:1705). 3 The idea of beauty as proportion inspired not only the Greek sculptors, notably Praxiteles, but also Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Le Corbusier. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), however, perhaps finding this definition a trifle mathematical, insisted that: There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’ (1985:189). Faces, rather than beauty, were what fascinated Aristotle; and his treatise Physiognomics established physiognomy as a science, although it was probably written by one of his followers at the Peripatetic school after his death. Aristotle argued that the face is a ‘particularly suitable’ part of the body to indicate ‘mental character’ (1984:1250). One example will suffice: The face, when fleshy, indicates laziness, as in cattle; if gaunt, assiduity, and if bony, cowardice, on the analogy of asses and deer. A small face marks a small soul, as in the cat and the ape; a large face means lethargy, as in asses and cattle. So the face must be neither large nor little: an intermediate size is therefore best. (1984:1246) With ‘beautyism’ firmly established by Plato, and ‘facism’ by Aristotle, the beautiful face is semiotically linked to God, Love, the self and the soul; it is far more than simply physical. During the Renaissance, the rise of astrology added new power to the face, as astrologers described faces according to the seven planetary types, as they had described bodies also. Face-reading, like chiromancy or palm-reading, was popular, often according to the physiognomic principles developed by Aristotle. Metaposcopy, the reading of the lines and marking of the forehead, was a specialized discipline pioneered by Jerome Cardan and enjoyed a brief vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even the moles, warts and wrinkles on the face were plotted on portraits, and ‘divined’ for their cosmic significance. In the medieval view, everything had 80

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meaning, all was one; all corresponded. Past, present and future were written in the face, if only it could be divined (Magli, 1989; Finkelstein, 1992). The decline of astrology, with the rise of science, rationalism and mechanism, did not destroy physiognomy, however, but merely transformed it from a predictive, cosmic mode back to the traditional Aristotelian descriptive mode. Indeed physiognomy as a ‘science’ remained very popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Johann Lavater’s classic work On Physiognomy, which ran through 18 editions in many languages from its first publication in 1775 to 1885, was dedicated to the proposition: ‘If you would know men’s hearts look in their faces.’ Lavater also formulated ‘A Hundred Rules of Physiognomy’. The effectiveness of Lavater’s physiognomics is indicated by the reluctance of the Captain of HMS Beagle to allow Darwin on the expedition to South America. According to Darwin’s account, the Captain ‘was an ardent disciple of Lavater…and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage’ (1887, vol. 1:59–60). Lavater’s influence is also evident in the corpus of nineteenth-century European literature (Tytler, 1982). Later specialized works were published on noses (Warwick, 1848), ears (Cherry and Cherry, 1900) and resemblances between humans and animals (Redfield, 1852)—ideas that had lasted 2,000 years. Interest in physiognomics declined again in the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps in part because of the vigorous attack against it by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807/ 1961:342–8), but also due to the rise of phrenology—dismissed by Hegel also: ‘Bumps and hollows, there is room for selection!’ (1961:361). The rise and fall of phrenology was relatively rapid, but the ‘science’ persists among some New Age believers with the reprinting of old classics (Fowler and Fowler, 1835/1969; Wells, 1871/1971) and new work by a self-styled witch (Leek, 1970). Physiognomics enjoyed a brief renaissance in business circles in the early 1900s, under the leadership of one Dr Holmes Whittier Merton (Brandt, 1980:95–6); and re-appeared as ‘characterology’ in later decades (e.g. McCormick, 1920). Indeed physiognomics is still popular in some circles, and trade books are numerous (Baker and Bellack, 1981), including works on Chinese physiognomics (Mar, 1975; Kushi, 1981; Young, 1984). Studies on body language and face language promise to reveal the truths about moods and feelings, 81

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as well as character (Fast, 1971; Hall, 1973; Nierenberg and Calero, 1973; Davis, 1976). Perhaps the most presumptuous physiognomist of the century, however, is Kahlil Gibran: ‘Show me your mother’s face; I will tell you who you are’ (1962: n.p.). Aristotle and the science that he founded are therefore alive and well in our culture. Yet, while the themes of beauty and the face can be distinguished conceptually in their origins in Plato and Aristotle respectively, in fact they blend and merge with each other in Christian and indeed in contemporary thought. Here we examine the convergence between the face and beauty as symbols of the self. VAIN, DUNG AND GOD: CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY

Beauty has been controversial in Judaeo-Christian thought. The Bible warns against beauty; according to Proverbs (31:30) ‘beauty is vain’.4 Isaiah (28:1) said that ‘beauty is a fading flower’, Jeremiah inveighed against beauty (4:30), and the ascetics ignored the conventional beauty and dress norms, from Samson to John the Baptist This philosophy is entirely compatible with the early Greek ascetic tradition expressed in Plato’s Orphism. On the other hand, in the Song of Solomon, the bride and the King praise each other’s beauty and goodness in earthy and physical rather than metaphysical terms. Early Christianity did not impinge directly on this discussion of the face and beauty. The teaching of Christ and Paul on the body emphasized, as we have seen, both its intrinsic goodness and its dangerousness. Beauty had its place, but secondary to the search for the Kingdom; but anyone who can refer to the ‘glory’ of a woman’s long hair (I Corinthians 11:15) is not totally insensitive to beauty. The Christian love of beauty is evident in Christian creations: the Gothic cathedrals and the stained glass, the Gregorian chant, illuminated manuscripts, the religious statuary and the paintings. Yet always there is tension; for on the other hand, all creation and all beauty may be dismissed: ‘All is vanity’ (Ecclesiastes 1:14), or, in Saint Peter’s words: ‘All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass’ (I Peter 1:24). Some Christians emphasized the ascetic side, some the transcendent side; Plotinus (c. 203–62 BC) emphasized body82

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negativism. In his development of Plato’s aesthetics and metaphysics, he retained Plato’s idea of the ladder of beauty (I:6; 1956:56–64); and Beauty, together with the One and the Good, are the names of the Absolute: the One is ‘beauty above beauty’ (VI:7, 32). He also maintained Plato’s dualism, polarizing Matter and Soul, evil and good, ugly and beautiful: ‘A Soul becomes ugly …by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter’ (I:6, 5; 1956:60). He seems to have experienced this dualism personally, for Porphyry, his friend and biographer, records that he ‘seemed ashamed of being in the body’, and refused to sit for his portrait (1956:1). Indeed he dismissed beauties of the body as ‘copies, vestiges, shadows’ of Beauty, and not to be pursued. What should be pursued, he said, is beauty of the soul: ‘We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another order; our self-knowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in self-ignorance we are ugly’ (V:8; 1956:433). And he advised his readers: ‘let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty’ (I:6; 1956:64). This equation of God and Beauty is reiterated by Augustine in his famous prayer. But for Augustine matter is not evil and ugly, nor is physical beauty a shadow; matter is good, and beauty reflects God, for God is Beauty, and Beauty is God: ‘I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love you late!’ But Beauty is also Good: ‘It was you, then, O Lord, who made [earth and the heavens], you who are beautiful, for they too are beautiful; you who are good for they too are good; you who ARE, for they too are. But they are not beautiful and good as you are beautiful and good’ (Confessions, Bks 10, 27; 11, 4; 1961:231–2, 256–7). Jerome (345–420), a contemporary of Augustine’s, was less preoccupied by beauty but observed the face; indeed his is a classic statement of facism, echoing Cicero: The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart’ (Letter 54; 1975:251). Boethius (c. 475–525), continued the mainstream of thinking about beauty from Plato to Augustine. Indeed God is described as the ‘height of beauty’ (1969:97). Yet Philosophy, in the person of a lady, warns Boethius against (physical) beauty: ‘The sleek looks of beauty are fleeting and transitory, more ephemeral than the blossom in spring’ (1969:92). Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired the Second Crusade, echoed Plotinus when he said that: ‘Interior 83

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beauty is more comely than external ornament, more even than the pomp of kings.’ Indeed he declared bluntly that (physical) beauty is ‘dung’: We who have turned aside from society, relinquishing for Christ’s sake all the precious and beautiful things in the world, its wondrous light and colour, its sweet sounds and odours, the pleasures of tastes and touch, for us all bodily delights are nothing but dung. (In Eco, 1986:9, 7) Yet Bernard also believed that ‘the body is an image of the mind’. Beauties may be dung (Bernard), shadows (Plotinus), or ephemeral (Boethius), but bodily beauty was still symbolic, as Gilbert of Hoyt advised: have regard also for the bodily countenance whose grace can be seen in its abundant beauty; for the exterior face can refresh the spirit of those who look upon it, and nourish us with the grace of the interior to which it witnesses. (In Eco, 1986:10) The body, in this view, may be inferior to the immortal soul, but the body and the face reflect light and grace and beauty. They mirror the soul. Thomas Aquinas, however, did not believe that ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ were connected, that physical beauty mirrored spiritual beauty. Indeed, following Aristotle, he distinguished clearly between them: ‘Beauty of body consists in shapely limbs and features having a certain proper glow of colour. So also beauty of spirit consists in conversations and actions that are wellinformed and suffused with intelligence’ (Summa Theologiae 2– 2:145, 2; 1981, Vol. 35:75). Furthermore, we share the former with the ‘lower order’ of being, and the latter with angelic and infinite being (Hart, 1959:394). Aquinas defined beauty as ‘that which pleases’, and insisted that ‘the beautiful and the good are identical in reality; it is only the mind that makes a distinction between them’ (Summa Theologiae 1–2:27, 1; 1981, vol. 19:76; cf. Summa Theologiae 1:5, 4, 1). Furthermore, ‘beauty goes with (conveniat) every virtue’ (Summa Theologiae 2–2:141, 2; 1981, vol. 43:11). Indeed beauty is one of the transcendentals, the attributes of being, which are unity, truth and goodness. Beauty is also one of the attributes of God, for God as Existence is 84

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Infinite Goodness and Infinite Beauty. Aquinas reflects not only Plato’s ancient philosophy of beauty, but also Augustine’s prayer to Beauty (Hart, 1959:351, 386–93). Beauty is therefore of supreme value in Thomistic metaphysics; and he revived the Platonist equation of Beauty as Truth and Goodness. Beauty has been complex in Christian thinking; but beautification has been almost unanimously condemned as vain. Jeremiah (4:30) condemned beautification long ago: ‘And you, O desolate one, what do you mean that you dress in scarlet, that you deck yourselves with ornaments of gold, that you enlarge your eyes with paint? In vain you beautify yourself.’ Clement of Alexandria forbade women to dye their hair, to pierce the ears and to ‘smear their faces with the ensnaring devices of worldly cunning’; ‘love of display is not for a lady but a courtesan’, and ‘cosmetics and dyes indicate that the soul is deeply diseased’. He advised (and here he is reminiscent of Plotinus) that ‘the man, who would be beautiful, must adorn that which is the most beautiful thing in man, his mind’. Why? ‘“For it is monstrous for those who are made “in the image and likeness of God” to dishonour the archetype by assuming a foreign ornament’ (1956:273–87). Jerome (345–420) was even more caustic: ‘What have rouge and white lead to do on a Christian woman’s face? …They are fires to influence young men, stimulants of lustful desire, plain evidence of an unchaste mind’ (1975:241; cf. 163). The critique continued for a thousand years. Thomas à Kempis, the Augustinian monk and mystic, also warned about beauty: ‘Do not be vain about your beauty or strength of body, which a little sickness can mar and disfigure’ (Bk 1, ch. 7; 1952:34). Cosmetics did not come into general use in England until the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and the Puritans reiterated the traditional view that make-up is sinful. One divine, Phillip Stubbes, stated emphatically in 1583 that ‘whosoever do colour their faces or their hair with any unnatural colour, they begin to prognosticate of what colour they shall be in hell’ (Stubbes, 1973: n.p.). This was a somewhat tactless remark, since his queen’s hair was both red and coloured; but he was citing Ciprian. The Christian attack on beauty and beautification declined after the Renaissance, except for the Puritans. Now the Avon Beauty Guide says: ‘Make-up is fun. Make-up looks like you, only better’ (Griffin, 1979:16). 85

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FACISM AND TH E BEAUTY MYSTIQUE

During the Renaissance both physical beauty and the face were of divine and mystical significance. Beauty because in Platonist and Augustinian philosophy it led to God and, by reversal, reflected God; and in Thomistic philosophy Beauty is one of the attributes of God. The face because individual characters were inscribed there, and future fortunes could be read there by trained ‘diviners’. Also, the face was, and is, the prime focus of beauty. All these themes permeate The Divine Comedy of Dante (1265– 1321). The contrasts between beauty/ugliness, good/evil, love/ hate, joy/horror, light/darkness, God/Satan, permeate the work. The ugliness, horror and evil of the three-headed Satan, weeping from his six eyes, devouring sinners, with ‘runnels of tears and slaver’ dripping from his triple chin, is in sharp contrast with the former Lucifer, Light-Bearer, ‘once as fair as now he’s foul’ (1955, Vol. 1, Canto 34). Yet Dante cannot describe the beauty of Beatrice, transformed after their vision of the angelic circles (Vol. 3, Canto 30); it is the same when Saint Bernard bids Dante to gaze at the Virgin Mary, Mother of God: ‘Now to that face which most resembles Christ Lift up thy gaze; its radiance alone Can grant to thee the power to look on Christ’. I looked, and on that countenance there shone Such bliss… That nothing I had looked on heretofore Had held me breathless in such wonderment, Or unto God so close a likeness bore. (Vol. 3, Canto 32) For Dante, beauty is a reflection of the glory of God; and the face is the expression not only of the individual, but also of God. Even the structure of the face, the medievals believed, is witness to God. Dante reads ‘OMO in man’s countenance’ (Vol. 2, Canto 22, 1.32). This refers to the words ‘[H]OMO DEI: man is of God’ inscribed on the face. The two eyes represent the two Os, the lines of the eyebrows form the M, and the ears form the D, while the E and I, horizontally, are formed by the nostrils and the mouth (1955, Vol. 2:248, 251). Perhaps the finest exposition of the medieval idea of beauty, which closely followed Plato’s, was offered by the courtier Baldesar Castiglione (1478–1529): 86

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beauty is a sacred thing…[it] springs from God and is like a circle, the centre of which is goodness. And so just as one cannot have a circle without a centre, so one cannot have beauty without goodness. In consequence, only rarely does an evil soul dwell in a beautiful body, and so outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness… Therefore for the most part the ugly are also evil, and the beautiful good. And it can be said that beauty is the pleasant, gay, charming and desirable face of the good, and that ugliness is the dark, disagreeable, unpleasant and sorry face of evil…it can be said that in some manner the good and the beautiful are identical, especially in the human body. And the proximate cause of physical beauty is, in my opinion, the beauty of the soul. (1984:330–2; emphasis added) This belief that physical beauty is caused by spiritual beauty is characteristic of the Renaissance; but Castiglione went on to suggest that the lover of physical beauty may grow to love intellectual and spiritual beauty, and may grow from the love of particular beauties to the love of universal beauty and ultimately God (1984:340–1). Castiglione not only reflected Plato, Augustine and Aquinas but also justified secular and sensual delight in beauty: a superb synthesis of ‘biology’ and theology, the profane and the sacred, sex and God. Castiglione’s concerns with the meanings and causes of physical beauty followed the Platonist and Neoplatonist traditions, but another sixteenth-century Italian, Firenzuola, seems essentially modern in his long description of ideal feminine beauty. He described the hair, forehead, skin, eyebrows, eyes, ears, temples, nose, mouth, teeth, chin, hands and so on in great detail (in Burkhardt, 1981:209–11). Two points are instructive, however. First, beauty is purely physical; there is no suggestion that beauty is a symbol of virtue or leads up a ladder to God. Beauty is not metaphysical. Second, Firenzuola marks a literary turning-point in that the feminine is the paradigm of beauty now, rather than the male as in the Greek tradition; the change is evident also in the paintings of da Vinci, Botticelli and Raphael. Despite these paradigmatic shifts, old ideas were not completely displaced. Francis Bacon followed Castiglione and Platonism in his aphorisms: ‘Virtue is nothing but inward beauty; beauty is 87

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nothing but outward virtue’ (1884:156). Conversely, in his essay on deformity, he states: ‘Deformed persons are commonly even with nature, for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature’ (1985:191–2; Bacon’s emphasis). Bacon’s contemporary in France, the essayist Montaigne (1553– 92), was a strong adherent of the beauty mystique, and a great admirer of beauty. He found it ‘incongruous’ that Socrates, with the ‘beauty of his soul’, was so ugly as they said; for ‘there is nothing more likely than the conformity and relation of the body to the spirit’. He added: ‘I cannot say how much I consider beauty a powerful and advantageous quality…I consider it as within two fingers’ breadth of goodness’ (1965:809–10). The equation of beauty and goodness, the conformity of body and soul, the value of the face—the central themes are sketched very clearly. Miranda also subscribed to the beauty mystique. In The Tempest (Act I, Scene ii) she identified physical and moral beauty on first seeing Ferdinand: I might call him A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble… There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. For Miranda, the man is good looking therefore ‘a thing divine’ and therefore good. Caliban, on the other hand, is both evil and ugly—a monster both literally and figuratively; Prospero calls him ‘A devil, a born devil…and…with age his body uglier grows’ (Act IV, Scene ii). The conflict between good and evil is also a conflict between beautiful and ugly. Miranda was not alone in her beliefs. Thomas Walkington (1607) was equally moved: ‘When I doe gaze with a longing looke on the comelinesse of the feature without, I am more than halfe persuaded of the admirable decencie within’ (in Camden, 1941:401). And Thomas Browne in Religio Medici (1642) asserted that: ‘there are mystically in our faces certaines characters which carry in them the motto of our Soules wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures’ (1964:57). Milton (1608–74) also subscribed to the beauty mystique. Adam and Eve are beautiful in Paradise before the Fall, reflecting God: 88

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for in their looks divine The image of their glorious Maker shone, Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure— (Paradise Lost, Bk 4:288ff.) Even Satan, newly expelled from heaven, is at first still glorious and majestic (Bk 1:59ff.; Bk 2:302ff.); but as his evil intent develops he appears ‘squat like a toad’ (Bk 4:800); and then ‘mixed with bestial slime’, a serpent (Bk 9:165). Finally, after the Fall, he and all the devils are punished by God and transformed permanently into ‘a crowd of ugly serpents!’ (Bk 10:538–9). Where Dante had written, till words failed, of the increasing beauty of goodness and love in his ascent into heaven, Milton stressed the increasing ugliness of sin. But the equations of the beauty mystique were identical for both. The Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were captivated by beauty, natural beauty in particular, but human beauty also, and even the idea of beauty. Wordsworth wrote about a little girl in ‘We are Seven’, and captures the essence of the beauty mystique: ‘Her eyes were fair, and very fair;/Her beauty made me glad’. William Blake in his satirical ‘Proverbs of Hell’ includes a classic facist proverb: ‘He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.’ Another proverb states that ‘Exuberance is Beauty’. Coleridge, like so many others, was impressed by the beauty of Lord Byron: ‘so beautiful a countenance, I scarcely ever saw…his eyes the open portals of the sun—things of light and for light’ (in Abrams, 1968:1457). Certainly Coleridge did not consider the notorious rake virtuous, even if beautiful; yet he equated beauty with sun and light, both familiar analogues of God. Byron himself wrote a famous poem that begins: ‘She walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies’; and concludes in the by now familiar strains of the beauty mystique, equating beauty and goodness: The smiles that win, the tints that glow,/But tell of days in goodness spent,/A mind at peace with all below./A heart whose love is innocent.’ Shelley composed ‘A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, in which he states: ‘I vowed that I would dedicate my powers/To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?’ (Socrates had made a similar promise to Love, as we have seen). Yet it was John Keats, dead at 26, who summarized the Romantics’ view in ‘Endymion’: A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness. 89

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And he concluded his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ with the muchquoted lines: Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. The consensus within European cultural history has been impressive. Beauty is objective, related to goodness and to God, and moral and physical beauty are related; it is located primarily in the face, which also reflects character and the soul and perhaps the future. And beauty as physically attractive not only reflects Divine beauty, and inner moral beauty, but also inspires physical desire, i.e. is sexy. None the less, there were some who objected, and observed the relativity of beauty. Montaigne, who, as we have seen, was an adherent of the beauty mystique, was also the first to offer an early anthropology of beauty: We imagine its forms to suit our fancy…The Indies paint it black and dusky, with large swollen lips and a wide flat nose. And they load the cartilage between the nostrils with big gold rings, to make it hang down to the mouth…In Peru, the biggest ears are the fairest, and they stretch them artificially as much as they can…Elsewhere there are nations that blacken their teeth with great care, and scorn to see white ones; elsewhere they stain them red. (1965:355–6) Voltaire (1694–1778), likewise, was more impressed by the relativity than the objectivity of beauty; for him, beauty is in the culture of the beholder, not in the philosophy of Plato: ‘Ask a toad what beauty is, absolute beauty, the to kalon? He will answer that it is his female, with two large round eyes sticking out of her little head, a large and flat snout, a yellow belly, a brown back’ (1972:53). The philosophical implications of such relativism were drawn by David Hume (1711–76). In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, he remarks: Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty…To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an inquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter. (1965:6) 90

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Yet Hume was also a traditionalist, and in his most famous work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40:2, 1, 8) he restated Aquinas’ definition of beauty (that which pleases), adding a corollary on ugliness or deformity: beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as…is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing character of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness. Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (1985:350) The addition of pleasure and pain to the ancient Platonist equation contributed another dimension to the beauty-ugliness mystique. Kant rejected Hume’s empiricism and subjectivism. In his Critique of Judgement (1790) he returned to a Platonist-type idealism: ‘the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good’ (1951:198). Schiller was more lyrical; ‘Beauty alone makes the whole world happy, and each and every being forgets its limitations while under its spell’ (1967:217; letter 27). Hegel was equally captivated by beauty. In his Aesthetics (1835) Hegel states that ‘everything beautiful is truly beautiful as sharing in this higher sphere [of the spirit] and generated by it’ (1975:2). And in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, he says: the beautiful is essentially the spiritual that expresses itself sensibly…in such a way that the sensible does not have being on its own account, but only has complete significance within the spiritual and through the spiritual, and is the sign of the spiritual. (1987:585; cf. 477) In Hegel’s view the human sensory form is determined by the spirit, the exterior by the interior, thus we create ourselves physically as well as spiritually: The external human form is alone capable of revealing the spiritual in a sensuous way. The human expression in face, eyes, posture, and air is material…but within this corporeality itself the human exterior is not only living and natural, as the animal is, but is the bodily presence which in itself mirrors 91

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the spirit. Through the eyes we look into a man’s soul, just as his spiritual character is expressed by his whole demeanour in general.5 (1975:433–4) Hegel insists that the body, especially the face, manifests the soul: ‘the face has a…centre in which the soulful and spiritual relation to things is manifested’. Indeed, a man’s ‘glance is what is most full of his soul, the concentration of his inmost personality and feeling’ (1975:729). Despite his materialism, Feuerbach echoed his former professor. In a brief passage on beauty he suggests: ‘The beautiful is the sensible in its transition to the spiritual’ (1980:89). The mystique of beauty, the face and the eyes is deeply rooted in European thought: for this takes us back to Homer and Plato. Schopenhauer (1788–1860) agreed with Hegel about the spirituality of the face, but, unlike Hegel, was a convinced physiognomist. He wrote: ‘That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go by.’ His facism is clearer in the emphatic statement that ‘the face of a man is the exact expression of what he is, and if he deceives us, that is our fault, not his’ (n.d.: 250, 254). Hence he recommended physiognomics: it is the study of truth. Beauty fascinated not only poets and philosophers but also naturalists. In The Descent of Man, Vol. 2 (1871), Darwin discussed the variations in, and functions of, animal beauty and the differences in cultural definitions of beauty; he concluded that: ‘It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect of the human body’ (1981, Vol. 2:353). None the less, in his view, beauty was immensely significant in the evolutionary scheme of things, contributing to sexual selection (1981, Vol. 2:369). THE FACE, BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

In the twentieth century, the twin beliefs that the face (and the body) mirror the soul, and that beauty and goodness are one, and are reflected in the face, still persist as they did in the past. In a well-known passage Wittgenstein stated that ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’ (1968:178). One cannot help observing that Wittgenstein himself did not have a notoriously 92

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beautiful body. Also, the implications for the physically handicapped are clearly negative. Georg Simmel was fascinated by the face and declared bluntly in his essay ‘The Aesthetic Significance of the Face’ (1901) that ‘in the features of the face the soul finds its clearest expression’; and again: ‘the face strikes us as the symbol, not only of the spirit, but also of an unmistakable personality’ (1965:276, 278).6 The face tells the truth. Emerson, the American philosopher and poet, often wrote about beauty. In one essay, ‘Beauty’ (1901/1968), he says, echoing Bacon and Castiglione, that ‘Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue’; and adds, in Platonist mode, that ‘Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty are all but different faces of the same all’ (1968, Vol. 1:19, 24). ‘Beauty is the virtue of the body, as virtue is the beauty of the soul.’ Indeed: ‘a beautiful person is sent into the world as an image of the divine beauty, not to provoke but to purify the sensual into an intellectual and divine love’. Furthermore, ‘perfect beauty and perfect goodness are one’ (1968, Vol. 12:240, 217). Continuing on this theme he asserts that: ‘Beauty is its own excuse for being’ (1968, Vol. 9:38); and is ‘welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself… Her existence makes the world rich’ (1968, Vol. 2:178). These are classic statements of the beauty mystique. Thorstein Veblen in 1899 offered the first sociological theory of beauty, suggesting that ‘the utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the article’ (1953:94); beginning with spoons, he then discussed the aesthetic values of parks and lawns, cats and dogs, and finally dress, of men and particularly of women. Of the ideal feminine beauty, he observed: The ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender waist. These features…go to show that the person so affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. (1953:107) The beautiful woman is therefore a status symbol; she not only does not work, but cannot work; long hair, corsets, high heels, 93

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long dresses, and so on, are intended to indicate this: they too are status symbols; and the decoration of the woman with jewellery, making her an expensive ornament, reinforces this process, as does the attention to fashion and ‘the alleged beauty, or “loveliness” of the styles in vogue at any given time’ (1953:121, 125–6). Freud argued somewhat differently: ‘There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of “beautiful” has its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was “sexually stimulating” (1977a:69n2). Indeed Freud seemed mildly perplexed by beauty: ‘Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it’, apparently because the enjoyment of beauty can compensate for the threat of suffering. He suggests that: ‘The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim’ (1985:270–1). Yet Freud’s theory of beauty originating in ‘sexual excitation’ neatly complements Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, quite apart from any compensation roles it may play. Rollo May is reminiscent of Socrates and Shelley in the title of his autobiography, My Quest for Beauty (1985). This reflects Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931): ‘We live only to discover beauty’ (1968:27). Edward O.Wilson, the founder of sociobiology and surely closer to Darwin than to Freud, also eulogizes beauty, the beauty of science.7 He quotes Hermann Weyl, the perfecter of quantum and relativity theory: ‘My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful’ (1984:6). There is an echo of Keats here; but for Keats beauty and truth could not clash. Wilson himself suggested that beauty may lie ‘in the genes of the beholder’ (1984:109), i.e. much that we perceive as beautiful is determined by some sort of genetic memory of mankind’s earliest and optimal environments in the savannah, on hills and by water. Here, of course, Wilson is referring to natural rather than to facial beauty; but the idea is intriguing. Our daily language indicates the prevalence of the beauty mystique. We might say that someone ‘looks good’, ‘looks divine’, or is ‘divinely beautiful’: phrases which neatly equate beauty, goodness and God. Conversely, the phrases ‘as ugly as sin’ or ‘looks like hell’ equally neatly equate ugliness, evil and the Devil. To be attractive is, by definition, to attract. To be lovely is to be lovable and, by implication, to be loved. Conversely, to be unlovely is to be unlovable and unloved; and to be ugly is to be repulsive and 94

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to repel. Beauty and ugliness are evaluated linguistically therefore, not only as physical opposites but also as moral opposites. On the other hand our proverbs and folk wisdom warn insistently against taking beauty at face value: ‘Beauty is only skin deep’, ‘Appearances are deceptive’, ‘All that glitters is not gold’, ‘Handsome is as handsome does’, and ‘Never judge a book by its cover’.8 In practice, however, the beauty mystique reigns and the folk wisdom is largely ignored. Ugliness and physical deformities, particularly facial deformities, are stigmatized (Goffman, 1963; Kampling, 1981). Birth-marks, as well as burns and scarring, or overweight, may traumatize the individuals concerned and those with whom they interact. Such conditions, whether congenital or accidental, may be changed by cosmetic surgery; but the psychic and social significance of ugliness is immense (Stallings, 1980; Kaczorowski, 1989). Indeed discrimination against the ugly was institutionalized in the so-called ‘ugly laws’ in some American cities, whereby those of ‘unsightly’ appearance in public places were liable to arrest (Note, 1987:2035). There is a second dimension to ugliness. Just as physical beauty is believed to symbolize inner moral or spiritual beauty or goodness, so too physical ugliness is believed to symbolize an inner ugliness or evil (as with Therstis, Cyclops, Lucifer, Caliban, as we have seen). The equation is also reversible. Semiotically, the ugly are evil, and the evil are ugly. Villains, at least in fiction, are portrayed as ugly, and often as physically deformed or handicapped (Captain Hook, Long John Silver, Richard III—villainous in Shakespeare’s play, if not in historical fact). It is not surprising, therefore, that the physically handicapped and/or the ugly are perceived as villains (e.g. by Bacon). Furthermore, those who are perceived as evil—i.e. enemies of one sort of another: military, ethnic, racial, political, etc.—are ‘uglified’—portrayed as ugly: propaganda includes ‘uglification’. In Germany, for instance, Hitler presented the Jews as both physically ugly and morally ugly in Mein Kampf (1924); the Aryans, on the other hand, were physically and morally beautiful, and biologically and spiritually superior. Riefenstahl’s film The Will to Power showed the Nazis as beautiful, blonde, noble and strong. Similarly, in Ireland and England during the Fenian crisis, cartoonists from each side showed the other as ugly: as apes, Yahoos, Frankensteins, vampires, and generally unpleasant (Curtis, 1971). Again, in the United States 95

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from the earliest days of contact, Blacks were stigmatized by Whites. The linguistic opposition of white and black connoted life and death, ‘purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil’ (Jordan, 1969:7; emphasis added). Centuries later Black nationalists responded with ‘Black is beautiful!’—by implication, white, its opposite, is ugly; and Malcolm X added that the white man is the Devil and the enemy (1965:212–13, 251, 266). The issues remained polarized, but the moral poles were reversed; now Blacks were beautiful and good; and Whites were evil and ugly. As in ethnic relations, so in crime. Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, concluded not only that ‘born’ criminals were atavistic throwbacks and moral imbeciles but also that a physical ‘criminal type’ existed, distinguished in their bodies by prehensile feet, lefthandedness and hernias, and in their faces by ‘outstanding ears, abundant hair, a sparse beard, enormous frontal sinuses’, prognathism, broad cheekbones, a low and retreating forehead, oblique eyes, a small skull and, in women, a masculine face (1911/ 1968:xviii, 369–72). It was therefore often possible to distinguish born criminals from the rest of the population: they were extremely ugly. The face is the clue to the criminal self. Lombrosian ideas still persist. In The Secret Adversary, first published in 1922 and still in print, Agatha Christie describes villains as looking villainous; one was ‘A villainous looking man with close-cropped hair’; a second had ‘a weak, unpleasant face…his shoulders cringed a little as he talked, and his eyes, small and crafty, shifted unceasingly’; and a third was still more obvious: ‘He was obviously of the very dregs of the society. The low, beetling brows, and the criminal jaw, the bestiality of the whole countenance’ (1987:51, 48, 53). He was, in sum, Neanderthal. This is perhaps less description than invective; but the process by which the evil, however defined, are portrayed as ugly, and the good are shown as good looking, both express and reinforce facist beliefs and the beauty mystique. Appearance symbolizes ‘reality’. The beauty mystique is rooted not only in physiognomy and philosophy, linguistics, ethnic relations, war and criminology, but also in our literary heritage. Our fairy stories imbue children with the mystique. In the Brothers Grimm’s story ‘Cinderella’, it is the remarkably beautiful and amazingly good Cinderella who wins the heart of the prince. In ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Beauty, who is both good and intelligent enough to see through ugliness, breaks the 96

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spell over the beast, who promptly turns into a handsome prince. The moral of the stories is not only that virtue triumphs, but so does beauty. Hans Christian Andersen’s story, ‘The Ugly Duckling’, tells how the poor duckling was loathed and persecuted by his brothers and sisters, and everyone else. Even his mother wished he had never been born. His problems are resolved only when he becomes a beautiful swan. All three of these stories exemplify the beauty mystique, and socialize children into the cosmic value and practical utility of beauty; and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Snow White’ transmit the same morals. Adult literature emphasizes the same themes. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817), the monster was so monstrous that even his creator rejected him and fled; yet he was intrinsically ‘benevolent and good’, in accord with Rousseau’s view of humanity. Society, however, rejected him for his ugliness—even young children, the monster learned, were prejudiced, and abhorred deformity. He explained: ‘Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.’ But he found no Beauty for his Beast. Spurned by all, shot at, hated, lonely and miserable, ‘I declared everlasting war against the species.’ He kills, again and again, but is filled with remorse. He and his victims were destroyed by the beauty mystique: the hatred and fear of ugliness. A more recent application of the same theme is in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, (not the films) where the villains are hideous (Synnott, 1990). Truth is often as strange as fiction, as the case of John Merrick, the so-called ‘Elephant Man’, exemplifies. He was so ugly, so deformed, that people paid to see him; and when travelling he had to wear a bag over his face. Dr. Treves, his very experienced physician, admitted that on the basis of his looks and his inability to articulate ‘I supposed that Merrick was imbecile and had been from birth.’ But he found out that he was wrong. The man was ‘highly intelligent…possessed an acute sensibility and—worse than all—a romantic imagination’ (Montagu, 1979b:17–18). In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the good doctor not only becomes the evil Mr Hyde, but he also becomes ugly—his face is transformed and his body is deformed: ‘Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides…had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay’ (Stevenson, 1984:84). 97

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And in Oscar Wilde’s story The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the enigma was how Gray could be so evil, and yet still be so good looking; only the picture could resolve the contradiction. The same idea that the face is the mirror of the person is conveyed in George Orwell’s well-known dictum that ‘At 50 everyone has the face he deserves’ (1970:579). The same point was made in an American Catholic high school text of the early sixties: The faces of the pure, even those who otherwise lack natural beauty, are usually clear-eyed, noble, strong, open, innocent, appealing. But the faces of the impure, whether beautiful or homely, in proportion to their depravity often become hardeyed, coarse, weal, callous, naughty, brazen, sensuous, repellent. Yes, impurity leaves its ugly marks. (Elwell, 1961:566) A recent children’s book insists on the primacy of moral over physical beauty: If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely. (Dahl, 1982:9) The nastier people become, the uglier they look; this view repeats Milton’s description of Satan; but the corollary is that ugly people are nasty! Conversely the morally good person ‘will always look lovely’. Essentially the same point is made by the theologian Charles Davis: The bodily beauty of men and women, the beauty that shines forth physically, is not purely physical. Everyone will admit this in regard to the human face. Facial beauty insofar as it comes from perfect physical proportions, firm flesh, and finely textured skin, can of itself be dead and unattractive. Indeed, such features may be the basis of an ugly countenance, expressing a selfish or hateful personality. But a face can have a quite extraordinary beauty in the mobile expressiveness with 98

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which it presents a rich, lovable personality, despite features in themselves physically ugly. The same is true of the body as a whole. Its living beauty is never exclusively physical. (1976:38) Facism and the beauty mystique are primarily visual; and they are most apparent in films and television programmes, advertising and comics (Longmore, 1985; Bogdan et al., 1982). Recent films illustrate the beauty mystique with particular vividness. In Batman, the evil Joker is hideous after his immersion in a tank of toxic waste; and the sequel, Batman Returns (1992), features the hideous and evil Penguin. In 1992 also Superman was finally killed by the again, ugly and evil Doomsday. In Dick Tracy, the bad guys are ugly: Flattop, Pruneface and Mumbles. The heroes, Michael Keaton and Warren Beatty, are supposedly reasonably attractive. Freddie Krueger, Darth Vader, Jabba the Hut and the Klingons are archetypally ugly and horribly villainous. In the Western mythology there is no distinction between the two. This mystique, however, has costs as well as benefits. Discrimination and prejudice against the ugly persist. Not everyone agrees that virtue shines through physical ugliness. One 32-yearold man states: I was an ugly child, I was an ugly teenager, and now I’m an ugly adult. I get angry when I hear some-one say that looks don’t matter. It isn’t true. Most people won’t give me a chance because of how I look. (Cash et al., 1986:32) This is precisely the point made by Mary Shelley, consolidated by the ‘Elephant Man’ and asserted by others defined as ugly or deformed. Tolstoy insists: ‘It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness’ (1978:538). Perhaps the most lyrical writer on beauty today is the poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran. In his bestseller The Prophet (1923) he writes: beauty is…an ecstasy …a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted. …an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears. …a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels ever in flight. 99

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People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror. (1985:82–3) Poets and artists, philosophers and theologians, politicians and criminolog ists, novelists and dramatists, naturalists and scientists, psychologists and cosmeticians…people in all walks of life have adored beauty, even where they have perceived it and defined it differently, and equated beauty with goodness and virtues of all sorts, and rewarded this beauty. Attractiveness does attract. Yet the unattractive protest that they are neither evil nor vicious. CONCLU SION

Beautyism, and its attendant, facism, the prejudice and discrimination in favour of the beautiful and attractive (however defined) and against the ugly and less attractive, are virtually institutionalized in our society, and they are the last major bastion of inequity. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. There is no specific mention of physical appearance or handicap (except in so far as ‘race, colour, sex’ apply) and no awareness of the multi-dimensional impact of aesthetic prejudice and discrimination. Racism, sexism, ageism and class prejudice and discrimination have all been ‘exposed’, discussed and researched by sociologists, politicians, journalists, teachers, clergy and students for decades. Not that all these social problems have been solved, but they have been recognized. The pursuit of beauty, on the other hand, is widely regarded as an excellent investment with sub- stantial psychic, social and economic returns, and, for these reasons, it is increasing in salience in Europe, North America and around the world. 100

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Beautyism and its converse, uglyism (to coin an ugly word), persist in all areas of our social lives, often in subtle and elusive ways, in small things and in big. Aesthetic relations are perhaps as significant as class, gender or ethnic relations as determinants of life chances; and aesthetic stratification as powerful as class, gender or ethnic stratification. The power of aesthetic relations derives, at least in part, from its polyvalence. Each age seems to construct the meaning and value of beauty differently, and indeed although people echo each other, each individual seems to perceive beauty somewhat differently. Beauty is many things to many people. On the one hand, beauty is perceived positively, but variously, as goodness, and a symbol of goodness; as fun and as good for the psyche; as truth, a status symbol and sexual excitation; as subjective, objective and as culturally relative; physical and metaphysical; a gift from God; earned and learned; as life and eternity. Furthermore, facism and the beauty mystique are institutionalized through the work of such novelists as Shelley, Wilde, Christie, Stevenson and Fleming; they are expressed in fairy stories and children’s stories, as we have seen; and in films and television programmes, advertising and comics, propaganda, ethnic relations and criminology. Hence their power. The beauty mystique has also been attacked by the ancient Jewish prophets and Christian ascetics, and occasionally by philosophers (Theophrastus, Theocritus) and writers (Euripides, Tolstoy); more recently health workers have warned of the dangers of beautification (Goldwyn, 1984; Nader, 1986), and animal rights activists have criticized the cosmetics industry and their research methods as destructive of animal life and welfare (Singer, 1977, 1985). The most powerful critique of the beauty mystique comes from the women’s movement, beginning effectively with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953). In her view women’s interests in beautification are a contributing factor in the oppression of women. Make-up is a symbol of this oppression. Beauvoir argued that ‘woman’s narcissism impoverishes her instead of enriching her; by dint of doing nothing but contemplate herself, she annihilates herself’ (1953:707). Beauty is no substitute for hard work; and she observes that ‘Make-up can substitute for creating a work of art’ (1953:529, 534). Beauty is political. The women’s movement gathered strength in the sixties. There were demonstrations against the ‘Miss America’ beauty pageant 101

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in 1968, and offending articles of make-up and beautification were thrown into the ‘Freedom Trash Can’ as symbols of servitude. There had been objections to beauty contests before, usually by male clerics on moral grounds, but these were the first by women on political grounds (Deford, 1971). Later researchers have argued that beautification is unnecessary, time-consuming, expensive, unhealthy, even dangerous, ecologically disastrous, degrading, inauthentic, ultimately futile and contributes to self-hatred.9 In The Beauty Trap, Baker insists that ‘freeing ourselves from the beauty trap is something that every woman must accomplish if she is ever to be content with herself (1984:8). A recent critique is Naomi Wolf’s popular The Beauty Myth (1990); the blurb on the cover summarizes the argument: ‘If a political regime subjected its opponents to some of the atrocities that women endure in the name of “beauty”, there would be an international outcry.’ The volume exposes ‘The cult of beauty for what it really is—anti-erotic, hostile to love, an increasingly cruel trap which serves as a political weapon against women, who are in more danger from it today than ever before’. The costs of the beauty mystique are high, and the body traps, in Judith Rodin’s (1992b) phrase are many, particularly for women; and for many people the costs will outweigh the benefits. Here I have been concerned not so much with the attacks on the body mystique, which are well known and have been well publicized, but with its roots, origins and persistence, and its power, which I think has been less well understood. Yet without this understanding of the cosmic meanings and equations of valorized beauty and stigmatized ugliness, such attacks may miss their mark. Beauty in this view is not goodness, but evil; not an investment but a waste; not truth but a lie, as the satirists had always said; not wisdom but stupidity; not fun, but political; not life but dangerous to life and health; not freedom but a trap; not a solution but a major social problem.

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4 HAIR Shame and glory

Doth not nature itself teach you, that if a man have long hair it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her. So wrote Saint Paul to the people of Corinth (I Corinthians 11:14– 15); the shame of one sex is the glory of the opposite sex. Indeed the debate over hair symbolism is both ancient and complex, and applies not only to gender but also to politics, as Hippies, Skins and Punks, and Rastafarians, among others, have recently demonstrated. Hair is one of our most powerful symbols of individual and group identity—powerful first because it is physical and therefore extremely personal, and second because although personal it is also public, rather than private. Furthermore, hair symbolism is usually voluntary rather than imposed or ‘given’. Finally, hair is malleable, in various ways, and therefore singularly apt to symbolize both differentiations between, and changes in, individual and group identities. The immense social significance of hair is indicated by economics: in the United States sales of hair care products amounted to 25 per cent of the total cosmetics and personal care industry: $4.6 billion in 1990, with sales increasing 8 per cent over 1989— faster than the rate of growth of the US economy (Standard and Poor, 1991: H40–2). People do so many things to their hair nowadays, and meanings are so varied, that it would seem to be impossible to see any social order in the range and variation. All is individual. Punks and Skins, Rastafarians, balding sixties Hippies and young nineties Yuppies, wet looks, braids, dreadlocks, crew cuts, dyed blondes, beards, ponytails, men with toupées, women with wigs, and men and women 103

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with proudly shaven heads…it’s all a puzzle. Are shaven legs and armpits politically correct for women? For men? What does it all mean? Despite the tangled profusion and confusion of hair norms, and the range and complexity of symbolisms, there are I think some principles of order and intelligibility, and change too.1 The theory of hair to be developed here can be called the theory of opposites, since current symbolic practice can be summarized in three propositions: 1 Opposite sexes have opposite hair. 2 Head hair and body hair are opposite. 3 Opposite ideologies have opposite hair.2 This pattern of triple oppositions indicates the complexity and subtlety of hair symbolism; and this complexity is possible for two distinct reasons. First, although hair grows all over the body, in terms of body symbolism there are only three zones of social significance: head hair (the scalp); facial hair (beards, moustaches, eyebrows, eyelashes, sideburns); and body hair (chest hair, armpit or axillary hair, leg, arm, back and pubic hair). Each of these zones has both gender and ideological significance. Second, hair can be modified in four principal ways. Length can be changed and may therefore range from the zero of bald or shaven heads to the world record of over 12 feet.3 Colours and styles can also be changed, and even the quantity of hair can be changed with the use of false or artificial hair. It is these multi-zonal and multi-modal aspects of hair that give it a peculiar, perhaps unique, richness and power as a public and physical symbol of the self; for in all three zones and in all four modes of hair change, the norms for men and women are opposite. In discussing these propositions, we will consider, successively, head hair, including length, colour, styles and false hair; facial hair, and body hair; and finally the politics of hair. This discussion of conventional hair norms applies principally to the United Kingdom and North America; rules are apparently different in much of Europe and South and Central America, particularly with respect to facial hair for men and body hair for women. HEAD HAIR

The first proposition states that the opposite sexes have opposite hair, and this is particularly clear for head hair. First, there is the 104

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genetic factor. Most men eventually show signs of baldness, due to the hormone testosterone: from 12 per cent of men aged 25 to 65 per cent of men aged 65, according to the American Medical Association. Women, however, due to their higher levels of estrogen and fewer androgens, lose much less hair over the years (Pesman, 1984:26–7). Sociology follows biology, and women tend to identify far more closely with their head hair than men do. One woman who had lost her hair following radiation treatments for cancer said: ‘When you lose your hair you feel like you have nothing to live for’ (New York Times, 18.9.83). An advisor on dress for women seemed to agree with this point: ‘In writing this book, I had many discussions with my editors whether or not hair should be included. My thinking was that a girl just isn’t a girl without her hair’ (Hemingway, 1979:143; emphasis added). The belief that ‘a girl isn’t a girl without her hair’ may seem, and may even be, extreme; but surely it could not be said for men. Their gender identity is usually not that tangled up with head hair, but it may be strongly dependent on facial hair (beards and moustaches) and chest hair as symbols of masculinity. Thus head hair and body hair are opposite for men, and they are the opposite of norms for women—for whom facial hair and chest hair are usually ‘unwanted’, while head hair, as we have seen, is part of the cultural definition of femininity. This brief summary of the first two propositions will be developed below, for in each of the four modes of hair change (length, colouring, styling and additions) the social norms of our society prescribe different behaviour for men and women. There are exceptions of course, as there are always rebels against the conventional norms; but these rebels tend to exemplify the third proposition: opposite ideologies have opposite hair. To begin with length: perhaps the most obvious difference between the hair of men and women today is that, conventionally, men tend to have shorter (and less styled) hair than women. This does not mean that all men always have shorter hair than all women, but that is the norm.4 Long hair, however, has for centuries been both a gender sign and a sex symbol in our society. Paul was probably not the first to describe a woman’s long hair as a ‘glory’ and contemporary references in advertising, poetry and fashion magazines to the ‘crowning glory’ are legion. Men say they prefer long hair because it is ‘sexier’ (Cooper, 1971). And there is even a ‘Long and Lovely’ competition in the United Kingdom. (One cannot 105

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imagine such a competition for men except for beards or as an ideological satire.) 5 Indeed so powerful is the symbolism that a secretary in New York, whose long hair was shaved off completely by a jealous wife, was awarded $117,500 in compensation (Montreal Gazette, 25.9.84). The appeal of long hair goes far back into Western mythology, to the stories of Mary Magdalene, Rapunzel, Lorelei and Lady Godiva. Milton reinforced it in Paradise Lost (Bk 4) as he described Eve’s wanton, golden tresses: She, as a veil down to the slender waist, Her adorned golden tresses wore Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved, As the vine curls her tendrils. The feminist Susan Brownmiller brings the issue of length up to date: I harbor a deep desire to wear my hair long because, like all the women I know, I grew up believing that long hair is irrefutably feminine. I could certainly use the advantage that long hair confers, but I happen to look terrible when my hair is long. I know what some people think about short hair— they say short hair is mannish, dyky…So I keep my hair at a middling length and fret about its daily betrayal. (1984:55) Long hair may be ‘irrefutably feminine’, but it is also, observed Veblen (1953:121), a status symbol. Like the long skirt of his times, long hair ‘is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion’. It is therefore evidence of wealth and leisure. However, the opposite of ‘long’, ‘feminine’ hair, Brownmiller points out, is precisely the short, ‘mannish’ (opposite gender) and ‘dyky’ (opposite ideology) hair which these propositions attempt to clarify. Length, however, is only one of the modes in which men’s and women’s hair are opposite; style is another. Hair can be curled or straightened, put up or let down, plaited or tied, frizzed or permed; and flowers, beads, ribbons, bows, veils or hats can all be added or subtracted as accessories. Yet traditionally women are more likely to use more styles, and change them more often, than men. The fashion books and magazines for women constantly emphasize the number of ‘styles’ and ‘looks’ one may create from 106

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a given cut. They not only make the same person look different, but the styles may be chosen to project different images of the self as glamorous, exotic, mature, competent, etc. Despite some emerging interest in hair styles and aesthetics for men (Molloy, 1976; Fix, 1981), men are not usually so interested in unique hair styles nor in how many ‘looks’ can be developed from one cut. Most men do not wear barrettes, nor change their hair style for a dinner date. 6 Indeed, conventionally, norms for males tend to emphasize uniformity and mutual identity. Not only are male styles generally similar to one another, but they have hardly changed since the thirties and forties. One study of a corporation pointed out the importance of the conformity and stability of hair styles for men: An inappropriate appearance could be grounds for complaint to higher management. A new field supervisor was visited by his boss for a ‘chat’ about setting a good example for the guys after his longish hair, curling the slightest way down the nape of his neck, caused comment. ‘Appearance makes a big difference in the response you get around this company’, the boss insisted. Another executive was upset because a staff expert he frequently called upon for help seemed to change his appearance or hairstyle with each fashion wind. ‘What are you trying to do now?’ he once asked the staffer exasperatedly. ‘We get used to you one way, then you have to change. Why must you always be changing?’ (Kanter, 1977:47) Change is therefore the essence of fashionable and conventional femininity as defined by women’s magazines; non-change, stability and uniformity are required for corporate and establishment men.7 Norms for women emphasize multiple styles per cut and the possibility and advantages of constantly looking a different person— different from earlier; and a unique person—different from other women. Every year there is a ‘new look’. Thus King George VI’s or John F.Kennedy’s hair style would be quite acceptable in offices 50 and 25 years later; but Jackie Kennedy’s would be 25 years out of date and acceptable only at a nostalgia party. The conventional norms therefore are opposite for the opposite sexes, at least with respect to length and style. They are also opposed, though less totally, for colour. 107

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Colour Gentlemen prefer blondes, it is said; but marry brunettes is the corollary. Colour is important; and the most popular stereotypes about blondes are that they are dumb and have more fun. The stereotype of the dumb, fun blonde may not be accurate, and it is not entirely positive, but women are more likely to dye, tint, or streak their hair blonde than any other colour. Two women who dyed their hair blonde reported dramatic psychological and social changes. Virginia Graham, an American television personality, exclaimed that ‘my whole life changed when I became a blond’. She told her father: ‘My hair made me feel drab. It pulled me down. Now I feel like a bird about to fly.’ She explained that becoming blonde made her feel like a woman: ‘I didn’t like being a brunette. I didn’t like my type. I didn’t like what I was. I didn’t feel girllike. And I didn’t like the boys’ attitudes toward me. But now, suddenly, it was all changed’ (1967:77–9). Similar changes were reported by another American beauty expert when she became a platinum blonde: Truck drivers whistled, men tried to pick me up and at parties boys encircled me…taxi drivers offered me steak, Scotch and even more, a police car rushed me to the theatre with sirens wailing when I was unable to find a cab and little mementoes from shy men were left outside my door. A Jaguar or Thunderbird carried me off to lunch between classes and boys followed me out of Columbia library. (Perutz, 1970:85–6) No doubt not everyone who dyed their hair blonde experienced such dramatic changes, or would welcome them, but these examples do clarify both the psychology and symbolism of colour. One woman explained: ‘Blonde was more than just a hair colour for me, it was a person who is sexy and happy’ (New York Times, 18.10.86). These associations may help to explain the disproportionate number of blondes in the entertainment world: disproportionate not only to the number of blonde females in the population, but also to the number of blonde male stars and sex symbols. This list of blonde sex symbols is not exhaustive, but it must include Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield, Lana Turner, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe (who once said, ‘I like to feel blonde all over’), Brigitte Bardot, Doris Day, Goldie Hawn, Grace Kelly, Ursula Andress, Bo Derek, Dolly Parton and Madonna. Models have included Cheryl 108

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Tiegs, Christie Brinkley and Twiggy; actresses include Farrah Fawcett, Loni Anderson, Suzanne Somers, Linda Evans, Morgan Fairchild, Cybill Shepherd, Cheryl Ladd, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kim Bassinger. In Playboy calendars, about half of the playmates are blonde; and about one in three ‘Miss America’ contestants are blonde. In both places, and also in the soap operas, the proportions are six to 10 times the proportion of blondes in the population, for although a quarter of American women are blonde as children, only 5 per cent remain so after puberty (Freedman, 1986:196). These patterns of stars, sex symbols and playmates therefore reflect the blonde mystique. There are dark-haired sex symbols too but not, it seems, in proportion. Male sex symbols on the other hand have tended to be ‘tall, dark, and handsome’: Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and perhaps Elvis Presley and Marcello Mastroianni in the sixties and seventies; and more recently Burt Reynolds, Erik Estrada, Tom Selleck, Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner and Keanau Reeves. The only blonde sex symbols that spring to mind are Robert Redford, Patrick Swayze and Nick Nolte, and perhaps Rod Stewart and Sting. Blonde is seen as an essentially female colour, like pink; with dark hair as primarily a male colour. This is entirely congruent with the advice of a well-known fashion consultant who advises that dark hair is a ‘power colour’, whereas blonde hair is a ‘fun colour’, quite unsuitable for business. This, he believes, is true for both men and women (Molloy, 1976:121; 1978:86). If dark hair= power, and blonde hair=fun, as Molloy asserts, then perhaps the stereotypes are widely believed and have become self-fulfilling prophecies.8 Blonde and dark hair are polarized as socially opposite, fun and power, and are the symbolic equivalent of the gender colours of pink and blue. Furthermore, they are opposed not only as colours, as gender symbols, and as values, but also in terms of the symbolic meanings of white and black rooted deep in the English language, and in their cultural associations in Western civilizations, as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear (see chapter 2).9 Grey hair is often the first physical and public manifestation of mortality, so the first grey hairs are often removed; and when more appear, then both men and women may consider dyeing the hair. Women have often complained that grey hair on men is regarded as a mark of distinction, whereas on women it is perceived as a sign of age. The 109

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double standard is invoked, but so is Clairol. When the US Food and Drug Administration announced some years ago that hair dyes are carcinogenic, one woman allegedly said that she would rather die than not dye (Banner, 1983:274). Hair colour is entangled not only with concepts of femininity and beauty, but also with intimations of mortality in a youth-oriented society. For men, however, motivation for dyeing the hair may be quite different. Molloy advises men to take out the grey ‘if looking younger is a business necessity. Usually it is the opposite.’ Indeed he advises young men in power positions to ‘look more distinguished by slightly, very slightly greying their sideburns’ (1976:121–2). 10 For some women, death may be preferable to grey; but grey for men may mean preferment. Despite the risk of cancer about 45 per cent of women in the 40–59 age group in the United States colour their hair, falling to 38 per cent among those aged 60–69 (Henig, 1985:61). Figures for the United Kingdom are not available, but about 35 million American woman colour their hair compared to 1 million men (New York Times, 18.10.86). People dye away, but there are few data on what colours people prefer in the opposite sex. Indeed two small surveys indicate that almost one-third of men and women say they do not care; of those who care, dark hair is preferred by both sexes (57 per cent of women, 36 per cent of men), but men are twice as likely to prefer blondes as women (26 per cent to 13 per cent) (Glamour, April and August 1983).

Hair additions The fourth mode of hair change, the use of hair additions, can be considered swiftly. Women may, and often do, wear wigs, switches, falls and extension braids or plaits; and men may wear hairpieces or toupées. None the less, despite these apparent similarities, the two sexes have strikingly different norms with respect to false hair. First, far more women use false hair in one form or another than men;11 and second, they wear it for different reasons. Women may put on the aptly named convenience wigs if they are in a hurry, or for fun, for fashion or for the image; and just for a change they may wear falls or extension braids. Men, on the other hand, may sometimes wear hairpieces or toupées; this is rarely for fun and 110

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still less for a temporary change of identity but usually to conceal baldness, and therefore to appear younger. Additions are therefore usually ‘permanent’, at least in public, and are regarded with some embarrassment. Also, since they have to be worn all the time they can cause men considerable inconvenience; the hair should not get wet in the rain or the showers or pools; interlinked wigs, woven into the hair, have to be tightened every month at some expense; body-contact sports are out, as are many other sports which require rapid movement and involve perspiration. (Of course, the man in question could always remove his false hair, but if he did not feel extremely sensitive about his baldness, he would not be wearing it in the first place.) Convenience hair for women is quite inconvenient for men. And the false crowning glory of one gender is regarded with shame by the opposite sex. Even in false hair, therefore, opposite sexes have opposite hair. FACIAL HAIR

The second hair region is the face, which includes beards, moustaches, sideburns, eyebrows and eyelashes; also nasal hair and ear hair, which both sexes minimize. Physiologically, the male beard distinguishes the two sexes in facial hair, just as male baldness distinguishes them in scalp hair. At first this male hairiness is likely to be emphasized as young men proudly try to grow moustaches as a symbol of manhood and adulthood: a visible and bodily symbol of a double opposition—to women and to children. Conversely, women apply various treatments to remove what the advertisements refer to as ‘unwanted facial hair’. What is beautiful for one gender is ugly for the opposite sex—the young man’s glory is a woman’s shame. However, most men are clean-shaven, particularly conventional, establishment men from cabinet ministers through businessmen and professionals, lawyers, doctors and bankers, to TV announcers and servicemen. Appearances are important, particularly in jobs which require working with others or with the public; and so also are beards. John Molloy is firm on the importance of being clean-shaven, and advises lawyers: ‘If you have a client with a beard or a moustache, no matter who is on the jury or who the judge is, make him cut it off’ (1976:191). And Yale sociologist Rosabeth Kanter has noted the rarity of beards in big business: 111

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Managers at Indsco had to look the part. They were not exactly cut out of the same mold like paper dolls, but the similarities in appearance were striking. Even this relatively trivial matter revealed the extent of conformity pressures on managers… The norms were unmistakable, after a visitor saw enough managers, invariably white and male, with a certain shiny, clean-cut look. The only beards, even after beards became merely rather daring rather than radical, were the results of vacation-time experiments on camping trips, except (it was said), for a few in R & D—‘but we know that scientists do strange things’, a sales manager commented. (1977:47) In the hairless face, therefore, men are similar to women; but this is the only one of the three hair regions where the opposite sexes have similar norms. This does not mean that faces will be confused, for, despite the similarity of facial hair norms, faces are presented quite differently. Make-up, with which women ‘put on’ the desired face, is the most obvious difference; but a second is accessories like earrings, pendants, chains, necklaces and scarves. Third, women are more likely to use eyelash thickeners or curlers or a range of false eyelashes. Furthermore, women are more likely to pluck or shave their eyebrows, to use liners and even to dye them to match their dyed head hair. Eyebrows have their fashions too. The Mona Lisa and Marlene Dietrich removed their eyebrows. Now, thanks to Brooke Shields and Mariel Hemingway, eyebrows are being worn thicker and heavier. So last year’s plucker is this year’s liner. Finally, the two sexes also differ in the frame of the face, which is the head hair. In these five methods, therefore, men and women can and do present their faces as different, even though not totally opposite. Beards, as we shall see, are more useful today as symbols of political opposition to the conventional male norm than as symbols of gender difference. BODY HAIR

The second proposition states that head hair and body hair are opposite. The two sexes have slightly different patterns of hair distribution due to hormonal differences, particularly on the face and chest; and there are considerable variations by ethnic group. But these minor physiological differences of degree become major social distinctions of kind as the opposite sexes symbolically maximize 112

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their differences. Men, for instance, conventionally minimize their head hair and face hair—they shave their faces and (compared to women) keep their scalp hair relatively short, unstyled, undyed and free of false hair. But they maximize their body hair: they neither cut nor shave the hair on their legs, arms, under their arms or anywhere else. Thus head hair and body hair are opposite. But, as we have seen, the opposite sexes have opposite hair. Thus, women maximize their head hair but they minimize their body hair: they often remove leg hair and axillary hair and trim the pubic hair. There is a certain irony, as well as a contrast, in this for both sexes. Women may go to a great deal of time and expense to cultivate their head hair, with visits to hairdressers for shampoos, rinses, sets, perms, styling, layering, tinting, cutting and so on. And they go to almost as much time and expense to remove their unwanted body hair by waxing, shaving, plucking, bleaching, electrolysis or depilatories. Beauty conscious and fashion conscious women may then glory in the style and profusion of the hair above, and the absence of the hair below. European women may be less worried about body hair than their North American counterparts; none the less even though advertisements in beauty magazines may suggest lesbianism or masturbation, they never show hairy legs. This attitude goes back a long way. Ovid advised women to shave their legs in about 2 BC (Bk 3, 194; 1974:159); and Kathrin Perutz insists that ‘Hairy legs are men’s legs’ (1970:75). The men are opposite: glorying in the smoothness of the shave and the trimness of a cut, and the tangled hairiness of the chest below. Chest hair is often regarded as a sign of virility and a sex symbol; and a man without chest hair can be very ‘ashamed’, as witness this ‘Dear Abby’ letter (Montreal Star, 20.2.79): DEAR ABBY: I’ve never seen a problem like mine in your column. I’m a 33-year-old normal man except that I have absolutely no hair on my chest, arms or legs. And that is where I want hair the most. I have plenty of hair on my head and a thick growth in my pubic hair, so I know I can grow hair, but I’m so ashamed of my hairless body I avoid going to the beach. Is there some kind of treatment I can take to promote the growth of hair where I want it? I am miserable in my hairless state. I want to be like the other guys. (Hairless in Hilo) 113

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Hairless in Hilo was right to be worried, if hairy chests=masculinity.12 Hair is not just hair, it is a sex symbol; and voluminous chest hair is therefore the equivalent of long, glossy, wavy head hair on women. Hence the availability of paste-on chest hair. Women seem to feel the same as men about male body hair. A survey in the women’s magazine Glamour (1983: August 281) found that 61 per cent of the women surveyed like body hair on men. But men and women are extremely upset by chest hair on women; again, the glory of one gender is the shame of the opposite sex. In sum, men and women have opposite norms from each other, and opposite norms for the head and the body. In terms of hair, therefore, the male head and the female body are equivalent— relatively hairless, shaven or short; and the female head and the male body are equivalent—hairy. Only faces are presented in the same way with respect to hair, but they are quite distinct when the context is considered. However, these trends apply only to men and women who subscribe to the conventional social norms. Not everyone does; and the exceptions will be discussed next. However, the traditional equation of hair practice is presented in Table 4.1. This typology should not be interpreted as implying that all men are on one side and all women are on the other; it is merely intended to highlight the norms, the trends and the tendencies. There is, in practice, a fair latitude and range, and eccentricities are permitted. However, the principal deviations from these

Table 4.1 Hair practices by gender and body area

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norms are significant, and may be described as ideological, in the broadest sense of the term. OPPOSITE IDEOLOGIES: HIPPIES, SKINHEADS AND PUNKS

Opposite ideologies have opposite hair. Hair is not only a sex symbol, it is also an ideological symbol. Opposition to conventional sex roles, to conventional definitions of femininity and to the conventional norms for women and for men is therefore often expressed in opposition to conventional hair norms. Opposition to, and support of, the body politic are expressed in the body physical. Indeed hair is a political symbol of the main protest movements in our culture, both men’s and women’s. In the fifties the clean-shaven face and short head hair were the accepted styles for men in North America and the United Kingdom; crew cuts were particularly popular in the United States. Styles had changed little since the twenties when moustaches went out of fashion, although they revived during the war with various styles for the various services. The fifties, however, brought economic growth and prosperity, and with them came a new freedom of individual self-expression, and new hair styles. Duck-tails or, more colloquially, DAs became fashionable, pioneered by Elvis Presley and Tony Curtis; then the beatnik look of James Dean and Marion Brando arrived, speaking a language of toughness and motorcycle gangs. Teddy Boys in Britain sported Edwardian dress and long hair. Finally the Beatles introduced the beatle-cut in the late fifties. Each style identified its wearers with particular stars or singers, and with particular ideologies and peer-groups. Hair was a symbol of musical taste and of values; both a badge and a language distinct not only from the conventional majority but also from each other. The Hippies, however, created a social movement in the sixties.13 The movement was initially a middle-class protest in many dimensions at various levels: a protest against the Protestant work ethic and the Puritan sexual ethic. Student protests, civil rights protests, anti-war protests and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were all part of this political movement. Society was defined as exploitative, fascist, racist, bureaucratic, militaristic, inhuman and ‘unnatural’. 14 The symbols of protest were legion: beads and jeans and sandals as against suits; peace signs as opposed to ties; flower power rather than ‘green’ (i.e. money) power; and 115

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the weed rather than alcohol. But the most powerful and evocative symbol of protest was hair: long, straight, ‘natural’ hair for women, with no dyes or tints, no curlers, lacquers, falls, wigs or perms, i.e. the opposite of the prevailing fashion. Men grew their hair long—the opposite of their fathers; they also grew beards and moustaches, which made them not only opposite to their fathers and the conventional norm, but also opposite to the opposite sex. Thus men and women demonstrated in their bodies their (ideological) opposition to the majority and their (gender) opposition from each other. Indeed Hair was the title of a rock musical celebrating the movement. And the longer the hair, either male or female, the greater the commitment symbolized—because the commitment had lasted longer.15 The Hippy style was enormously popular in the young middle class and their values had enduring political impact; but within 10 years a counter-trend emerged: the Skinheads. The Skinheads, like the Hippies, opposed the Establishment, but not for the same reasons, and they hated the Hippies, especially male Hippies, as effeminate and effete: looking like women with their long hair, flowered clothes, beads and sandals, presenting daffodils to the police and the National Guard, spaced-out on drugs, middle-class, pacifist, lazy, freaky and weak. The values considered positive by the young middle class were considered negative by the young working class. With long hair and regular hair preempted, the Skinheads, or Skins for short, symbolized their opposition by cutting their hair very short, except sometimes for sideburns. The Skinheads differed from the Hippies in class origins, and opposed them in musical taste, dress, attitudes to violence, amusements and aesthetics. Thus their hair (and their style) symbolized their dual oppositions to both the establishment and the Hippies (Knight, 1982). In 1976 the New Wave or Punk Rockers, Punks for short, crashed on British shores with the Sex Pistols. This movement, like its predecessors, expressed itself in hair. Even the name Punk is evocative since it is slang for hoodlum or vandal. Originally a derogatory term, Punk is now asserted with pride as the chosen identity; Punk Rockers therefore capsize establishment values. What is vice to society is virtue to Punk; hence the safety pins through the ears and the cheeks, chains, dog-collars and leads, bondage, swastikas, crosses, torn clothes, on-stage vomit and obscene lyrics. Whatever will scandalize, shock or horrify ‘the enemy’ or ‘sir’ is laudable and 116

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expresses the rebellious beauty of Punk. Punks glory in precisely what is shameful to the establishment. Regular hair, long hair and cropped hair had by now been adopted by others. And Johnny Rotten was emphatic: ‘I hate long hair’ (Stevenson, 1982). Punks therefore had to make a creative leap if they wanted to look different and therefore to be different. So they leaped into technicolour— shocking colours: pinks, bright greens, purples, blues and dayglow orange; and into new styles—spikes, wings, long, shaven, mixed. Both colour and styles are unique and the Punk Rockers have thereby created a powerful symbolic statement in their hair. From the perspective of popular culture, however, Skins and Punks are also interesting in that both males and females wear similar hair creations. The opposite sexes do not have opposite hair. This is most unusual for any society. Perhaps it can best be understood as ideological opposition symbolically over-riding gender opposition. Thus all four groups persist among both men and women, each mutually opposed ideologically to all the others, and each symbolizing their identities and ideologies in hair. Two recent developments are interesting. One is the fragmentation of style that is emerging as various rock groups try to develop a distinctive image which audiences can first identify and then imitate. Indeed one observer suggested 10 years ago that there are ‘something like thirty’ distinct and observable styles on the London scene (York, 1983:48–9). These include some basic ‘types’ (Hard Core, Heavy Metal, Rude Boys, Sixties psychedelic), but also re-runs (Mods, Hippies, Rockabilly), take-offs and mixes; and that does not include individual ‘statements’ or ‘creations’ like two I saw recently: a young man who had shaved his head into typical male pattern baldness, and a young woman with jet black hair and a copper wig. The other development is the ‘playing’ with gender identity, or gender semiotics, evident in the gender-bending, cross-dressing and transvestite looks of Boy George, formerly of Culture Club, and Annie Lennox, formerly of the Eurythmics, both of whom were seen as ‘opposite’ in the Grammy Awards of 1984. Indeed Boy George congratulated America: ‘You know a great drag queen when you see one.’ It is evident too in androgyny: Michael Jackson, with his curly hair, high, quiet speaking voice, coy manner, hairless face and sequins has inspired Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Black Muslims, to warn Black youth against his ‘female-acting, sissified acting expression’. Prince has also 117

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maintained the expression very successfully, and both have set a hair style with many imitators. The evolution of hair among young people since the fifties has proceeded, in the main, in a dialectical clash of oppositions: from establishment norms to Hippies to Skins to Punks to a wide range of styles, including recently androgyny and gender-bending. Hair is, of course, only a part of the total presentation of the self-dress, bearing and language are also significant; but hair persists as a focal point and prime symbol of new identities and new ideologies (see Hebdige, 1979). Among men, longish hair is now coming back as a fashion, rather than a Hippy protest; but the very long hair of Heavy Metal groups remains a group norm and a protest, opposed to establishment conventions. OPPOSITE IDEOLOGIES: WOMEN

Hair has been a particularly powerful symbol for women since the sixties. As the second wave of the women’s movement developed, and opposition to the beauty mystique increased, so hair came to symbolize male oppression and the stereotypical ideal of woman. Hence Germaine Greer’s outburst: I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth…I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. (1971:61) Not only did feminists attack conventional norms for head hair, with the false eyelashes, wigs and lacquer, they also attacked norms for body hair. An article in Ms magazine (Lyons and Rosenblatt, 1972) described body hair as ‘The last frontier’ and looked forward to the day when this ‘small but intimate tyranny will be resisted’ and ‘the hirsute will live happily with the hairless’. Hair became ideological. Lily Tomlin was photographed baring her axillary hair; a woman stroking the hair on her legs said: ‘it may seem ugly, but it’s me’; and a third decided ‘not to add anything that isn’t me— not to remove anything that is me’ (Lyons and Rosenblatt, 1972:64, 118

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131; Levine and Lyons, 1980:208). Another feminist described her progressive liberation in physical, almost geographic, terms: ‘I saw myself as quite liberated at first and then, rapidly, very liberated. I stopped plucking my eyebrows, shaving my legs…and wearing bras’ (Kampling, 1981:29). Ideology is symbolized in the body. Thus hairy legs, unplucked eyebrows and axillary hair became a symbol of feminism and egalitarian ideology, and a symbol of opposition to traditional and stereotypical roles. The same physiological ‘item’ may therefore symbolize quite different things: long axillary hair symbolized both gender (male) and ideology (feminist), depending on the context. The only hair zone that was not discussed as a potential symbol, and the only zone about which traditionalists and feminists agreed, was facial hair. Facial hair, unlike leg and axillary hair, is always ‘unwanted’—by women but not, of course, by men. An interesting exception occurred in Seattle, where a female employee of the YMCA was fired for refusing to remove ‘excessive hair growth’, in the phrasing of her work evaluation sheet, from her chin. ‘If God gave it to me, why should I have it off?’ the lady asked; a YMCA official stated: ‘Basically, we’re asking for good grooming’ (Montreal Gazette, 26.7.83). This particular case is interesting not so much because refusal to conform to the norm is penalized, as because this particular norm (removing female facial hair) is so universally observed by women. Refusal to shave leg hair or axillary hair would probably not have been so threatening to conventional values about good grooming (which indicates that the face is a much more powerful social symbol than the leg). None the less, a moustache could be an effective symbol of protest. Germaine Greer (1971:38) opposed body depilation in the strongest terms, but never questioned facial depilation: The rationale of depilation is crude…In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido. If they do not feel sufficient revulsion for their body hair themselves, others will direct them to depilate themselves. In extreme cases, women shave or pluck their pubic areas, so as to seem even more sexless and infantile.15 119

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Even pubic hair is now defined as political. It is the least visible and public of all the hair regions and therefore might be expected to have the least symbolic utility. While this may be so for the general public, perhaps for that very reason it may have the greatest symbolic impact among intimates. To control the pubic hair is to control the person (and such control is even more powerful than the military control over men’s head hair, precisely because it is so intimate). Men generally do not cut, dye, style or do anything else to their pubic hair—they leave it ‘natural’. Some women, or in Greer’s term, stereotypical women, in contrast, often shave, wax or pluck the ‘bikini-line’. Mary Quant went further and predicted that: ‘pubic hair…will become a fashion emphasis, although not necessarily blatant. I think it is a very pretty part of the female anatomy; my husband once cut mine into a heart shape; pubic hair is almost aesthetically beautiful anyway’ (Cooper, 1971:116). It is relevant to observe that she said nothing about cutting his pubic hair; so it seems that he controlled hers without reciprocity. The symbolism of pubic hair is therefore most instructive, for not only do men and women, conventionally, have opposite styles— not cutting and cutting respectively—but also traditional women and feminists have opposite styles—cutting and not cutting respectively; thus traditional male and feminist styles are similar. The stereotypical feminine look has been defined by feminists as narcissistic, politically oppressive, expensive and ultimately selfdestructive; but it is also described by Molloy as inefficient in business. Hair must be medium length: ‘it can never look so short or styled in such a way that it would look mannish or boyish…but it can’t be any longer than shoulder length…Women with very short hair and with very long hair can be very feminine, very sexy, very appealing—and very non-authoritative.’ He added that ‘too many curls and waves will hurt you in business’ (1978:84, 86; emphasis added). A case in point occurred in Wisconsin, when a bank teller was demoted from the teller’s window to the basement because the bank manager objected to her braids and beads coiffure; the manager said it was not the image the bank tried to project (New York Times, 17.4.80). The teller’s image was feminine, whereas the image the manager was trying to project was masculine. The struggle over images and hair continues; but ironically, insofar as the feminist look is opposite to the feminine look in all zones and modes, as we have seen, so it approaches the masculine look. The feminist ideal includes, or used to include, medium to short 120

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hair lengths, easy to manage, without expensive styles and sets; no wigs, false eyelashes or curlers; no make-up; and axillary and leg hair not only unshaven, but even proudly displayed. Indeed the hairier the legs and the longer the axillary hair, it seemed, the greater the commitment to feminism; for the longer the hair, the longer the duration of the commitment and the greater the shock to conventional values.16 The feminine shame became the feminists’ glory. Such symbolism is passé now. The point has been made. Feminism does not necessarily preclude femininity. None the less hair was, and is, a visible political statement. The body is not only a political symbol, it is itself political. BEARDS AND BALDNESS

What about beards? Just as men’s long hair is anti-establishment, so too are beards, according to Molloy (1976:122) and Kanter (1977). Julius Fast, an expert on body language, is more circumspect, however, and suggests that the effect of a beard depends on the circumstances: it depends on the type of beard, ‘on the judge, on the image you want to project in court, on the case you’re involved in and on your age. Does it say wisdom or does it say hippy?’ (1978:12). The language of the beard may therefore be difficult to interpret, since it is still tinged with Hippy meanings; yet it is only 100 years since beards were the norm; and the height of establishment fashion (Robinson, 1976). Beards are rarely regarded simply as beards (Reynolds, 1950). They always seem to symbolize something else. Children find beards ‘scary’ (Hirsch, 1981:84). Women are about evenly divided (Glamour, August 1983). But corporations reject them (Kanter, 1977). Similarly baldness is rarely regarded simply as baldness. Physiologically baldness, like the beard, is a male gender sign; and logically one might expect that the bearded, bald male, with two gender signs visible, would be perceived as doubly masculine, doubly virile, and totally opposite to feminine. Physiological logic and cultural logic, however, do not coincide. Indeed baldness seems to be regarded primarily as an age-sign and therefore a death symbol, rather than as a gender sign and a virility symbol. A recent survey found that 79 per cent of women found baldness unattractive, leading one commentator to remark that ‘a man without hair is like a ring without a diamond’ (Montreal Gazette, 10.3.83). 17 121

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Men respond to this evaluation in various ways. Some reject their baldness and have expensive and painful hair transplant operations (e.g. Frank Sinatra) or use toupées or hairpieces. Others compensate and grow beards or moustaches to counterbalance or offset baldness (Fix, 1981; Lieberman, 1982). Still others accept their baldness; a ‘Bald is Beautiful’ movement has started in the United States, whose ‘sole purpose is to try to eliminate the fear over loss of hair and to instill pride in a bald head’. A recent book entitled Bald is Beautiful (Taylor, 1983) features Telly Savalas, Sean Connery and the bald author on the cover. The necessity for such a movement and such a book, however, merely confirms the fact that most men fear baldness and most women find it unattractive. This fear of, and distaste for, baldness give the deliberately shaven heads of such men as Isaac Hayes, the late Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas a shock value that mere baldness cannot evoke. For they reject an extremely powerful and popular symbol of life and youth and elect a baldness which is an equally powerful symbol of age and death. Even more powerful a symbol is Sinéad O’Connor’s shaven head: a protest against the IRA practice of shaving the heads of Catholic women who dated Protestant men or British soldiers in Ulster 18 according to some, or a protest against her record company’s insistence that she fix her hair to look more appealing, according to others. TH EORETICAL IMPLICATIONS

Hair is hair is hair? Not exactly. It is also a powerful symbol of the self. Nelson, dying on board HMS Victory, requested: ‘Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things belonging to me’ (Howarth, 1972:191). Hair not only symbolizes the self but, in a very real sense, it is the self since it grows from and is part of the physical human body; furthermore, it is ‘immortal’ since it survives death.19 It is this personal and biological origin of hair which gives it such richness and power. Corporate executives and adolescents, crewcut marines and Rockabillies, Teddies, Hippies, Mods, Skins and Punks…all express their identities and ideologies in their hair; so do monks and nuns, Hollywood trendsetters and Rastafarians, feminists and film stars, conventional men and women, and deviants and rebels. The mad use their hair unwittingly; and ‘collaborators’ have their hair used unwillingly. 122

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Yet the norms for hair are surely strange; for conventional men, the facial hair is completely shaven, but head hair is given a moderate cut, while body hair is left totally alone! For women on the other hand, body hair is often removed on certain parts of the body, or trimmed in other areas, while head hair is the ‘crowning glory’. Young men’s moustaches are glorious, but women’s are shameful. Most odd. Hair is significant, however, not only in the ethnography of popular culture, but also in more general theories of the body and theories of symbolism. With respect to the sociology of the body first, the sociology of hair calls attention to the close relation between the physical body and the social body in the two aspects of gender and ideology. Gender and ideology are ‘made flesh’ in the hair as people conform to, or deviate from, the norms, and even deviate from deviant norms; they thereby symbolize their religious, political, sexual, social, occupational and idiosyncratic identities. Mary Douglas was one of the first to theorize that: The physical experience of the body…sustains a particular view of society’ (1973:93); and she develops this in the context of smooth and shaggy hair—a sort of Jacob-Esau polarity: Shaggy hair, as a form of protest against resented forms of social control, is a current symbol in our own day…Take the general run of stockbrokers or academics, stratify the professional sample by age; be careful to distinguish length of hair from unkempt hair; relate the incidence of shagginess in hair to sartorial indiscipline. Make an assessment under the division smooth/shaggy of other choices, preferred b everages, preferred meeting-places and so on. The prediction is that where the choices for the shaggy option cluster there is least commitment to the norms of the profession. (1973:102) Hair protest now takes many more forms than simple shagginess, which surely, in any case, may symbolize individualism, carelessness, or a lone wolf identity (in contrast to a team identity) rather than a lack of professional commitment. None the less, Douglas was the first to attempt a systematic, theoretical analysis of the relation between the two bodies, and to formulate tentative hypotheses. The second matter of theoretical significance is the nature of symbols. Both Leach (1958) and Hallpike (1969) have suggested 123

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one-on-one equations of symbols and meanings, although they disagreed about the meanings. Thus Leach’s equation was that ‘cut=sexual restraint’, but Hallpike’s equation was that ‘cut= social control’, and he gave the examples of soldiers, monks and men as opposed to ‘uncut’ Hippies, artists and women. While these brief summaries do not do full justice to their arguments, they do indicate the direction of their insights. None the less, developments over the last 20 years require, I think, a conceptual framework rather more complex than the simple dualism of cut/ uncut, short/long, and rather more subtle than one meaning per style. Also it is no longer sufficient to consider the head hair only; it is also necessary to evaluate the symbolism of facial hair and body hair. Furthermore, in analysing any or all of these three zones, we also have to consider colours, styles, the use of false hair, and combinations of all sorts. Hair symbolism is clearly more complex and subtle now than it was before Skins, Punks, feminism, androgyny and gender-bending. Given this framework, the message of the medium can be clarified. Rather than attributing opposing meanings to polarized hair styles—cut/uncut, short/long—it may be more useful to analyse deviations from the norm, and different types of deviations with respect to the three zones and the four modalities of hair change. Hence what becomes significant for a theory of symbolism is not the ‘intrinsic meaning’ of, say, short hair on the head—for there is none; there are various meanings in different contexts. What is significant is the process by which opposition to social norms is developed and symbolically expressed in the body. Turner (1967), for instance, has pointed out the ‘multi-vocality’ of symbols; and Firth (1973) has referred to the ‘umbrella of meanings’ that may attach to a symbol. Blondeness carries a vast and complex range of associations, some of them contradictory, and some stronger than others, but they apply very differently to women and men, as we have seen. Similarly a Skinhead and a marine may have identical hair-cuts: extremely short; but they symbolize entirely different realities and express totally different, indeed opposite, values. The one rejects, often violently, precisely the society which the marines support, even more violently on occasion. Similarly stubble has various meanings: perhaps an Italian macho look, or mourning in the Conservative Jewish community, or as in the Yasser Arafat mode a dedication to Islam. Thus the same hair symbolizes different realities. 124

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Conversely, different hair styles may symbolize similar values. This applies not only to eccentrics, the exceptions to the rule, who may flout the norms without disagreeing on values: like the male corporation president in Toronto who flaunts a pony-tail with his business suit. It applies also partly because in a heterogeneous society people may disagree about the appropriateness of symbols, as feminists may disagree about body hair. And Skins and Punks, who tend to correspond closely in their rejection of (and by) establishment society, have entirely different hair styles. Two examples from minority communities may serve to clinch the argument. In the Black community during the twenties, thirties and even later, many prominent Blacks (including Malcolm X) had a conk—a process of hair straightening. In the fifties and sixties during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements the conk was re-defined as shameful, and many Blacks gloried in the Afro or the natural, a symbol of ‘Black is Beautiful’. Both Malcolm X (1965:53–4) and Angela Davis (1974:96–7, 150) described the immense psychological importance of this change of style. In due course Afros became fashionable rather than political, and after Cicely Tyson in Sounder (and Bo Derek in 10), Blacks (and Whites) began to adopt, or re-adopt, the old style of cornrows and braids, decorated with chevrons, beads, mirrors, and so on. Hair styles now, however, at least for women, are sometimes ‘sculptured’, and highly individualistic, often based on a wide range of African styles. The ‘wet-look’, popularized by Michael Jackson and Prince, is, or was, particularly popular. The ‘dreadlocks’ of the Rastafarians symbolize their religious and ideological opposition to the styles of ‘Babylon’ and to, in Bob Marley’s phrase, ‘them crazy baldheads’. Women must keep their locks covered. Some Blacks, however, prefer the Punk look. More recently young male Blacks (and Whites) have taken to having designs ‘carved’ in their hair: maps of Africa, abstract patterns, or names or values (Peace, Black Power or the Volkswagen logo) or faces. The sequence of change has been very rapid; and each change symbolizes changing values and social realities, and oppositions: the oppositions of Afro to conk, dreadlocks to wetlook, Punk to braids, straightened or natural, or ‘carved’. Hair also plays an important part in Jewish symbolism. In ancient times, because of the Biblical proscriptions against shaving (Leviticus 19:27; Deuteronomy 14:1), all male adult Jews wore beards; and this tradition persisted, with rare exceptions, even into the twentieth century. However, with the mass settlement of Jews in the West, 125

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where most men were clean-shaven, few Jews but the Orthodox wore beards. Orthodox Jewish men are distinguished from Conservative and Reform Jews not only by their beards, but also by their payess or sidelocks, which are never cut, and by their covering of their heads either by a hat or by a yarmulke (skullcap). This is a symbol of the presence of God and perhaps derives from the custom prescribed for the priests in the Temple (Exodus 28:30). The Orthodox keep their heads covered all the time; Conservative Jews cover their head when the name of God is pronounced, and in the synagogue, praying, reciting a blessing, etc.; while the Reform Jews may go bareheaded even in the synagogue (Cohen, 1965:136; Trepp, 1980:38). Thus Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews are distinguished from each other by hair norms, but also men and women have opposite hair styles; for Orthodox women have their hair cut short when they marry (as do many orders of Catholic nuns when the nuns take vows), and then they usually wear a sheitel or wig. The reason? The faithful woman does not show her hair, for a woman’s hair is described by the Rabbis as ‘nakedness’, and can be seen only by her husband. Only a shameful woman would show her hair and would have her hair uncovered (Numbers 5:18; Trepp, 1980:281). (This is similar to the custom that prevails among the Rastafarians, and prevailed until recently among Christians in church.) Mourning, as an ‘opposite state’ to the norm, is also symbolized in hair. In the Israelite tradition, when Jews were bearded, then mourning was symbolized by shaving the beard (Jeremiah 41:51; Ezekiel 5:1); today, among the Conservatives, mourning is symbolized among men by not shaving, and among women by not cutting the hair (Trepp, 1980:333–5). Dedication to God was also, in ancient times, symbolized by not cutting the hair; Samson is the most wellknown example of this (see Derrett, 1973). Thus exceptional states and status are symbolically expressed in the body, particularly the hair. The search for intrinsic meanings and a ‘natural’ symbolism of the body therefore seems to be in vain. There is no one-to-one correlation of particular phenomena with particular meanings, nor of meanings with phenomena. This is in part no doubt because of the complexity of society and societies: what is shame in one culture is glory in another. But it is also because of the rapidity of social change in Western cultures: last year’s glory is this year’s shame. 126

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Traditional societies, as many anthropologists have shown, have symbolized status differentials by hair differentials, and institutionalized hair rituals in rites of passage. But these forms are static. In the West, however, as we have seen, changes in hair are rapid and ubiquitous and express not only status change, but also ideological differences and changes in many spheres of social life. They can be understood not as a fixed pattern but as a fluid process, as styles change in opposition and contrast to earlier styles. Hair is not only determined by gender or ideology, it is also fashion. It is precisely this complexity which distinguishes North American and European hair symbolism from the symbolism in traditional societies. To conclude: hair is a physiological phenomenon, but it is also a social one: a symbol of the self and of group identity, and an important mode of self-expression and communication. Despite the plethora of hair styles, colours, lengths, and the use of false hair and colourings, however, hair display and concealment can be understood both as pattern and as process, in terms of the three polar oppositions of gender (male-female), ideology (left-right), and biology (head-body). Thus hair enables social distinctions and changes to be symbolized. Indeed the major divisions in our society are symbolized in hair—gender, occupation, age, faith, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and political orientation—as well as more individual identities—moods, and personal tastes, or simply fun; but sometimes hair is just…hair.

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5 THE SENSES The puzzle and the balance

The senses have been a puzzle for millennia. The same old questions keep recurring. Are the senses valid or invalid ways to knowledge? Are they morally good or bad? Are they means, or ends in themselves? Are they all equal, or are some more privileged than others? If so, why? And, most important, how do our answers to these questions affect how we live our lives? Equally, how does the way we live indicate what we think of (or feel about) the senses? Indeed, do we all live similar or different sensory lives? Do women and men live the senses the same ways? As we will see, the answers to these questions have varied over the centuries, oscillating between sense-positive and sense-negative, the superiority or inferiority of the senses with respect to reason, and the ratio or balance of the sensorium. The conceptual and existential significance of the sensorium is obvious. We are social beings, and we communicate in and with and through our senses. Long before we are rational beings, humans are sensing beings. Life without the senses does not make sense. Yet the senses have been sorely neglected by the social sciences until very recently. Simmel (1908/1921) initiated the sociology of the senses with a few insightful pages; but apart from a few works— Montagu’s well-known Touching (1971/1978), an article on the sociology of odours (Largey and Watson, 1972), and some useful work by Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and their school, mostly in the humanities—the subject has been largely ignored. In the eighties and nineties, however, there has been a sudden explosion of interest in the senses. One thinks particularly of Gonzalez-Crussi’s The Five Senses (1989), the zoologist Jillyn Smith’s Senses and Sensibilities (1989) and Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses (1990). Novelists have written about our different sensory worlds: Patrick Süskind’s 128

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Perfume (1986) and Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun (1988). And psychologists suggest that the senses characterize different ‘kinds of people’; in Unlimited Power, Anthony Robbins (1987) says that people tend to access their brain in either visual, auditory or kinesthetic modalities; but Tardif (1989) thinks that there are only two types of people: eye people and ear people. Alain Corbin (1986) is, I think, the first historian to research one of the senses, with his history of the sense of smell in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The therapeutic value of the senses is increasingly being researched, as in various works on touch (Howard, 1971; Colton, 1983; McNeely, 1987; Barnard and Brazelton, 1990), aromatherapy, numerous books on various types of massage, and even light therapy to cure the winter blues. Anthropologists have observed that people use their senses differently and indeed live in different sensory worlds, the implications of which are only now being drawn (see Seeger, 1975, 1981; Stoller, 1989; and especially Howes, 1991; Classen 1993); and now there are new works on pain (Morris, 1991) and pleasure (Ferguson, 1990; Tiger, 1992). It seems we are finally coming to our senses, literally. In this chapter we consider a very brief overview of Western thinking about the sensorium, from Plato to the present, and in succeeding chapters we discuss three of the senses: touch, smell and sight. This is not a history of the senses, nor a philosophy of sense knowledge; we are merely spotlighting certain thinkers and certain issues, trying to bring the sensorium into the domain of sociology, and to indicate the changing and various constructions of the sensorium and their social implications. Obviously this consideration of the senses overlaps with our earlier discussion of the body; but I have tried to keep duplication to a minimum. TH E ANCIENT GREEKS

The Greeks lived and loved the sensuous life. The Olympic Games, the banquets, the pottery, the sculptures, the erotic paintings, the plays, all proclaimed their enjoyment of beauty, food and drink, sex and love, music and debate. The Greeks, particularly the Athenians, have often been portrayed as a hedonistic people; and there may be some truth in this. The first philosophy of hedonism was developed by Aristippus (c. 435–350 BC), founder of the Cyrenaics, who advocated the sensuous life. 129

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Yet there is also a strong streak of scepticism, a distrust of the senses among some of the earliest Greek philosophers, notably Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Empedocles (in Guthrie, 1962:394). Parmenides, it seems, was the first to make the momentous distinction between the senses and reason; he reported that the goddess warned him not to trust the senses but to judge by reason (Guthrie, 1965:25). Empedocles was also persuaded of the fallibility of the senses, but he argued that the mind too is a feeble instrument: ‘Men behold in their span but a little part of life, then swift to die are carried off and fly away like smoke…yet each boasts that he has found the whole’ (in Guthrie, 1965:138). Indeed, in his view, the senses are trustworthy channels to understanding: Come now, observe with all thy powers how each thing is clear, neither holding sight in greater trust compared with hearing, nor noisy hearing above what the tongue makes plain, nor withhold trust from any of the other limbs [organs, parts of the body], by whatever way there is a channel to understanding, but grasp each thing in the way in which it is clear. (In Guthrie, 1965:139) Despite Empedocles, the Greek tradition insisted on drawing a clear distinction between the senses and the mind, and on the epistemological and metaphysical superiority of the latter. The senses had a place, but that place was low; restricted to the animal part of humanity. Animals had senses; but the distinctive characteristic of humans is the faculty of reason. Senses reveal things; but the mind reveals ideas, an infinitely superior reality, according to the Socratic tradition. It is the difference between appearance and reality. Socrates was particularly eloquent on this matter, and in Phaedo (65–6), the story of his last hours, he holds forth on the relation between the senses and the soul. Given his influence on Western thinking about the senses, this long quotation is necessary. Having clarified that absolute beauty and goodness cannot be seen with the eyes, Socrates asks, rhetorically: Don’t you think that the person who is likely to succeed in this attempt [to reach the goal of reality] most perfectly is the one who approaches each object, as far as possible, with the unaided intellect, without taking account of any sense of 130

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sight in his thinking, or dragging any other sense into his reckoning—the man who pursues the truth by applying his pure and unadulterated thought to the pure and unadulterated object, cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes and ears and virtually all the rest of his body, as an impediment which by its presence prevents the soul from attaining to truth and clear thinking? Is not this the person, Simmias, who will reach the goal of reality, if anybody can? What you say is absolutely true, Socrates, said Simmias. (Plato, 1963:48–9) This strong denial of the utility and validity of the senses was repeated almost 2,000 years later by Descartes, as we shall see; such has been the strength of the Socratic tradition. Plato expressed the same hierarchy of reason over senses in his famous allegory of the cave in the Republic (Bk 7). The captive audience in the cave, trusting to their senses, believe that the flickering shadows on the wall, and the sonorous echoes, are ‘real’; reason, says Plato, not the senses, is necessary for the understanding of ‘the good’ (1963:748–50, 764). Elsewhere, Plato argued that there are three types of men: of gold, silver and bronze, ruled by the head, the heart and the belly, corresponding to reason, courage and…the senses. To be ruled by the senses is to be the lowest type of humanity, fitted only for menial manual labour, such as farming, in the Republic. For Plato, the superiority of mind over matter was a given; and the social structure of his ideal Republic—guardians/ philosophers, warriors, and farmers/ artisans—reflected the congruence of politics and biology (Republic, Bks 3 and 4; 1963:659–88). Yet Plato was interested in the senses, and he did attempt to explain, mythologically, their origins. The most notable aspect of his discussion is the primacy he accords to the sense of sight as the foundation of philosophy, and as the sense that leads to God and Truth: The sight in my opinion is the source of greatest benefit for us, for had we never seen the stars and the sun and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered…And from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man. (Timaeus 47; 1963:1174–5) 131

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Similarly, in the Symposium (210–12), Plato argued that it is visual beauty which initially inspires the philosopher to mount the ‘heavenly ladder’ to God, who is Absolute Beauty (1963:562–3). Plato did not discuss the sense of touch, however, nor the relationships between the senses. Aristotle was equally delighted with the sense of sight. Echoing Plato, he began his Metaphysics (980) linking sight to knowledge, the distinguishing feature of humanity: All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight…The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things. (1984:1552) Unlike Plato, Aristotle did discuss all five senses; he also ranked them: ‘Now sight is superior to touch in purity, and hearing and smell to taste’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1176; 1984:1858). 1 Touch and taste are ‘animal’ senses, in his view, unlike the other three ‘human’ senses. In touch and taste, through lust and gluttony, humanity is ‘incontinent and intemperate’. These are, he insisted, the senses of ‘least honour…and the only pleasures deserving of reproach’ (Problems 949–50; 1984:1491–3). In contrast, he pointed out that ‘in regard to the pleasures of sight, hearing and smell, no-one is called profligate if he is in excess’ (Eudemian Ethics 1231; 1984:1950). Aristotle’s rank ordering of the senses is presented in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 The Aristotelian hierarchical order of the senses

This Aristotelian ranking of the senses has persisted over the centuries; indeed Hegel’s hierarchy is very similar, as we shall see presently. The principal change since Aristotle has been in the evaluation of the sensorium. 132

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EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Christian thinking about, and practice of, the senses, like that about the body, has been deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, the senses are good as created by God; on the other hand, the senses may lead the Christian down the broad road to sin, hell and damnation; it was for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge that God cursed Adam and Eve, and expelled them from Eden. Christ’s life may be said to have exemplified a positive attitude towards the senses and to human life: he fed the hungry, healed the sick, raised the dead and turned water into wine, and good wine at that. His teaching reinforced the lesson of his life. He taught his disciples to pray: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Matthew 6:11). And at the Last Judgement the Son of Man will admit the righteous to the Kingdom saying: ‘I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you received me in your homes, naked and you clothed me’ (Matthew 25:34– 5). Christ therefore recognized human sensory and physical needs, for food, drink, warmth and comfort, as legitimate, natural and normal. But Christ also warns that the senses, like the body, are a means to an end, not an end in themselves: ‘if your eye makes you lose your faith, take it out and throw it away! It is better for you to enter life with only one eye than to keep both eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell’ (Matthew, 18:9). And Christ’s own life was one of physical and sensory deprivation (see chapter 1). Paul, like Christ, led an ascetic life and, if anything, was more cautious about sensory gratification than his teacher. He frequently condemned gluttony, lust, drunkenness and adultery, which he described as ‘sins of the flesh’. As an example: Saint Paul warns the Philippians: I have told you this many times before, and now I repeat it with tears: there are many whose lives make them enemies of Christ’s death on the cross. They are going to end up in hell, because their god is their bodily desires. They are proud of what they should be ashamed of, and they think only of things that belong to this world. (3:18–20) It is not simply the abuse of the senses, it is the senses themselves that are at fault; for, Saint Paul argues, the senses are ‘natural’, 133

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they are part of human nature—and as such they are opposed to the Spirit. Human nature and the Spirit are ‘enemies’, Saint Paul tells the Galatians: ‘What our human nature wants is opposed to what the Spirit wants, and what the Spirit wants is opposed to what our human nature wants. These two are enemies, and this means that you cannot do what you want to do’ (5:16–17). This idea of the self at war with itself, the Spirit against human nature, is re-coded as mind against body in his letter to the Romans (7:19–24), as we discussed earlier. The solution? Paul insists that the Christian should ‘mortify’ the senses (Romans 8:13): as he had also instructed them to mortify the body. This dualistic and ascetic tradition persists through many of the Church Fathers to Ignatius and beyond. John Chrysostom (c. 347– 407) was particularly articulate on this matter of the senses, and the parts of this ‘body which is taking me to my death’. He advocated various types of sensory ‘fasting’: [Let] not my mouth only fast, but also the eye, and the ear, and the feet, and the hands, and all the members of our bodies. Let the hands fast, by being pure from raping and avarice. Let the feet fast, by ceasing from running to the unlawful spectacles. Let the eyes fast, being taught never to fix themselves rudely upon handsome countenances…Let the ear fast also. The fasting of the ear consists in refusing to receive evil speakings and calumnies…Let the mouth too fast from disgraceful speeches and railing. (1956:359) Yet Chrysostom was not entirely sense- or body-negative. He wrote eloquently of the body as a manifestation of God’s ‘own power and wisdom’: the eyelashes, the eyebrows, hair, the brain, the heart, even the nails, but especially the eye. He thought of the eye as beautiful and powerful, as ‘instructing us’ to God, and as ‘more sure and distinct’ than the ear: God, the Supreme Artist…hath been able to make an eye so beautiful, as to astonish all who behold it, and to implant in it such power, that it can at once survey the high aerial expanse, and by the aid of a small pupil embrace the mountains, forests, hills, the ocean, yea, the heaven, by so small a thing.

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The heavens may be silent, but the sight of them emits a voice, that is louder than a trumpet’s sound; instructing us not by the ear, but through the medium of the eyes; for the latter is a sense which is more sure and distinct than the former. (1956:414–15, 401) Chrysostom clearly reflects the Aristotelian politics of the senses, ranking the eye as superior to the ear, but he also insists on the ‘bi-morality’ of the eye: it can look either way, up or down, at God or ‘rudely upon handsome countenances’. The moral value of the senses depends on their use. In his Confessions, Augustine (354–430) described with remarkable frankness his ambivalence towards, and his battles with, the senses. On the one hand, they are the channels through which the glory of God is experienced: You called me; you cried aloud to me; you broke my barrier of deafness. You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me; you put my blindness to flight. You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet odour. I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am inflamed with love of your peace. (Bk X:27; 1961:232) On the other hand, he complains that ‘the senses are not content to take second place. Simply because I allow them their due, as adjuncts to reason, they attempt to take precedence and forge ahead of it, with the result that I sometimes sin’ (Bk X:33; 1961:238). All the senses are problematic in this way, but some more than others: The sense of smell does not trouble me greatly with its attractions’; but he admits, ‘I am tempted through the eye’ and ‘more fascinated by the pleasures of sound’. He loved music: ‘So I waver between the danger that lies in gratifying the senses and the benefits which, as I know from experience, can accrue from singing’ (Bk X:29–34; 1961:233–41). Augustine’s conflict between the enjoyment and the renunciation of sensual pleasure is best illustrated by his famous prayer: ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet’ (Bk VIII:7; 1961:169). Augustine’s contemporary, Jerome (347–c. 419), was more sexnegative than most of the Church Fathers. He praised marriages only because they bore virgins: ‘I praise marriage and wedlock, 135

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but only because they beget celibates; I gather roses from thorns, gold from earth, pearls from shells’ (in Nelson, 1978:52). He insisted that ‘all sexual intercourse is unclean’ (in Pagels, 1988:94; cf. 3– 31). The early church institutionalized this ascetic tradition: the renunciation of sensual gratification and the mortification of the flesh. Chastity, martyrdom and virginity were celebrated in the imminent expectation of the Second Coming. The Stylites or pillar ascetics who emerged in the fifth century pioneered what could be called competitive sensory deprivation; and the first monastic communities were developed in the Eastern and the Western churches in the fourth to the sixth centuries. In this time, for many Christians, life was no doubt hard: scrabbling to make a living through war and plague, drought and flood. For them, Christian ascetic doctrine may have been a consolation, an ‘opiate’ in Marx’s famous phrase, because suffering and pain were ennobled and graced. TH E SECOND MILLENNIUM

Christian reservations about sensory gratification notwithstanding, Christians did create works of surpassing beauty. The eye looked on the paintings, the rich vestments, the soaring cathedrals, jewelled chalices…everything was beautiful. The oral and aural senses were also gratified by the chanting of the Gregorian liturgy. And on feast days Christians celebrated with food and drink, wines and spirits. The Carthusians invented chartreuse and the Benedictines, naturally, benedictine. Sensory gratification could be good, so long as it was directed towards the glory of God. Indeed some of the feasting was very lavish. On major feast days in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Benedictines enjoyed feasts of thirteen to sixteen courses (Bynum, 1987:41). Yet sensory abstinence could be even better. Fasting had become an intrinsic component of Christian spirituality by the third and fourth centuries, with many meanings. Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 215) reflected ancient Greek asceticism in his assurances: ‘Fasting empties the soul of matter and makes it, with the body, clear and light for the reception of divine truth.’ Yet fasting also mystically opposed the first sin of gluttony; and according to the pseudoAthanasius of the mid-fourth century had both physical and spiritual benefits: ‘Fasting…cures diseases, dries up the bodily humours, puts 136

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demons to flight, gets rid of impure thoughts, makes the mind clearer and the heart purer, the body sanctified, and raises man to the throne of God.’ Fasting was an imitation of Christ, a prayer to God, an antidote to concupiscence: a veritable physical and spiritual cure-all. And the occasionally feasting Benedictines also had only one meal a day for six months of the year. As Caroline Bynum, from whom this paragraph has been drawn, notes: ‘eating and fasting have been to Christians complex symbols and complex acts’ (1987:31–47). None the less, this feast-fast oscillation partly indicates how some Christians lived the puzzle of the senses and the body: with a degree of gratification and much denial. The ascetic tradition was strengthened in the Middle Ages. New monastic orders were founded from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries: the Cistercians, Carthusians, Franciscans and Dominicans. The Flagellant movement, in which bands of Christians walked from town to town, praying, doing penance and scourging themselves, indicates the depth of ascetic thought in popular culture. Indeed a new spirituality demanded the imposition of physical pain on the self, in imitation of Christ’s passion and death. The lives of the saints show their zeal in this regard in their private lives. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74) presented the most systematic analysis of the senses. There is no question that he privileged sight, following both Plato and Aristotle; he states clearly that ‘the highest and perfect felicity of intellectual nature consists in the vision of God’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 3, Pt 1, chs 60, 51; 1956:199, 177; emphasis added). This doctrine of the Beatific Vision, perhaps rooted ultimately in Plato’s discussion in the Symposium, is also founded on Saint Paul’s assertion: ‘What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror; then we shall see face to face’ (I Corinthians 13:12). Thus Aquinas gave theological sanction to a long-established philosophical and cultural tradition of the hegemony of sight. In his many discussions on human happiness and the meaning of life, Aquinas makes it quite clear that human happiness does not consist in riches, glory, nor in honours; nor does it consist in ‘pleasures of the flesh’, ‘the chief of which are those of food and sex’, nor in ‘goods of the body’ such as health, beauty and strength, nor in ‘the senses’. The arguments are similar in each chapter, hinging (in this last case) on the superiority of the intellect over the senses, and of men over animals, which also have senses but not intellect; furthermore sensory pleasures are ‘the chief impediment to contemplation’ which is the way to God (Bk 3, Pt 137

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1, chs 27, 32, 33; 1956:110–13, 119–20). Aquinas’ rank order therefore reflects Aristotle’s, with sight at the top and ‘food and sex’ (taste and touch) at the bottom, and pleasures are negatively evaluated. 2 Ignatius Loyola was equally concerned about the senses. In his Spiritual Exercises he advised retreatants to maintain ‘custody of the eyes’ at all times; also custody of the mouth, both as an instrument of nutrition and as a medium of communication. He proposed eight ‘Rules for Eating’, by which the individual ‘will experience less pleasurable gratification in feeding his body’ and will remain ‘master of himself, rather than slave of his appetite. With regard to speech: ‘No one may swear’; ‘Do not speak a thoughtless word’; ‘Nothing should be said to take away another’s character or for mere gossip’ (1963:39, 73–5, 26–7). In one of his more contentious recommendations he insists that even sight should be doubted: ‘this is the attitude of mind we should maintain: I will believe that the white object I see is black if that should be the decision of the hierarchical Church’ (1963:122). Finally, the Rules of the Order insist that ‘No-one may touch another, even in jest’. Not content with controlling the sensory appetites, Ignatius also recommended penance to those following his spiritual exercises; retreatants should cut down on food and sleep and ‘chastise the body by inflicting actual pain on it. This is done by wearing hairshirts or cords or iron chains, by scourging or beating ourselves and by other kinds of harsh treatment’ (1963:39–40). The redemptive value of pain and mortification has a long history.3 THE EARLY MODERNS

Christians therefore were very ambivalent towards the senses. Necessary for life, they could, however, lead to damnation; they could be enjoyed, but not too much; they reflected God’s goodness, but could lead into temptation. Above all, they had to be controlled. After the Renaissance, concern with the senses became less moralistic, and both more practical, more epistemological, and more scientific. Montaigne (1533–92) confessed: ‘I like very much to be surrounded with good smells, and I hate bad ones beyond measure’ (1965:228); but he also noticed the importance of pleasant aromas for mood-enhancement and healing (as modern hospitals do not), and the relation between the senses and mental or spiritual attitudes: 138

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The doctors might, I believe, derive more use from odors than they do, for I have often noticed that they make a change in me and work upon my spirits according to their properties; which makes me approve of the idea that the use of incense and perfumes in churches…was intended to delight us and arouse and purify our senses to make us more fit for contemplation. (1965:229) René Descartes developed his philosophy with a totally different evaluation of the senses. Inspired by the example of mathematics, with its deductive truths, he attempted to build a new philosophy from first principles, and to this end he adopted the method of ‘systematic doubt’. Rehearsing all the time-honoured arguments concerning the fallibility of the senses, or sense deception, he argued that ‘it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have once deceived us’. So: ‘I will consider myself as having no hands, eyes, flesh, blood or senses’. Neglecting the possibility that his mind must also have deceived him in the past, he defines himself as: ‘A thing that thinks’—the old Aristotelian definition of homo sapiens,5—he totally denies the senses: ‘I shall now close my eyes, stop up my ears, turn away all my senses’ (1968:96, 100, 106, 113). Hence his famous conclusion: ‘I think therefore I am’ (1968:53). And what is this ‘I’? Descartes added: ‘it is certain that I, that is to say my mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it’ (1968:156). This was mind-body dualism at its extreme, and it seems probable that Descartes was deceived by his mind.5 Descartes was not only a philosopher, he was also a scientist, and published work on astronomy, meteorology, music and optics. The two careers were not well integrated in his mind. He began his Dioptic with superlatives: The entire conduct of our lives depends upon our senses, among which that of sight being the most universal and most noble, there is no doubt that inventions which serve to augment its power are the most useful which could exist. And telescopes ‘seem to have opened to us the way to attain a much greater and more perfect knowledge of nature’ (in Vrooman, 1970:128). Thus, with his philosopher’s hat on his head, Descartes closes his eyes; with his scientist’s hat on, he uses a telescope. 139

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The scientific and experimental paradigm of vision, which Descartes did so much to advance, had not long before been thought to challenge the church. Galileo had been forced to recant. But by the end of the century, religion and science, church and state, were divorced. And the new scientific paradigm of the senses coexisted with the Christian moralistic paradigm. Thomas Hobbes is best known for his political philosophy, but he began Leviathan (1651) with a theory of knowledge that opens with the chapter ‘Of Sense’. He affirms his materialism and the utility and value of the senses: ‘there is no conception in a man’s world which has not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense’ (1960:7). The senses are the foundation of thought as thought is the foundation of politics and social life. Hobbes began with the senses and concluded with the state. In his Essay on Human Understanding (1690), Locke also described the senses enthusiastically as ‘this great source of most of the ideas we have’, and as one of the two ‘fountains of knowledge’ (Bk 2, ch. 1; 1964:90). And he insisted that ‘Nothing can be in the intellect which was not first in the senses’ (Bk 4, ch. 3; 1964:332). Locke, like Hobbes, began with the very senses which Descartes had rejected. David Hume went further. Like Empedocles, but much more radically, he was sceptical of reason. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) established scepticism as a philosophy, with the principle of ‘universal doubt’ insisting that ‘all knowledge degenerates into probability’ and is ‘deriv’d from nothing but custom’. Hume had little faith in reason (Bk 1, 4, 1:1985:231, 234); and he found philosophy profoundly depressing—so had to rely on the senses to cure reason! Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds [of depression], nature herself…cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimera. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends. (Bk 1:7; 1985:316; emphasis added) The depressing logic of reason is therefore, in Hume’s commonsense view, ‘cured’ by food and drink and talk and laughter: the senses, in fact. Reason, it seems, should not be taken too seriously. Hume therefore rather casually reversed the traditional philosophy of the 140

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dominance of reason over the senses, mind over body, which had seemed so strongly entrenched from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas to Descartes.6 The light of reason was now found to be flawed and even depressing; only to be tolerated on a full stomach— that is, with the senses gratified. The piercing clarity of thought needs food and laughter. The senses therefore do not necessarily imply hedonism; they may, in this view, simply imply sense: common sense. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: HEGEL, FEUERBACH AND MARX

In the nineteenth century, attitudes changed yet again. Hegel treated the senses, and the related parts of the body, in a new paradigm, as symbols of the self, as survival mechanisms and as instruments of communication. He developed a sophisticated philosophy of the sensorium (see Figure 5.2)

Figure 5.2 The hierarchy of the senses in animals and humans according to Hegel Source: Hegel, 1975:728–37.

He distinguished between animal and human biology, and upper and lower human senses. Here he describes the relation between animal biology and the sensorium: In the formation of the animal head the predominant thing is the mouth, as the tool for chewing, with the upper and 141

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lower jaw, the teeth and the masticatory muscles. The other organs are added to this principal organ as only servants and helpers: the nose especially as sniffing out food, the eye, less important, for spying it. (1975:728) The rank order of the sense organs for animals is therefore mouth, nose and eyes, with the mouth as the principal survival mechanism, and the nose and eyes as ‘servants and helpers’. Hegel did not mention ears and skin, but one suspects he would rank them in that order. He argues, however, that neither the biology nor the hierarchy is the same for humans, for ‘the human appearance in its b odily form [b ears] an impress of the spirit…indicative not of a practical relation to things but of an ideal or theoretical one’. Thus, in the upper part of the face, the ‘soulful and spiritual relation to things is manifested…in the intellectual brow and, lying under it, the eye, expressive of the soul’ (1975:729). In the lower part of the face is the mouth, ‘the practical organ of nourishment’, which Hegel evaluated as an animal function. Hegel largely ignored the function of the mouth as a medium of communication, which is particularly odd since he lectured on this matter! The nose belongs to an ‘animal need’ and is ‘in the service of the mouth and feeding’. The ear, he thought, is more related to the spirit than to the practical sphere. The chin, not being a sense, only completes ‘the spiritual expression of the mouth’. Of hair, the lowest ranked part of the face, he says: ‘Hair as such has the character of a plant production rather than of an animal one. It is a sign of weakness rather than a proof of the organism’s strength’ (1975:729–37). Like Plato, Hegel did not discuss the sense of touch, nor the skin as a sensory organ. This omission suggests that Hegel thought this was the least important of the senses, a fact consistent with his idealism. Indeed the greatest differences between animals and humans in Hegel’s hierarchies of the senses are the reversed ranks of the mouth and the eyes: eyes are low for animals, high for humans. The evolution of humanity, for Hegel, was the shift in the primacy of the sensorium from mouth to eye, reflecting the importance of mind over body again. The reaction to Hegel was swift. Ludwig Feuerbach, one of his disciples, attacked this hierarchization in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1830): 142

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I regard the sensuous world as the first element of psychology and of philosophy in general;…I cannot derive my body from my mind—for I have to eat or to be able to eat before I can think; as the animals demonstrate, I can eat without thinking, but I cannot think without eating; I cannot derive my senses from my faculty of thought, from my reason—for reason presupposes the senses, but the senses do not presuppose reason…Man’s first belief is his belief in the truth of the senses, not a belief in conflict with the senses, such as theistic and Christian belief. (Lecture 10; 1967:86–7) ‘If you wish to know the truth about matter, make use of your senses, recognize the truth of the senses’, for in the mind are only thoughts, ideas, and imagination (Lecture 17; 1967:158). Both Hume and Feuerbach insist on the philosophical importance of food, albeit for slightly different reasons. Feuerbach attacked not only Hegelian idealism—the idealists forget ‘that man thinks only by his materially existing head, that reason has an enduring material foundation in the head, the brain, which is the center of the senses’ (Lecture 10; 1967:87)—but also the Cartesian certainty; for Feuerbach, the first principle is not ‘Cogito’, but ‘Senteo, ergo sum’: I feel, therefore I am. Feuerbach’s contribution was to restore the value and the validity of the senses, to assert their existential primacy (food is ‘first’), to develop a materialist base for philosophy, and to insist on the significance of the senses for philosophy, and also for psychology and religion. But what about the workers? Karl Marx criticized the philosophers for all their words, words, words: ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it’, he argued (1963:84). Marx began not with the Christian God, nor the Cartesian cogito, nor Hume’s doubt, but, and here his debt to Feuerbach is very apparent, with the satisfaction of human biological and sensory needs: [We] must begin by stating the first presupposition of all human existence, and therefore of all history, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is, therefore, the production of material life itself. This is indeed a historical act, a fundamental condition of 143

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all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must be accomplished every day and every hour merely in order to sustain human life. (1963:75) ‘The individual is a social being’, Marx insists. ‘The production of life, both of one’s own by labour and of fresh life by procreation, appears at once as a double relationship, on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship’ (1963:91–2, 77). Individual history starts with sex; and sexual intercourse is social and sensual. In contrast to the entire Western tradition from Plato to Hegel, Marx argues that: ‘Man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking but with all his senses’. This is not trivial, as Aquinas or Descartes might have thought: ‘the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present’ (Marx, 1964:140–1; his emphasis). But the degree of human affirmation is a variable, determined by the relation to the means of production. The ‘bestial barbarization’ of the worker in the capitalist system not only provides a habitation which is a ‘mortuary for which he has to pay’, but also denies the worker simple ‘animal’ necessities, light and air, etc.: Filth…the sewage of civilization (speaking quite literally)— comes to be the element of life for him. Utter, unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, comes to be his life-element. None of his senses exist any longer, and not only in his human fashion, but in an inhuman fashion, and therefore not even in an animal fashion. (Marx, 1964:148–9; his emphasis) Marx’s burning indignation at the sensory deprivation of the proletariat makes a striking contrast to, for instance, Hegel’s theory of the eye. The process of alienation reaches its inevitable conclusion in the ‘animalization’ of the proletariat: man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. (Marx, 1964:111) 144

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For Marx it is through the senses and the body, in productive and reproductive labour, that people produce and reproduce themselves. Marx therefore moved the puzzle of the senses away from the endless debates over whether they are good or bad, which were human, which were animal and how they were to be ranked, into the arena of real, material life: ‘eating, drinking, procreating’. ANTHROPOLOGY

Only 15 years after Marx’s death, the first anthropological research on the senses was conducted by the Torres Strait Expedition of 1898–9, led by Alfred C.Haddon of Cambridge. In an age preoccupied with measuring the body (anthropometry) and the head (craniometry), Haddon initiated the measurement of the senses, and tested ‘visual acuity, sensitiveness to light, colour vision, including colour blindness, binocular vision, and visual space perception; acuity and range of hearing; appreciation of difference of tone and rhythm’ and more (1901/1978:22–3). This scientific perspective on sensory reactions does not constitute an anthropology of the senses as such; but it was a step forward in that this was the first systematic recognition of the senses in anthropology. The measurement of sensory reactions was a long way from the clarification of sensory meanings and lives in different societies, however; this was still physical anthropology rather than social anthropology. Ruth Benedict was the first anthropologist to attend to the senses directly. In Patterns of Culture (1935) she described the Pueblos of New Mexico, especially the Zuni, as ‘a people who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues’; they keep to the middle of the road, treasure tradition and order, and abhor individualism (1968:42–3, 56–7). Their Apollonian culture is in stark contrast to the Dionysian culture of most of the Indian nations of North America and Mexico as a whole: They valued all violent experience, all means by which human beings may break through the usual sensory routine, and to all such experiences they attributed the highest value’ (1968:58). A fundamental Dionysian practice common to all but the Pueblos, Benedict argues, is that they ‘seek the vision by fasting, by torture, by drugs and alcohol’ (1968:62). By transcending the senses, one sees the truth, becomes powerful, and finds the unique self. Classic examples are the Sun Dance of the Western Plains and the Peyote cult 145

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Nietzsche had originally formulated this distinction from his study of Greek tragedies. Thus the Apollonian-Dionysian personalities and cultures are not, of course, exclusive to the Indian nations of the Americas. The Dionysian seeks ‘to escape from the boundaries imposed upon him by his five senses, to break through into another order of experience…to achieve success’ (Benedict, 1968:56). One may admire or condemn (depending perhaps on one’s own personality), but Benedict showed the very different meanings of the senses, and how peoples live very different sense-lives. Benedict developed her discussion of the senses further in her famous analysis of Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). The paradigm of the Japanese sensorium is, it seems, very different from the Apollonian-Dionysian polarity, and also from the contemporary American paradigm. Benedict says that, given Japan’s strict ethical code and the Buddhist faith: [It] is therefore doubly surprising that the Japanese code is so hospitable to the pleasures of the five senses…The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of cultivation. They are sought and valued. Nevertheless they have to be kept in their place. They must not intrude upon the serious affairs of life. Such a code keeps life at a particularly high tension… They cultivate the pleasures of the flesh like fine arts, and then, when they are fully savored, they sacrifice them to duty. (1965:177–8) A contradiction is therefore established between the ideology of the sensorium and the practice of the senses, and between the often conflicting ideals of physical pleasure and duty. Some examples: hot baths are a favoured indulgence for the whole family, and sleeping is regarded as a pleasure not a duty; eating is enjoyed, and the cuisine is an art form; and romantic love is cultivated. But the body must also be ‘hardened’ by cold showers or dips in icy water; and sleep is ruthlessly sacrificed for ‘serious affairs’; food should be eaten quickly; and lovers commit suicide. Erotic pleasure is divorced from family life. Mistresses are tolerated, and masturbation is a pleasure. Many of these ideals and practices contrast sharply with the United States of 1946, Benedict notes. These few examples indicate that the Japanese and 146

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American sensoria are, or were, very different; and stem originally perhaps from very different philosophies of human nature (Benedict, 1968:178–94). Finally, Zen Buddhists say there are six senses: ‘The sixth sense is located in the mind, and training makes it supreme over the ordinary five’ (Benedict, 1968:240). Benedict’s exploration of the Japanese sensorium is extraordinarily rich and complex and she clarified a number of important points. One, the senses are regarded far more positively than they are, or have been, in the Western Christian tradition; two, they are constrained in tension by the duty ethic; furthermore, and most importantly, the numerical and spiritual dimensions of the sensorium are unique to Zen; and finally the sensorium cannot be considered effectively outside the philosophical and theological context in which we live the senses. At the same time, Margaret Mead, living in the South Seas, was struck by the very different roles of tactility in the sensorium of the Arapesh of New Guinea and the North Americans; but this is discussed below (chapter 6). SIMMEL AND FREUD

The founders of sociology, Comte, Durkheim and Weber, paid little attention to the senses, at least in their sociological writings; their lives, however, were no doubt unavoidably sensual and corporeal. It was the marginal sociologists Veblen (1899/1953)—who discussed such social phenomena related to the senses and the body as beauty, fashion, manners, eating and drinking and ‘good taste’—and Simmel (1908/1921) who pioneered what he described as the sociology of the senses. Simmel stated: ‘It is through the medium of the senses that we perceive our fellow-men.’ This perception has two components: the emotional response to the person, and understanding. He illustrates his point as follows: The speech, quite as much as the appearance, of a person, may be immediately attractive or repulsive. On the other hand, what he says enables us to understand not only his momentary thoughts but also his inner self. (1921:357) This example may perhaps suggest the primacy of the ear over the eye in Simmel’s thought: through hearing the words, one can 147

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understand the ‘inner self’. This also reflects Simmel’s apparent belief in the superiority of the understanding over the emotions. But no doubt it could be argued also that seeing what people do is just as useful for understanding someone as listening to what they say, perhaps even more useful. Actions speak louder than words. In a short but immensely rich essay, Simmel goes on to discuss the sociology of the face: ‘a man is first known by his countenance, not by his acts’ (1921:359); and then, more to our purposes, the problem of sensory deprivation. He discusses, briefly, the sensorium of the blind and the deaf: ‘one who sees without hearing, is much more perplexed, and worried, than the one who hears without seeing’. The blind, he says, have a more ‘peaceful and calm disposition’, for it is easier to make sense of sound without sight than it is to make sense of vision without sound. And this, he goes on to say, helps us to understand modern urban life: we see people all the time, but we never hear them. This in turn ‘brings us to the problems of the emotions of modern life: the lack of orientation in the collective life, the sense of utter lonesomeness, and the feeling that the individual is surrounded on all sides by closed doors’ (1921:361). Here Simmel links the sociology of the senses to the sociology of the emotions in an area that has still not been fully explored. The influence of Freud should perhaps be mentioned here. Mead was both very interested in, and very knowledgeable about, the work of Freud; indeed she referred to herself as a ‘neo-Freudian’ (Howard, 1984:179). She did not follow Freud in his geographic schematization of oral, anal and phallic phases of psycho-sexual development; but she saw something in his theory of penis envy, re-defining it as sex role envy or status protest. She cited the comment of a small girl when she first saw a little boy urinating: ‘Wouldn’t that be a convenient thing to take on a picnic!’ (1949:273). Freud, however, suggested that humans’ adoption of an upright carriage had resulted in the replacement of smell by sight as the dominant sense: the nose by the eye (1985:247, 288–9). He also commented on the expansion of the sensorium by technology 35 years before McLuhan and Hall: With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, 148

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which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory. With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale. Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease. (1985:279)

THE BALANCE OF TH E SENSORIUM

It was not until the sixties that Marshall McLuhan began to develop a new framework for the senses. McLuhan became interested in the senses as he realized that poets like Hopkins, Eliot and Yeats each experienced their reality with a different ‘sensory mix’. He also noticed the shift during the Renaissance from a primarily oral/ aural mode of sensing reality to a primarily visual mode: the shift being caused by the invention of printing (Marchand, 1989:48, 59). In his first book which directly discusses the senses, The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan argued that ‘if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture’ (1962:41). And new technologies were extending our senses and our bodies all the time. In The Medium is the Message, a cult book in its time, he explained: All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye…clothing an extension of the skin …electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous 149

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system…Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world…When these ratios change, men change. (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967:26–41) And the sense ratios have changed. The principal change occurred with the invention of the alphabet and handwriting by the Egyptians about 3,000 years ago. McLuhan was given to aphorisms, so he is worth citing: The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in prealphabet societies was the ear—‘hearing was believing’. The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear. Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space… The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967:44, 48) The first stage in this biological and sensory metamorphosis, in the exchange of an ear for eye, hearing for seeing, was the invention of writing. The second stage was the invention of print by Gutenberg in about 1450. The third stage was the invention of radio by Marconi: the first trans-Atlantic message was sent in 1901. So began the modern communications revolution, and the development of television and computers. Goose quills, machines and electrical energy have transformed not only our civilization, but also our sensory systems; and made ‘us’ radically different from ‘them’ in a pre-literate, pre-visual culture, from a sensory perspective. ‘Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies’ (McLuhan, 1965:45). McLuhan had hoped to put his ideas to very practical use by developing a test to measure the ‘sensory typology’, the sense ratios and balances, both of individuals and of entire cultures. This, he believed, would revolutionize education, advertising and politics; it would enable sensory deficiencies to be remedied, and it would facilitate communication. The project never got off the ground, 150

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partly for lack of funding (Marchand, 1989:160–4). But a circle of his friends, including two anthropologists, Edward T.Hall and Edmund Carpenter, and the Jesuit philosopher Walter Ong, developed his initial ideas further. In The Hidden Dimension, Hall’s best-selling study of proxemics, he insists that: ‘people from different cultures not only speak different languages but, what is possibly more important, inhabit different sensory worlds’ (1969:2; his emphasis). Cultural experiences are therefore quite different. For instance, ‘Arabs make more use of olfaction and touch than Americans’ (1969:3). Numerous examples of the sensory universes of Americans, British, French, Germans, Japanese and Arabs are discussed, relating to touch, gaze behaviour, thermal space, tactile space, auditory space, oral styles and olfaction (1969:131–64). Similarly he argues that ‘men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds …Men and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways’ (1969:69–70). Human evolution, he suggests, has been marked by a shift in reliance from the nose to the eye (1969:40); and here he followed but did not acknowledge Freud. Carpenter, who had lived among the Inuit in Canada, described their sensory modality very clearly: With them the binding power of the oral tradition is so strong as to make the eye subservient to the ear. They define space more by sound than by sight. Where we might say, ‘Let’s see what we can hear’, they would say, ‘Let’s hear what we can see.’ (1973:33) A major new direction to studies of the sensorium was given by Walter Ong, SJ, a former student of McLuhan’s, who suggested in The Presence of the Word (1967) that it was the relations between the senses that should be studied, rather than the senses themselves; and he pointed to the importance of changes in the media of communication with respect to determining what these changes are. He noted that: ‘cultures vary greatly in their exploitation of the various senses and in the way in which they relate their conceptual apparatus to the various senses’. Indeed, culture can be defined ‘in terms of the organization of the sensorium’ (1967:3, 6). Later he suggested that the sensorium can be presented in a linear mode, in what he describes as ‘the noetic economy of the senses’ (see Figure 5.3). This noetic economy refers not only to differences between cultures, such as pre-literate and literate, oral/aural and visual, but 151

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Touch—Taste—Smell—Hearing—Sight Figure 5.3 The noetic economy of the senses according to Ong Source: Ong, 1977:136

also to changes over time from one sensory base to another: i.e. a culture’s ‘way of organizing both physical actuality and knowledge as such’ especially an oral/aural to visual shift in the balance of the sensorium: from face to face, nose to nose communication to, so often nowadays, telephones, televisions, faxes, movies, the press and, of course, books, printouts, and all the paraphernalia of impersonal mass communication, often solely visual. This represents a shift from the proximity senses to the distance senses. On the one hand, Ong’s noetic economy does fit the senses neatly into some familiar dichotomies: Robert Redfield’s folk-urban and Ferdinand Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft typologies; Talcott Parson’s affective-instrumental pattern variables; and the notions of primary and secondary groups, total and segmental roles. On the other hand it is surely a little too linear, and a little too neat. The implication is that all traditional cultures are the same on the left of the continuum, and all modern ones are the same on the right of the sensory spectrum—which, of course, we know they are not! It also implies that the ‘development’ from pre-literate to literate and ‘hyper-visual’, in Ong’s term, follows along the same sensory trajectory—which again is not necessarily so. The range of sensory possibilities is therefore not simply vertical, as Aristotle and Hegel believed, nor horizontal, as Ong has suggested, but surely holographic, in an almost infinite and always surprising range of permutations and combinations, with alternative meanings, values and applications. Mead, Benedict, Hall and Carpenter may have been alert to alternative sense ratios, yet none I think fully appreciated the vast chasm that separates alternative modes of sensing reality. And what is reality? Indeed. David Maybury-Lewis recalls a time among the Xavante of Brazil when sickness struck the village; the shaman ‘was dreaming intensively, traveling through space and time to track down the cause of the disease’ and the entire village, including him, danced to combat the plague: This went on for days—how many I do not remember—until the dancing stopped. The dancers squatted around their fires. 152

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Nobody spoke. We sat there for hours. The fires stopped crackling and glowed like wounds in the night. At last a sighing movement ruffled through the lines of men. My companion nudged me. ‘Listen!’ he said. ‘Can you hear it?’ ‘Hear what?’ ‘The souls of the dead. They are whistling all around us.’ (1992:307) We are deaf to entire orders of reality which exist for other peoples, but not for us. These are matters of kind, not simply of degree, as musicians may have a better ear than the tone deaf, and hear ‘more’ in a singer; or as women may be more in tune to meta-messages of conversation than are men, as Tannen (1990) says. And the Xavante are not the only ones who hear. Paul Stoller lived for eight years, on and off, among the Songhay of Niger. Here Djibo, a sorko or healer, is searching for a sick man’s ‘double’, stolen by a witch, which will, if he does not find it soon, be turned into an animal and killed, and then the patient will die: Djibo crawled into the pile of millet husks. He sifted through the pile for a few moments when suddenly he leaped to his feet. He flapped the palm of his hand over his open mouth. ‘Wo, wo, wo, wo’, he cried. He turned toward me. ‘Did you see it?’ ‘See what?’ ‘Did you feel it?’ ‘Feel what?’ ‘Did you hear it?’ ‘Hear what?’ Djibo shook his head in disappointment, for he expected that I would have sensed the man’s double as he, Djibo, had liberated it. He grumbled: ‘You look but you don’t see. You touch but you don’t feel. You listen but you do not hear. Without sight or touch’, he continued, ‘one can learn a great deal. But you must learn to hear, or you will learn little about our ways.’ (Stoller and Olkes, 1987:70) Despite his initial sensory inadequacies, Stoller did eventually learn to hear, and he was also taught to see; but obviously the sensory world of the Songhay sorcerer is quite different from that of the 153

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American anthropologist—it is spiritual as well as physical. The Songhay live in a far more acoustic universe. Children here may chant that ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ Adults know better: ‘That hurt!’ The Songhay know this too. Yet adults here do not expect their words to cause paralysis of the lower body, from which Stoller suffered, nor the facial deformation which he, as a sorcerer himself, caused by his words, nor the deaths which his enemy caused. We are perhaps familiar with the evil eye, and even with the polluting touch, but not with such devastating words. The anthropological exploration of the sensorium is just beginning, and the qualitatively different sensoria are just being queried. Why, for instance, the Suya of Brazil believe that ‘sexual intercourse is “bad for the hearing” of young men’; and when they understand something, they do not say ‘I see’ but ‘It is in my ear.’ And why for the Ommura of New Guinea: ‘It is not the eyes that are “the windows of the soul”…but the nose’ (Howes, 1991:175–9). It is only relatively recently in the Western tradition that the ancient Greek, Christian and Cartesian distrust of the senses has been re-evaluated, principally by Hume, Feuerbach, Marx and then by Sartre. Sartre insisted that the function of the sense organs is ‘to know’; adding: ‘I know the Other through the senses’ (1966:448; his emphasis). The hegemony of sight is well established in the Western sensorium (Jonas, 1970; Dundes, 1972); and it will not disappear soon. Of the 18 chapters in one recent physiology textbook entitled The Senses, 11 are on vision, three on hearing, followed by one each on the vestibular sense (balance), skin (touch) and the ‘chemical senses’ of taste and smell (Barlow and Mollon, 1987). This provides us with a physiological rank order of the senses, so to speak, in which sight outnumbers the other four (or five) senses by 11 to seven! Or, in arithmetical terms again, sight is over three times more important than hearing, and 22 times more important than either of the chemical senses! Such arithmetical ratios provide us with useful unobtrusive measures of sensory values; Feuerbach’s insistence on food is forgotten, as is Marx’s emphasis on the priority of procreation. Yet without these so-despised senses, where would we be? Would we be?

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CONCLU SION

People have been puzzling over the senses for centuries; and the puzzling has not stopped. Indeed the answers to the original questions seem to raise still more questions; the answers vary from thinker to thinker, and there is little consensus. There is not even any agreement on the number of the senses. The reduction of the sensorium into five senses was first determined by Aristotle, perhaps for neat numerological reasons rather than physiological ones; but Galen said there were six, Erasmus Darwin thought there were 12, and Von Frey reduced them down to eight (Marks, 1978:105). Zen Buddhists say there is a sixth sense, as we have seen, but a different one from the Western notion of the sixth sense as extrasensory perception (ESP). Recent authorities calculate that there are 17 senses (Rivlin and Gravelle, 1984). Five, six or up to 17, in one ‘sense’ it does not much matter to most of us how many senses can be scientifically determined; most of us can cope with the five that have been constructed in this culture. On the other hand, it is as well to recall that the number, as well as the meanings, of the senses is a social construct, not a biological given. Current thinking about the sensorium tends to emphasize not the fallibility of the senses but their utility, not their moral danger but their historical and cultural relativity, and not just their hierarchy, nor their linear noetic economy, but their holographic dimensions. Sensoria vary from individual to individual: some are blind, or need spectacles; some are deaf, or getting that way, and so on; the cook, the gourmet and the oenophile may privilege taste, the parfumier smell, the musician hearing, the artist and the photographer sight, and the healer touch. We see things differently, hear different things, taste things variously, prefer some smells to others, and some people are much more tactile than others. In sum, we all live in very different sensory worlds—men and women, children and adults, wealthy and Marx’s ‘animalized’ workers. Similarly sensoria vary from culture to culture, as anthropologists are exploring; and the alternative sensory possibilities are intriguing. What does it ‘feel’ like to live in another sensory world? The puzzle of the sensorium persists.

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6 TOUCH The first sense

Touch is the first of the senses to develop: the tickle reflex is evident in the foetus at eight weeks. Touch is also, probably, the most common and the most important non-verbal communication channel in our culture. Loving and hating, greetings and farewells, birthdays and funerals, healing rituals, helping behaviours, sporting activities and interactive relations of all sorts involve types of touching. Touch is not only utilitarian (cleaning and changing the baby, etc.), but also, and especially, emotional, sometimes in the same activities. Hugging and snuggling, pinching and punching, shaking hands or holding hands, linking arms, patting heads, slapping faces, tickling tummies, taking pulses, stroking and striking, kissing foreheads, or cheeks, or lips, or anywhere…They all involve touching and skin contacts, and convey without words a wide variety of emotions, meanings and relationships. Touch is not only essential for well-being, it is essential for being, as Aristotle noted long ago. Infants deprived of touching, hugging, cuddling, tender loving care, wither away and die: the ‘failure to thrive’ syndrome. And those infants who suffer from any of the disorders which prevent them from feeling pain, or anything, are in hazard of their lives also. People can survive and prosper without any other sense—indeed Helen Keller managed superlatively without sight and hearing—but life without feeling is more difficult (Marion, 1990). Touch has always been ranked low on the sensorium: Aristotle and Aquinas gave it a subordinate position in their respective hierarchies; Hegel ignored it; and only 16 per cent of my sample of 184 ranked touch as their most valued sense. Yet this ability to feel is of first importance for our physical health, our emotional 156

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life, and our intellectual development. These are some of the issues we will explore in this chapter. The organ of touch is the skin. Unlike the other senses, which are located in specific organs of the head (the eyes, the ears, the nose and the tongue), the sense of touch is located in the skin, which clothes the entire body. The human exterior is itself a sensory organ. Skin is polyvalent in its capacities. It is so thin that it is virtually transparent, yet it keeps our 100 or 200 pounds together; its area is about two square yards in average adults; and skin weighs about six to eight pounds, just less than the head, and constitutes about 16 per cent of total weight. A piece of skin about the size of the old shilling or a quarter contains more than 3 million cells, hundreds of sensory receptors, 200 sweat glands, 50 nerve endings and three feet of blood vessels (Montagu, 1978:4; Diagram Group, 1980:44; cf. Smith, 1989:181–5). Skin has a variety of physiological functions: to protect the internal organs from physical damage, bacterial infection and solar radiation; to sense pain, heat, cold and pressure; to regulate body temperature; to store and metabolize fat; to regulate the quantity of water and salt in the body; to metabolize vitamin D from sunlight; and finally to signal many illnesses and diseases. Skin therefore acts as an information-processing system: receiving information from the environment and transmitting back. Socially, however, skin is just as important and equally versatile in its functions. Skin may be painted, tattooed and scarred, tanned and bleached, bathed, shaved, perfumed and anointed, and dirtied, to convey an almost infinite number of messages and a host of meanings. In every society people change and decorate and even ‘mutilate’ their bodies to suit their values and fancies.1 Skin colours range from shades of black through browns, yellows, olives, roses, greys and purples to shades of white. Social significance may or may not be ascribed to these variations, in greater or lesser degree. Colours themselves may change, more obviously for those clad in paler shades, and indicate emotions and feelings: blushing with embarrassment, paling in shock or fear, flushing with anger. Touching and the skin are therefore both social and physical phenomena, which cannot be separated. The physical is the social, and vice versa. Given the importance of touch it is not surprising that touch provides some of our most powerful metaphors. Touch is more than skin-deep in the English language; indeed it covers 157

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23 columns in the Oxford English Dictionary, about the same as love. We say ‘keep in touch’ when we have been ‘out of touch’ for a while. And we often describe people by how we imagine they might, or should, ‘feel’ to the touch: hard or soft, slippery or slimy, oily or greasy; warm is nice and friendly, but cool is not, and frigid is icy. People may be smooth or prickly or a bit rough around the edges, touchy perhaps and very sensitive, or alternatively thickskinned and quite insensitive. Hopefully they will not hurt our feelings, especially in ticklish situations. All these adjectives, and there are many more, attest to the paramount role of touch. Indeed we often extend the metaphor of touch from the physical to the emotional. If we say, ‘How do you feel?’, the answer may be ‘too cold’, in physical terms, or ‘a bit sad’, in emotional terms. Feelings are both physical and emotional. We sense the world physically—and in so doing we create our own worlds in our imaginations, which in turn become our ‘real’ world. Visual metaphors seem to govern the worlds of reason and understanding, as we have ‘seen’ in chapter 5, and olfactory metaphors are particularly powerful in moral constructions and evaluations (see chapter 7), but tactile metaphors are primarily concerned with our ‘feelings’, ‘sensitivities’ and emotions, and our interactions with other people. In this chapter we will be considering the changing sensorium, particularly with respect to children; the ‘sensitive’ issues of tactility as relating to gender and power; and the broader matter of touch in our physical, emotional and intellectual lives.2 CHILDREN

‘Have you hugged your child today?’ was a popular reminder on bumper stickers a few years ago. And a recent Johnson & Johnson advertisement advises that The way you touch them now will touch them forever.’ But this is a relatively new philosophy, at least for the United States. The standard work on child care in the United States for the first 30 or so years of this century was Dr L.E.Holt’s The Care and Feeding of Children; first published in 1894, it was reprinted frequently until the last edition of 1943. Holt advised: ‘Babies under six months should never be played with; and the less of it at any time the better’ (1929:201); he objected to rocking babies too: rocking 158

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‘is a habit easily acquired, but hard to break and a very useless and sometimes injurious one’ (1897:91); and he particularly objected to kissing the baby: Tuberculosis, diphtheria [and syphilis, he added later] and many other grave diseases may be communicated in this way …Infants should be kissed, if at all, upon the cheek or forehead, but the less even of this the better. (1897:92) Playing with, rocking and even kissing babies was dangerous, according to Dr Holt—better not to touch them at all, except for purely functional purposes of cleaning, changing and feeding. Holt was not exceptional. Dr John B.Watson, the founder of Behaviourism, gave similar advice in his 1928 volume, Psychological Care of Infant and Child: There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. (1972:81–2) Watson dedicated his volume ‘to the first mother who brings up a happy child’. This carries the twin implications that such an event had never occurred before, and that under Watson’s guidance such a possibility could become a reality. He insisted that: ‘No one today knows enough to raise a child’ (1972:12; his emphasis). Watson explained: Mothers just don’t know, when they kiss their children and pick them up and rock them, caress them and jiggle them upon their knee, that they are slowly building up a human being totally unable to cope with the world it must later live in. (1972:44) To modern eyes and sensibilities (visual and tactile metaphors), this advice seems like the ultimate rationalization for child neglect, which only goes to show how much the sensorium has changed, and how quickly. For Watson, mothers were interfering with scientific methods. One chapter, entitled ‘Too Much Mother Love’, concluded by laying 159

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a guilt trip on mothers, particularly about petting, cuddling, fondling, hugging, kissing and just plain loving their children: In conclusion won’t you then remember when you are tempted to pet your child that mother love is a dangerous instrument? An instrument which may inflict a never healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for vocational happiness. (1972:87) These attitudes to touching and to children generally coincided with a range of policies in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth: the decline of breast-feeding, the development of a wide range of anti-masturbation devices, the practice of circumcision and even clitoridectomies, early toilettraining, and ‘mechanical’ feeding. Children were, to varying degrees, disembodied from their own bodies, literally as well as metaphorically, and also from their mothers’ bodies, and their fathers’. They were operated on, imprisoned and mechanized. Corporal punishment was institutionalized in the home and at school; this was believed to be in conformity with the Biblical adage: ‘He that spareth the rod, hateth his son’ (Proverbs 13:24), more usually rendered in Butler’s aphorism: ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ (Synnott, 1983). A measure of how much attitudes have changed, to children and also to touch, is that corporal punishment is no longer permitted in almost all schools in North America and Western Europe; and is against the law ‘even’ in the family in Sweden. Descartes had said that the body is a machine, and La Mettrie argued that ‘Man’ is a machine (see chapter 1); but the implications of this mechanism were drawn very carefully in a child-care text of 1921, in which the author insisted on ‘regularity’ as ‘the keynote of successful baby training’: This means regularity in everything, eating, sleeping, bathing, bowel habits, and exercise. Each event in a baby’s daily life should take place at exactly the same hour by the clock until the habit is established. It is quite possible to train the baby to be an efficient little machine, and the more nearly perfect we make the running of 160

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this machine, the more wonderful will be the results achieved and the less trouble it will be for the mother. (In Beekman, 1977:109–10; emphasis added) Babies as ‘little machines’: it was a military age for children despite the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the jazz, the flappers and the licence for the adults. Dr Spock was one of the first in the field of pediatrics to challenge Drs Holt and Watson. His Baby and Child Care was published in 1949, and his advice is exactly the opposite of theirs: Don’t be afraid to love him and enjoy him. Every baby needs to be smiled at, talked to, played with, fondled—gently and lovingly—just as much as he needs vitamins and calories. That’s what will make him a person who loves people and enjoys life. (1958:54) He began his book with the reassuring words: ‘Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do’ (1958:15); precisely the opposite of Dr Watson. The reflective social scientist may wonder about the damage to children from such distant (literally: non-tactile), mechanical and even punitive parenting, and about the credibility of experts, but also about why the sensorium changed so dramatically at this time. While it is difficult to answer this question with any certainty, I think that these changes in attitudes to, and in the practice of, touching children (and adults) have emerged and converged from many disciplines: Freudian theory, psycho-therapy, primate research and anthropology; these directions were reinforced by such movements as the Hippy movement, sensitivity training, somatopsychic theory, existentialist philosophy and, especially, the women’s movement. Ashley Montagu has discussed many of these factors in his work Touching (1971/1978), which did so much to draw the topic to public and academic attention. The most recent research on ways of raising children demonstrates the importance of hugs and cuddling and play for their growth: Adults whose mothers or fathers were warm and affectionate were able to sustain long and relatively happy marriages, raise children, and be involved with friends outside of their marriage at midlife. Contrary to the prediction, parental harmony was not related to ‘adult social accomplishment’. (Franz et al., 1991:592) 161

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This was the first major study of the long-term influence of parental warmth or coldness on children, and was one of a series of followup studies on a sample of 379 mothers and kindergarten-aged children originally selected in 1951. This study, and others in the series, seems decisively to refute the notion that distance, coolness and discipline are necessary for a child’s healthy development. ‘Coldness was associated with feeding problems, bed-wetting, greater aggression, and slower conscience development’ at age 5; at 12, adolescents raised with warmth had higher levels of self-esteem; and at 23, as adults, they had a more cooperative personal style (1991:586). The benefits of warm tactility are hard to overestimate. One of the pioneers of sensory research was Margaret Mead. Mead was not particularly interested in the sensorium as such; she principally researched sex roles in the South Seas, and the modes of production of the culturally desired personality. But the sensorium overlapped her interests and in Sex and Temperament (1935) Mead described child-rearing practices among the Arapesh of New Guinea. Yet she always had an eye on, and, in this example, she made an implicit critique of, child-rearing practices then (and perhaps even more now) prevailing back home: During its first months, the child is never far from someone’s arms. When the mother walks about she carries the baby suspended from her forehead in its special net bag, or suspended under one breast in a bark-cloth sling…if the child is fretful and irritable, it is carried in the sling, where it can be given the comforting breast as swiftly as possible. A child’s crying is a tragedy to b e avoided at any cost…Children are held a great deal…Suckled whenever they cry, never left far distant from some woman who can give them the breast if necessary, sleeping usually in close contact with the mother’s body, either hung in a thin net bag against her back, crooked in her arm, or curled on her lap as she sits cooking or plaiting, the child has a continuous warm sensation of security… The little baby’s life is a warm and happy one. It is never left alone; comforting human skin and comforting human voices are always beside it. Both little boys and little girls are enthusiastic about babies—there is always someone to hold the child. (1956:39–40) 162

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The contrast with North America and Western Europe is instructive. Babies are not held so much; they are more often in their cots or being pushed in a carriage; they usually sleep in their own cribs, and often in their own rooms, rather than with their parents; there is no exchange of mother’s breasts; babies are often alone or with baby-sitters or in pre-school or (now, but not then) in front of the flickering television; crying is no tragedy; and many little boys and girls are less than enthusiastic about babies. The tactile cultures are very different. Furthermore, breast-feeding among the Arapesh is not only nutritional, it is also a tactile game, as well as an erotic experience: This is an experience that the mother enjoys as much as the child. From the time the little child is old enough to play with her breasts, the mother takes an active part in the suckling process. She holds her breast in her hand and gently vibrates the nipple inside the child’s lips. She blows in the child’s ear, or tickles its ears, or playfully slaps its genitals, or tickles its toes. The child in turn plays little tattoos on its mother’s body and its own, plays with one breast while suckling the other, teases the breast with its hands, plays with its own genitals, laughs and coos and makes a long, easy game of the suckling. Thus the whole matter of nourishment is made into an occasion of high affectivity and becomes a means by which the child develops and maintains a sensitivity to caresses in every part of its body. It is no question of a completely clothed infant being given a cool hard bottle and firmly persuaded to drink its milk and get to sleep at once so that the mother’s aching arms can stop holding the bottle. Instead, nursing is, for mother and child, one long delightful and highly charged game, in which the easy warm affectivity of a lifetime is set up. (Mead, 1956:40–1) The extraordinary thing is that Mead wrote this while Holt and Watson were still in print; and even now mothers may not breastfeed their babies in public. Everyone may eat in public, except babies. The body remains strangely taboo. On the other side of the world from Mead, Marcel Mauss in his essay ‘Techniques of the Body’ (1936) was also writing about children and carrying: 163

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The history of carrying is very important. A child carried next to its mother’s skin for two or three years has a quite different attitude to the mother from a child not so carried; it has a contact with its mother utterly unlike our children’s. It clings to her neck, her shoulders, it sits astride her hip…it even seems that physical states arise here which have disappeared from infancy with us. There are sexual contacts, skin contacts, etc. (1979:111) The child with a ‘quite different attitude to the mother’, presumably closer, more positive, more secure, is also likely to have a quite different attitude to other people generally, and indeed to life. A recent report on the practice, prevalent in China today, of swaddling babies (known as the candle-wrap because the wrapped infants resemble candles) indicates that such infants lag in motor development and suffer high mortality rates from acute respiratory infections. In some of the poorest areas of northern China, babies are reared in bags of sand: the ‘sandbag children’; the process may last from one to five years, to save on washing and to permit both parents to work in the fields. The children, however, suffer from low IQs, probably from lack of stimulation (Globe and Mail, 6.11.91). Children grow up to become men and women, and tactility may still be problematic. GENDER

Men and women live very different tactile lives, as givers and receivers, as to who touches whom, where, and why; and as to how they understand the meanings of touching and being touched, holding and being held. In many arenas of social life—talk, play, sports, violence and sex—the patterns and meanings of tactility are gender-specific. The opposite sexes are opposite in tactility. While this is a gross over-simplification and generalization, for there is considerable individual variation and group overlap, it may be a more useful starting-point for discussion than the assumption that the two genders are the same. This opposition, or difference anyway, is no doubt more social than biological in origin, but it is one of the fronts in the battle between the sexes.

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Montagu, for instance, has suggested that the American female is ‘much less uptight about tactility than the American male’ (1978:185). And Shere Hite reported in similar vein that ‘many women said the men usually did not like to touch except during sex’ (1976:559). The origins of differential tactility can be found soon after birth. Mothers and fathers touch their sons and daughters differently, and indeed socialize them in different tactile directions. Mothers apparently touch their sons more at first, but talk to the daughters more, look at them more, smile at them more, and pick them up quicker when they cry; and after a year the gap is wider: ‘boys are touched, held, and kissed much less than girls’. Perhaps mothers prefer girls to boys and identify with them more closely; or perhaps they are socializing them to opposite roles. Fathers also treat their children differently: they play more with their sons than their daughters after the first year, and ‘rough house with the boys but treat girl babies “like porcelain”’. The cumulative impact of such behaviour is that boys are socialized to physical and emotional autonomy, while girls are socialized to physical and emotional affiliation; as such they are more comfortable with touching behaviour and other people’s bodies. Pogrebin concludes: ‘American females are raised to need the touching behaviour most men cannot give them’ (1981:126–7; Montagu, 1978:265–6). In school the polarizing socialization continues, not only in the curriculum, expectations and aspirations, etc., but also in the sensorium. In a perceptive analysis of her schooling in England in the fifties, Judith Okely has described the ‘curriculum of the unconscious’ in the training of a girl’s body. Two points relate to tactility: punishment and sports. The girls were not subject to corporal punishment; they were punished by ‘psychological exposure’. In contrast boys were constantly subject to physical violence, and sometimes still are; indeed the endurance of physical pain is part of ‘the masculine mystique’. Similarly, in sports. Some sports were exclusively for males, notably rugby, football and boxing. The principal difference between gender-typical sports is the degree of physical contact and violence required. In rugby ‘the arms and whole body are used as weapons. Players are expected to throw themselves and their opponents to the ground.’ Such behaviour is generally taboo for women. Thus ‘the “weaker sex” is made weaker, being forbidden aggressive and defensive use of the legs, arms, feet and the body’ (1978:567–9). 165

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The same arguments apply, with only minor modifications I would suggest, to sports in contemporary schools and universities. The violent body-contact sports are still predominantly, but not exclusively, male: ice-hockey, rugby, Australian rugby, (American) football, boxing, martial arts and soccer. These are more violent than, say, field hockey, figure-skating or aerobic dancing. Pain is something not to be avoided for some men, but to be endured and even to be sought out ‘No pain, no gain’ is the motto of athletic training. None the less, there have been changes. ‘Feel the burn’ is a theme in the aerobic workouts of Jane Fonda and other instructors; women are much more involved in body-contact sports than in Okely’s adolescence; and women’s self-defence courses are becoming more popular. Men and women are socialized into opposite tactile extremes, first by their parents as infants, and then by schools and peers as children and adolescents. These oppositions should not be overemphasized however. Men and women do not live in mutually exclusive and sensorially ‘watertight’ compartments. We are simply describing trends, tendencies and generalizations which are not necessarily applicable to all individuals. It is easy to generalize, not so easy to generalize with validity, but difficult to individualize! Some people are much more tactile than others. Although there are variations between the genders, there are also major variations within each gender. Some babies are cuddlers from birth, it seems, and some are not: they refuse to be cuddled, especially if their arms are held. Why this is so is not known. Some suggest that non-cuddling may have been due to a difficult birth; others believe it is congenital. In one small sample, half the babies were cuddlers, a quarter were resisters, and a quarter were in-between (Hardison, 1980:24–5, 170–2). The same with adults. Some enjoy holding and being held, cuddling and being cuddled; but some hate it. One woman stated: ‘I don’t like to be held or touched. I don’t like anyone to come close to me. It’s repulsive.’ But another woman is more typical: ‘When I am held, I am very happy, very content and I feel very safe, and I feel that there is nothing in the world that can go wrong because I am being held.’ A man, again untypical, reports: ‘If I could have sex without holding her, I probably would.’ But another man says: ‘To have this woman hold me is like the world is gone. When I’m with her nothing else matters…It’s a very comforting 166

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feeling’ (Hollender, 1970:446–7; Hollender and Mercer, 1976:50– 1). There can be problems, however; not surprisingly given the previous genderizing socialization. In her survey on female sexuality, Shere Hite asked women: ‘Do you enjoy touching?’ The responses were most enthusiastic. ‘Touching is the most important part of sex.’ And many women preferred the snuggling and cuddling to sex and orgasms: ‘General body touching is more important to me than orgasms…A really good hug will take over an orgasm any day.’ ‘Sex itself is not terribly important to me, but physical contact in the form of touching, hugs, embraces, caresses, etc. is most important. I am more interested in having that kind of physical contact than I am in having sex.’ I doubt that many men feel the same way; certainly many women expressed their dissatisfaction with male touching. One woman said: ‘Men never want to touch and kiss without fucking.’ Another said: ‘Touching is very important and meaningful, but doesn’t happen often because men most generally have but one end in mind when they touch you.’ And more: ‘He is not able to give affection freely’; ‘my boyfriend feels that a need for such contact involves neurotic insecurity.’ So some women barter, sex for hugs. Some men are affectionate, it is agreed; but they are, it is said, few and exceptional (Hite, 1976:556–62). One woman explained this difference in male and female sexual tactility: ‘Men are stimulated so much easier. Being held is an end in itself for women, but for men it is only a beginning.’ Hence a problem in the tactile communication system. Hollender explains it this way: When a man responds sexually to the woman who only wants to be held, she feels put upon; when the woman rebuffs the man’s advances, he feels she has insulted him. Clearly, there are crossed wires in the communication system. (1970:451–2) POWER

Touch is not only an expression of tenderness and affection, in the bedroom, the kitchen or the street; it is also an expression of power, and in the same places. The general rule is that superiors touch inferiors more than inferiors touch superiors, and not always 167

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with tenderness. At one extreme of this tactile spectrum, to mix the metaphor, stands Queen Elizabeth; etiquette demands that one may not shake hands with her unless and until the Queen extends her hand. An even better example historically is the King’s touch or the Queen’s touch, which was supposed to cure various ailments miraculously. Dr Johnson was touched by Queen Anne when he was a child in 1712; the practice died out soon afterwards in England, but continued well into the next century in France (Montagu, 1978:213–14). Similarly in the Christian tradition, Christ performed most of his miracles of healing by touching the afflicted individuals and, on only one occasion, by being touched. At the other extreme is the parent spanking the child, the bullies in the school yard and the playground, the headmaster caning the student, or the struggle for supremacy between battlers in the pub on a Saturday night, or the wife-batterers trying to control the relationship. The ultimate example is the infliction of pain, and even death, by the state. The physical punishment of criminals is legal in many societies, with flagellation or the cutting off of hands of thieves. Torture is practised routinely in many countries (Scarry, 1985). And capital punishment is practised in the United States, but not in Canada or the United Kingdom (although in theory the death sentence persists in the Isle of Man). This power dimension of the sensorium has been well illustrated by Nancy Henley. She tells how the Vice Chancellor of her university approached her, ‘took my upper arm in his two hands, saying he wanted to tell me something’. When he had finished, she reversed roles and ‘grabbed him back’, and explained her theory of touch as an instrument of power; just then the Chancellor appeared, ‘the only man on campus in higher authority, laid his hand on the arm of the Vice Chancellor, and urged him to accompany him to the next meeting’ (1977:95). Touch therefore is used to maintain the social hierarchy, and especially between the sexes, she argues. Much male touching of females is not about affection but is about power. Power does not preclude intimacy; but, prosaically, ‘usually the male is the first to place his arm around the female or initiate hand-holding in the course of dating, and as intimacy progresses, the first to attempt more overtly sexual intimacy, such as touching sexually-associated body areas’. (This is known as ‘hitting on’ women, in a highly tactile metaphor.) Furthermore, ‘every woman knows what is meant 168

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by a man who is “all hands”’. (This is known locally as ‘the Octopus Syndrome’.) While both examples demonstrate the different roles of tactility in the male and female sensorium, they also indicate invasive power. Indeed highly aggressive touching is often disguised as fun; Henley says: ‘I have seen women swung painfully dizzy at square dances, chased by playful gangs of men and thrown in water, carried, spanked, or dunked at a beach, all clearly against their will’ (1977:95–121). Her advice to women is to ‘start touching men, if the situation is appropriate, in order to break through the sexist pattern of tactual interaction. I happen to favor forcefully applied tactual interaction when the situation calls for it’ (1977:123). Violence tends to create counter-violence. Power is not only social, it is also physical. Touch is political. Physical violence is indeed the ultimate method of enforcement of the status hierarchy. Whereas the ‘feminine touch’ is equated with nurturing and artistic creativity, the ‘man’s touch’ is often equated with firmness and discipline and, in the last resort, with violence, against both men and women. Men commit about 90 per cent of the crimes of violence: assault, rape, incest, murder and attempted murder. Women are the principal victims of spouse-battery, incest, sexual abuse and rape: In the United States one out of three women will be raped; one half of all wives are victims of battering: a woman is raped every three seconds; a woman is beaten every eighteen seconds; one out of every four women experiences sexual abuse before she is eighteen years old; nine out often women endure sexual harassment at their jobs. (Morgan, 1984:51) One woman described the extreme of the masculine touch: ‘My father was a first-class bastard. The only way he believed of doing anything was with a club, a stick, or with the back of his hand. All you had to do was breathe’ (Belenky et al., 1986:32). So the man was exceptional, but the gender of physical violence is typical. Both sexes are violent, or may be, on occasion, and both are also victims of physical violence. But the gender patterns of violence are quite different. Men are far more likely to kill and to be killed than women, and most crimes of violence are committed by men. Yet although men are twice as likely as women to be assaulted or robbed, almost always by men, women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted. Also women are more likely to be assaulted in 169

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their own homes, and by relatives or partners, and more likely to be sexually abused as children than boys. The rates vary somewhat from country to country; but the general pattern of male violence is very similar in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, in order of their relative violence. The male touch therefore feels very different from the female. Some attribute this violence principally, or at least largely, to biology (see Lorenz, 1963; Ardrey, 1966). Others argue that social factors are primarily responsible (see Montagu, 1968). To my mind the evidence is compelling that there is a biological component to male aggression (see Wilson, 1979); and that this is reinforced and reflected in the socialization process. The question is, what is the balance? 50/50? Or 70/30? Or 30/70? And does it matter? I don’t think anyone can guess at the balance. In some societies men are much gentler than in others. The homicide rate in the United States is about 9.5 per 100,000 (1990), and climbing, almost four times higher than in Canada (2.5 in 1990) and six or seven times higher than it is in Britain and most of Europe. Furthermore, the homicide rate in Cape Town is 64 per 100,000, Johannesburg has a rate of 20, compared to New York with 5.5, and most European cities where the rate is less than one per 100,000. No one supposes that the biology of males is any different in these nations or cities! This suggests to me that the social factors are far more important than the biological. Furthermore most men are not violent; some women are violent (Jones, 1988). Even if biology is a factor in predominantly male violence, it is not the only one, and probably not the critical one. There is not much one can do about male biology; there is much to be done about the male culture of violence, and national policies of reform. The masculine touch is therefore ‘strikingly’ different from the feminine touch. Of course, both sexes can caress or kill; but my point here is the different roles of tactility in the gendered sensorium, at home, in school, in the office, in bed and in death. If there are ‘crossed wires’ in the tactile communication system between men and women, however, there are still more difficulties in cross-cultural communication. CULTURE

Tactility is very much a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual one, and some cultures are much more tactile than others. Indeed 170

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cultures can be described (albeit in dichotomized terms) as contact or non-contact, as in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1

The American psychologist Sidney Jourard was I think the first to research human touch quantitatively. In a simple procedure, he watched couples in coffee shops and counted the number of times they touched per hour. The scores he reported were: San Juan, Puerto Rico: 180; Paris: 110; Gainesville, Florida: 2; London: 0 (Jourard, 1968:137). This usually evokes a smile, or a tear; but Jourard made his point, that people in some cultures are much more tactile than in others. (In defence of Londoners I think his results might have been different had he moved out of the coffee shops and into Hyde Park.) Jourard also argued, as others have done since, that ‘many people suffer from deprivation of physical contact during their adult lives’ (1968:138); but the consequences of such deprivation are not so clear (cf. Montagu, 1978; Colton, 1983:16). It seems clear that Northern Europeans are, in general, less tactile than Southern Europeans; and that interaction between the inhabitants of these different sensorial politics and economics can be difficult. McLuhan (1965:78) cites a Greek guide for tourists which makes the point well: do not be surprised at the frequency with which you are patted, petted and prodded in Greece. You may end up feeling like the family dog…in an affectionate family. This propensity to pat seems to us a tactile extension of the avid Greek curiosity 171

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noted before. It’s as though your hosts are trying to find out what you are made of. Sure. The pinch on the bum on the bus is the tactile extension of a Socratic dialogue! And it is purely coincidental that such avid ‘Greek’ curiosity is felt only by males, and only towards females! Whatever the Greek tourist boards may say, however, visiting tourists often define such tactility as painful and as sexual harassment. Each culture has its tactile norms. The contrast with the upper-class English tradition is instructive, where touching was and is negatively sanctioned. This has produced, insists Montagu, ‘a rather emotionally arid human being who was quite incapable of warm human relationships. Such individuals made poor husbands, disastrous fathers, and efficient governors of the British Empire, since they were seldom capable of understanding genuine human need.’ Such non-tactility, combined with the public school system, he said, also created a high rate of homosexuality. But, in this complicated tactile calculus: ‘Even more far gone in non-tactility, if such a thing can be imagined, than the English, are the Germans’ (1978:285–6). Montagu suggests that the nontactile and anti-tactile tradition among men in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, is ‘rapidly breaking down’ (1978:300); but, as the Hite report indicates, not rapidly enough for many women. Within any of these cultural areas, however, there is a wide range of individual and sub-cultural variation. Californians and Southerners are often more tactile than New Englanders, and francophone Quebecers than English Canadians. Similarly in Latin America, women in Costa Rica interact closer and touch each other much more than women in Columbia and Panama (Shuter, 1976). Cross-cultural communication can therefore be difficult, for many reasons; not only the language problem, which may not exist, but also the volume of the voice, the distance between the speakers, the gestures, the facing posture (direct or angled), the amount and timing of eye contact as well as the tactility of the interaction. All these proxemic, kinesic and sensory behaviours may facilitate or inhibit comfortable communication. As to how and why these sensorial differences may have arisen, there is no definite answer. Several hypotheses are possible for the Northern-Southern European variations, based on climactic, socioeconomic, cultural, historical or religious variables; but there is 172

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no consensus; and they would not explain the range of other practices. No doubt, as Edward Hall (1969:131–64; 1973:162–85) has suggested, such variations are a function of more general orientations to space and to the body. There is another important point here too. Touching, and the ratio or balance of touch in the sensorium, is much more than simply counting. The meaning of touch must be considered and also, it seems obvious, the types of touch. Virtually every aspect of our lives is mediated by body contact of one sort or another. Take a pair of ‘average modern lovers’, if such exist. Desmond Morris has delightfully traced the development of their relationship through twelve stages, from ‘eye to body’ through to ‘genitals to genitals’. The stages are obviously not absolute, and can be reduced, e.g. by rape, or increased, and are subject to individual and cultural variations—but the process of intimacy is physical, as well as emotional and intellectual. Eye to eye, hand to hand, arm to shoulder, then to the waist, the first kiss, and so on, as more and more areas of the body are touched, caressed and felt (1979:62–88). But body contacts are not necessarily, nor even primarily, sexual. In crowded cities such contacts are inevitable and accidental and seemingly meaningless. Accidental bumps and nudges of shoulders and elbows are routine, though access to the front or back of the body is more personal. Indeed we can probably distinguish seven types of relationship based largely on the conventional accessibility of various body parts to the touch of another. Strangers have no access except accidentally; and they may apologize for such contacts. The English may even apologize if someone steps on their feet; but the French may relax and enjoy the general warmth on a crowded metro (see Montagu, 1978:287). Acquaintance is made by shaking hands; and tactile acquaintances may touch the forearm for emphasis or hold the shoulder, but not much more than that. Friends are permitted more contact, longer in duration and greater in intensity: hugs and kisses, arms around the waist or shoulders, but certain regions remain taboo. These three relationships are fairly straightforward; but professionals may have privileged access to some, or even all, parts of the body. Hair-dressers, beauticians, sales people, manicurists, dentists, shoe salesmen, palm readers, pedicurists, tailors…all may legitimately touch various portions of the anatomy in the course of their duties. Doctors may have access to the most private and intimate areas of the body, and 173

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with a speculum; yet physical ‘intimacy’ is mediated by a professional emotional distance, usually. Lovers: all areas of the body are open for lovers, though not necessarily in public, and of course more types of contact: stroking, tickling, licking, etc. Parents: similarly all areas of the body of the baby are accessible to parents, although not for the same purpose, nor the same actions. These parental ‘rights’ (and duties) can cease quite suddenly during puberty, as youngsters assert their rights to privacy, and to control the maintenance of their own bodies. Finally, enemies: they may well try to achieve forceful contact with various parts of the body, e.g. in rape, or in fighting, with or without contact ‘below the belt’. Morris has suggested that some of our contacts with ‘professional touchers’ is precisely to assuage our biological needs for body contacts. This would apply particularly to masseurs, but also to facials, and beautification procedures, hair washing and cutting and setting, not to mention the friendly hugs, dancing and other obvious forms of body contact, including sex (Morris, 1979:126–48). Furthermore, if we still do not receive sufficient tactile stimulation (for we need to touch as well as to be touched), we turn to pets, cats and dogs particularly. And then, at a further remove from human contact, objects: children have cuddly toys; adults may get tactile, as well as oral, gratification from smoking cigarettes (a nipple substitute?), or gum-chewing and candy-sucking (dummy substitution?). Fur coats feel cuddly, and down pillows are soft The search for tactile comfort extends to our clothes and under-clothes, easy chairs and rocking-chairs, and to the whole paraphernalia of sexual intimacies (Morris, 1979:168–85). Touching and physical contacts are therefore matters of everyday interaction, involving nurturing and loving, as well as fighting, personal aptitudes and attitudes and social boundaries, sex and power, and problems in gender and cross-cultural communication. But touch also relates profoundly to physical, emotional and intellectual development, life and death and health. TOUCH THERAPY

In 1915 Dr Henry Chapin reported that in children’s institutions in 10 American cities every single infant under 2 years of age had died. This was typical at the time. Indeed the death rate of infants 174

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in foundling institutions remained almost 100 per cent up until the late twenties. The solution? Simple. Dr Chapin took the infants out, and initiated the practice of boarding out babies. In the late twenties several hospitals introduced the mothering system (a practice imported from Germany): every baby should be picked up and mothered several times a day. Mortality rates dropped dramatically. Babies, it came to be realized, need tender, loving care (Montagu and Matson, 1979:112–14). They are not machines, despite Descartes and despite Watson. Quite how important the mothering process is became clearer following the reports of Dr René Spitz from Mexico in the midforties. He studied infants in two institutions, well-organized and alike in all essential aspects save that in one, ‘Nursery’, the infants we re raised by their mothers, in the other, ‘Foundlinghome’, they were raised by overworked nurses: one nurse for every 10 infants. The difference? Over two years in ‘Foundlinghome’, the death-rate was 37 per cent; in ‘Nursery’ over five years, with 239 children observed, the death-rate was zero. Furthermore, although the infants had started with similar development quotients (the foundlings actually slightly higher), by the end of the first year, the foundlings had dropped from 105 to 72, while the ‘Nursery’ infants rose from 102 to 105. By the end of the second year, the foundlings had dropped to 45, equivalent to a 10 month old. This development quotient is a measure of perception, bodily functions, social relations, memory and imitation, manipulative ability and intelligence (Montagu and Matson, 1979:115–16). Sensory stimulation of all sorts, which mothering involves (and no doubt fathering, though this was not discussed), is essential therefore for the full physical, emotional and intellectual development of the infant. Deprivation causes children to ‘fail to thrive’: they have higher mortality and morbidity rates, they develop less well, and the same probably applies to adults too. The psycho-somatic etiology of much ill-health, and health, is now widely recognized; less widely recognized is the corollary, the somato-psychic etiology of much emotional and mental health. The body’s power over the mind is no less important than the mind’s power over the body; and this is particularly clear in touch therapy. Robert Frager (1981) has described four categories of touchoriented ‘body-work’ in holistic medicine, most of which came to prominence in North America and Europe only in the sixties and 175

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seventies. These categories, which are not mutually exclusive, are relaxation practices, principally massage, either Swedish, Esalen or Shiatsu; body alignment techniques, particularly ‘rolfing’, developed by Ida Rolf, and others developed by Mathias Alexander and Moshe Feldenkrais; sensory awareness exercises, which have been utilized in psychotherapy and the human potential movement; and finally the psychotherapeutic body work associated originally with Wilhelm Reich and later with Alexander Lowen. Each system tends to work on different aspects of the body, but Frager suggests that ‘these systems are more complementary than contradictory’. All these techniques are usually dyadic enterprises in personal therapy but Deldon McNeely (1987) goes further and suggests that ‘body therapy’ is useful, indeed essential, for effective depth psychology, quite apart from improving physical and mental wellbeing. Reasoning, talking and thinking are not sufficient to effect complete dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious, in her experience. The body, the emotions and feelings, and physical activity, often mobilized by touch therapy, are also necessary. Some therapists see this as the emergence of the feminine in traditional patriarchal therapies: a shift from mind to body, thought to feeling, sight to touch. Some of the techniques of touch therapy have been developed in the group therapies of the human potential movement One study of this movement, which has myriad forms, was titled, significantly, Please Touch (Howard, 1971). Indeed touching other people, and communicating without words, is or was an important component of some groups. A number of games or exercises were developed for different purposes, and William Schutz describes some of those used at Esalen. First, Break In: people who are suffering from feelings of alienation, isolation or loneliness are told to break into a circle of those whom they have identified as excluding them. Pushing: to clarify people’s feelings about each other, or to increase involvement, two people are told to clasp hands and to push each other, to make the other give ground. Give and Take Affection: some people feel themselves unable, and some find it difficult, to express affection. One approach to this situation is for group members to express non-verbally their affection for the focus person; this is usually done by hugging or stroking (1967:147, 188, 198). Some critics have denounced the movement as ‘group-grope’ or ‘touchy-feely’; but others have found emotional growth and freedom in such apparently simple physical exercises and personal 176

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contacts. Jane Howard, after a year’s study, experienced a ‘liberation from verbalism’ and one veteran told her ‘I never knew that living could be so much fun’; an executive said: ‘It’s made me literally a warmer person. I don’t wear undershirts or wool suits any more, even in the northern winters, because I don’t need to’ (1971:209– 11). Body therapy, psychotherapy and group therapy: the singular role of touch, hitherto so undervalued, is only now beginning to be understood, it seems. The medical profession is also increasingly researching touch. The American pediatrician Dr Bernard Brazelton recently coordinated a conference on child development and pediatric research, the theme of which was ‘touch’. The published proceedings attest to the immense significance of tactile stimulation on infants— either massage, rocking or cuddling, as well as other forms of sensory stimulation (talking, eye contact and so on)—and also to the healing functions of touch on sick adults (Barnard and Brazelton, 1990). No doubt mothers have always known this; the problem is to translate this into institutional care and, for researchers, to quantify the effectiveness and the variables involved. PRIMATE STU DIES

In 1958 Harry Harlow delivered the Presidential address to the American Psychological Association entitled ‘The Nature of Love’, in which he reported on a series of his experiments with rhesus monkeys. He built a wire ‘nursing mother’ with a bottle of milk, and a warm, tactile, ‘terry-cloth mother’ with no milk, and watched the baby monkeys ignore the former, except when they were hungry, and flock and cling to the latter. ‘Contact comfort’ was far more important to the babies than the milk. This overturned the conventional wisdom of the time that love was primarily based on oral gratification in the nursing process; now tactile gratification (contact comfort) or, more routinely, hugs and cuddles were found to be far more important. He concluded, in the jargon: We were not surprised to discover that contact comfort was an important basic affectional or love variable, but we did not expect it to overshadow so completely the variable of nursing; indeed, the disparity is so great as to suggest that the primary function of nursing as an 177

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affectional variable is that of insuring frequent and intimate contact of the infant with the mother. Certainly, man cannot live by milk alone. 3 (In Montagu, 1978:30) Many experimental studies have shown the paramount importance of body contact: touching, gentling and petting various laboratory animals. In research on gentling rats, in 1921, Dr Hammett found that gentled rats were less likely to die, after the removal of their thyroid and parathyroid glands, than ungentled rats. In fact they had a six times better survival rate. Gentling therefore saves rat lives. The other interesting point is that the research was totally ignored in terms of its implications for other mammalian species (Montagu, 1978:14–16). Yet it did take many dead rats to make the relatively simple point, and many gland-removals. At the same time, however, Drs Holt and Watson were advising parents: ‘Don’t touch!’ In another study, rats were separated into two groups and fed and treated in the same way, except that one population was petted, the other was not. The researcher commented: ‘It sounds silly, but the petted rats learned faster and grew faster’ (in Montagu, 1979:331). I suppose it only ‘sounds silly’ because we have historically ignored the body in privileging the mind, and we have devalued the senses while valorizing the mind, virtue, money, being first, or other such life-goals. The range of laboratory studies indicates the importance of tactility not only for survival, growth and learning patterns, as we have seen; but also for relations with other animals of the species and with humans. Gentled animals are far less aggressive. The role of the sense of touch in the animal sensorium is therefore not minimal: it is perhaps central—mediating the other senses; for touch more than the other senses determines who we are, and influences our development, growth and personality from birth in a way that none of the other senses do, or can do. Field studies of the primates have clarified the enormous amount of touching, mostly other-touching, that they engage in. Among baboons, for instance, mother and infant are ‘in contact’ 24 hours a day, with the infant clinging to the mother even when she runs. Later the juveniles play and mock fight, with constant body contact. Grooming takes several hours a day, every day, for life; and observers can see that: ‘The animal being groomed relaxes, closes its eyes and gives every indication of complete pleasure’ (Washburn and 178

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De Vore, 1963:105–7). These baboons, unlike humans, are constantly and totally ‘in touch’ with each other. Such grooming is much more than pleasure and hygiene; ‘it is the social cement of primates from lemurs to chimpanzees’ (Jolly, 1972:153, 196). One authority even suggests that our tendency to stroke loved ones or pets, our enjoyment of massage or even of hair-dressing, may derive from an ‘innate tendency’ to groom others or to be groomed by others, stemming from far back in our evolutionary history (Sparks, 1967:170). Perhaps the most significant difference between human and animal primate tactility is that the animal primates primarily touch others, while the human primates touch themselves mostly; and we usually touch our heads. Desmond Morris suggests that: ‘the main reason we have for touching our heads is one of obtaining comfort from unconsciously mimed acts of being touched by someone else’ (1979:188). Michael Argyle speaks in a similar vein, saying that: ‘Perhaps touching the self is a kind of emotional equivalent of talking to oneself’ (1978c:265). This implies that we human primates are, to a degree, emotionally bereft and lonely, and literally must stroke ourselves, because no one else will, or does—unlike the other primates. Our physiological primate needs (for touching) and our cultural norms (against touching) are opposed. We defeat ourselves; and fight back with self-touching and self-reassurance. Ongoing research among the primates is therefore resulting in important insights about humans, not least about tactility. North Americans and Northern Europeans, particularly the men perhaps, are relatively non-tactile—not only relative to people of many other cultures but also to many other primates. We would probably be healthier if we were more at ease with our own and each other’s bodies. Both men and women associate touching so closely with power and sexual intimacy that we block much of our mammalian and especially primate biological heritage. Thus does our social body overrule our biological body; and culture ‘civilizes’ instincts, perhaps to our loss. John Turner’s habit of bum-patting in the 1988 Canadian federal election campaign was seen as chauvinistic, power-playing and an intrusion into an individual’s personal and private domain. Which perhaps it was; but perhaps, in this primate context, it wasn’t. The human situation is so complex, so overladen with taboos, that people are now writing books teaching touching: 179

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Hardison’s (1980) Let’s Touch: How and Why to Do It is ‘a practical guide to understanding and improving touching for learning, relating and attaining happiness…[It] gives you suggestions on …how to learn to touch.’ Another book, Touch Therapy (Colton, 1983), advises: ‘From a friendly hug to a tender caress—learn how touching can enhance your life’, and it includes ‘the secret to sexual fulfillment’ and ‘touch for success’. Baboons do it naturally; homo sapiens has to learn it. But humans and the great apes may not be so far apart after all. Jane Van Lawick-Goodall concludes her book with this ‘touching’ story: One day as I sat near him [David, chimpanzee] at the bank of a tiny trickle of crystal-clear water, I saw a ripe red palm nut lying on the ground. I picked it up and held it out to him on my open palm. He turned his head away. When I moved my hand closer he looked at it, and then at me, and then he took the fruit, and at the same time held my hand firmly and gently with his own. As I sat motionless he released my hand, looked down at the nut, and dropped it to the ground. At the moment there was no need of any scientific knowledge to understand his communication of reassurance. The soft pressure of his fingers spoke to me not through my intellect but through a more primitive emotional channel: the barrier of untold centuries which has grown up during the separate evolution of man and chimpanzee was, for those few seconds, broken down. It was a reward far beyond my greatest hopes.4 (1971:268)

CONCLU SION

Touch is many things, and has many meanings: it is magical and cosmic, healing and therapeutic, a product merchandising technique, a prime mode of communication, soothing or arousing, loving or murderous, creative, polluting, energizing, an expression of power, and also occasionally a problem in individual, cross-gender and cross-cultural communication. It is essential for human physical, emotional and intellectual development, yet also strangely taboo. 180

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It is seemingly instinctive for infants, nuzzling for the breast, but it also has to be learned, or re-learned, studied and taught. Yet if touching is instinctive, it is also culturally determined, with a wide variety of tactile interactive patterns in different societies, and indeed in different families. Also it is fascinating to note that touch seems to be climbing up the ladder of the sensorium, from the bottom according to the criteria of Aristotle and others, including Holt and Watson, up to number two (in my small sample) and perhaps number one with Spock, Brazelton and Montagu. The last word goes to Montagu, who pioneered the sociology of touch: It is not simply more light that we stand so much in need of, but more warmth. No one ever died of a lack of light, but millions have sickened, declined and died of a lack of warmth, the warmth of close contact with others who thereby demonstrated their involvement in one’s welfare. Far too many humans in the Western world have been unloved to a death. We need to understand that we have for too long neglected and overlooked the importance of tactile communication not alone in the development of the infant and child, but also in the development of the adult. (1979a:335)

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7 SMELL Fallen angel and potent wizard

We are all constantly emitting and perceiving odours, smelling and being smelled; and these odours play important roles in virtually every area of social interaction: eating and drinking, health, the home, therapy, stress reduction, religion, industry, transport, class and ethnic relations, and personal care. Odours are everywhere, and performing a wide variety of functions. Odours are also big business. The sales of fragrances and deodorants in the United States amount to 19 per cent of the total cosmetics and personal care industry, and are valued at $3.5 billion. Furthermore, there are now more than 500 women’s fragrances on the market, with another 20 expected to be launched in 1992, with launching costs of about $50 million each (Standard and Poor, 1992: H40–2). The fragrance industry, however, represents only about 20 per cent of the total aroma/olfaction industry, which includes detergents, air fresheners, polishes, the food industry and so on (Ackerman, 1990:39). The total olfaction industry is therefore worth perhaps about $15 billion. What do these odours mean? And how are these meanings constructed? Are any meanings universal? Or are they all relative? How do odours affect social interaction? How do these odours throw light, so to speak, on our own culture? We must first of all distinguish between different kinds of odours: natural (e.g. body odours), manufactured (e.g. perfumes, pollution) and symbolic (e.g. olfactory metaphors). These three kinds of odours are not completely separate; indeed in any given social situation all three may well be present, mingled together. They are conceptually separate, however, and it is with symbolic odour that we shall be principally concerned. 182

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Olfaction is a particularly critical area of research, not only because of its ubiquity nor even for its economics but for a number of other reasons also, which largely explain its powerful social and economic significance: (1) olfaction is so often ‘overlooked’, a phrase which describes the hegemony of sight, and which is part of the problem of olfaction; (2) it is often subliminal or, in Tom Robbins’ (1984) word, ‘magical’; (3) it is highly personal: an olfactory ‘consumption’ of the other; (4) it is physiologically direct; (5) it may trigger memories, affect moods and emotions, improve work performance, reduce stress, promote relaxation and enhance social and sexual relations; but (6), and this is my point, olfaction is also a moral construction of reality. Sociologists have rarely researched olfaction; indeed the only general article is Largey and Watson’s excellent piece ‘The Sociology of Odours’ (1972). Yet the subject is of immense social significance. Odour is many things: a boundary-marker, a status symbol, a distance-maintainer, an impression management technique, a schoolboy’s joke or protest, and a danger-signal—but it is above all a statement of who one is. Odours define the individual and the group, as do sight, sound and the other senses; and smell, like them, mediates social interaction. Here we will consider first the low status of smell in the sensory hierarchy; this may in part explain the relative absence of sociological research on smell. I suggest, however, that this low status is not ‘deserved’ and that we should attend more sensibly to our senses. Then we examine the role of odour in the moral construction of the individual and of various groups: class, race and gender. We conclude with a discussion on some of the practical and theoretical implications of olfaction. THE FALLEN ANGEL AND THE POTENT WIZARD

Smell is the least valued, and least researched, of all the senses. ‘If you had to lose one of your five senses,’ I asked some of my students, ‘which would you choose to lose?’ Most of them, 57 per cent (sample size 182), replied the sense of smell, followed by the sense of taste. Why? For many reasons. Some answered that smell was relatively unimportant and useless to them—except to inform them that the toast was burning. Others said they had a poor sense of smell anyway, due to allergies, colds, sinus problems and so on, so they would 183

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not be missing much. Some replied that much of what they smelled was so unpleasant that they could do without it. And others said that if they could not smell, they would not be able to taste so well, so they would not eat so much, so they could maintain their desired weights and figures! (But these respondents should logically have deprecated taste more than smell.) For many reasons, therefore, olfaction seems to be the most despised sense. Another indication of the low status of smell is the lack of a specialized vocabulary of olfaction. Things may be described as smelling nice or nasty or neutral, but this describes only one’s personal reactions to these odours. Odours are often defined in terms of other senses, sour or sweet (taste), strong or weak (touch); or even in their own terms: coffee smells like coffee, and geraniums smell like…. Without an independent vocabulary, it is hard to discuss the topic. Similarly there are books, courses and television programmes on musical appreciation, appreciation of the visual arts and taste or gastronomy and wine culture; but there is no equivalent in odour appreciation. Furthermore, there is not even a scientific classification system for the sense of smell as there is for the other senses. There are four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt and bitter, which are appreciated by different receptor sites on the tongue. Sight is determined by light, which exhibits the particle-like properties of photons, and wavelength variations along the electromagnetic spectrum. Sound is determined by vibrations, travelling at about 760 m.p.h., and is measured in decibels; and touch is determined by temperature, pressure, pain thresholds, galvanic skin responses and other variables. But there is no agreement about olfaction. Linnaeus suggested seven types of smell: aromatic, fragrant, ambrosiac, alliaceous, hircine, foul and nauseous; but the distinctions are not clear. Does a rose smell aromatic or fragrant? And what smells foul to one person, or to members of one culture, may smell fragrant to another. Modern scientists have estimated from four to nine classes or types of smell, excluding subcategories; but there is no consensus (Bedichek, 1960:15–26; Smith, 1989:106–7). Smell, and taste also, receive very little attention in contemporary physiology and psychology texts, as I noted earlier. They are described as the chemical as opposed to the proprioceptive senses; also as the lower (formerly, animal) senses as opposed to the higher or intellectual senses. 184

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This tradition of the disparagement of the sense of smell is most ancient. Aristotle developed a clear hierarchy of the sensorium. At the top were the human senses of sight and hearing, whose special contributions to humanity were beauty and music, and both could lead to God; at the bottom were the animal senses of taste and touch, which alone could be abused, by gluttony and lust respectively, and which did not lead to God. In between was smell: it could not be abused, in Aristotle’s view, but then, nor could it lead to God; none the less, he classified it as a human sense, but the lowest one.1 Aquinas followed Aristotle closely. Kant did not even discuss the sense of smell in his aesthetics. Basically, there is no aesthetics of smell in the Western tradition. Textbooks on aesthetics usually discuss visual beauty and the aural beauty of music, and perhaps taste, and perhaps the tactile textures of skin, marble or fabric. But not smell. One exception is Hegel, who did discuss the nose and smell in his Aesthetics (1975:728–37), but he regarded smell as the lowest in the hierarchy of the four human senses. He did not discuss touch. Freud was in line with this tradition in his suggestion that smell was the characteristic animal sense, and sight the dominant human sense: the development of erect human posture resulted in the replacement of the nose by the eye (1985:247, 288–9). Indeed Helen Keller, blind and deaf since she was 19 months old, described the sense of smell as ‘a fallen angel’, but insisted on ‘the nobility of the sense which we have neglected and disparaged’ (1908:574). The topic of smell itself is perhaps vaguely ‘distasteful’ to some, even ‘gross’. Adams (1986:24) suggests that: For many people [smell] has aspects of bestial sexual behaviour summarized in the image of two dogs mutually sniffing. Most of us do not smell as good, for as much of the time, as we think we should. Indeed ordinary human odours are to be eliminated, in the body, the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen and at work; deodorants, air fresheners, extractor fans, open windows and, at work, air purification systems all combine for this one purpose; yet animals live by odours. Perhaps for these reasons, olfaction has been hardly researched compared to the other senses, except until recently. Yet, physiologically, olfaction is an extremely powerful sense. A healthy 185

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person may be able to detect, with training, between 10 and 40,000 different odours; while experts, such as parfumiers or whiskey blenders, may be able to distinguish 100,000 odours (Dobb 1989:51). But such estimates are hard to verify. Some scientific dimensions of olfaction have been explored by the National Geographic Smell Survey. This, the largest survey on smell ever conducted, with 1.5 million respondents, published some interesting findings: women can smell more acutely than men, in general; reactions to odours, positive or negative, vary widely around the world; nearly two in three people have suffered some temporary loss of smell, and some, about 1 per cent, cannot smell at all (Gilbert and Wysocki, 1987). Yet the loss of the sense of smell is a serious matter. In one sample, 25 per cent had not known their food on the stove was burning until either they were told about it, or they saw it; 19 per cent had been involved in a major fire; 16 per cent had been exposed, unaware, to lethal amounts of natural gas; and almost 33 per cent had eaten spoiled food, or drunk spoiled drink, unaware. Anosmic, or smell-blind, people worry all the time about these things, and their own body odours. Furthermore, those who lose their sense of smell often lose their interest in sex, until their sense of smell returns (Rivlin and Gravelle, 1984:148–9). Smell is also often associated with memory. Kipling said that ‘Smells are surer than sounds or sights to make your heart-strings crack.’ This survey provided scientific evidence of the link between smell and memory. One man wrote: One of my favourite smells is cow manure. Yes! It brings back memories of me on my aunt’s farm in southern Ohio. The vacations I spent there were the happiest of my childhood, and any farm smell evokes wonderful memories. (In Gilbert and Wysocki, 1987:524) Helen Keller agreed: Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. The odor of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. (1908:574; cf. Gibbons, 1986) 186

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Smell may be a ‘fallen angel’, neglected, disparaged and taken-forgranted, but it is none the less a ‘potent wizard’, particularly with respect to memory. For some people, smells evoke memories; for others, memories evoke smells. In his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1913), James Joyce as Stephen Dedalus remembers his childhood and schooldays as a constant succession of odours: the ‘queer’ smell of oilcloth on his bed; his mother, who ‘had a nicer smell than his father’; and the ‘lovely warm smell’ of his mother’s slippers toasting before the fire. At school ‘Nasty Roche was a stink’; and he remembered the cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants. There was the ‘weak sour smell of incense’, the smell of altar wine, which made him feel ‘a little sickish’, the ‘strange solemn smell… like the old leather of chairs’ in the rector’s room, the smell of stale water, and the ‘smell of evening in the air, the smell of the fields in the country where they digged up turnips…the smell there was in the little wood’ (1964: passim). George Orwell also remembered his schooldays in olfactory terms: a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling—a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-ofmutton stew, and the banging doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber-pots in the dormitories. (1970:348) The evil smells which Orwell recalled are congruent with the very bad times he experienced in this school. The physical odour and the metaphysical reality are symbolically reciprocal. Good times equate with good smells: even cow manure smells great because it evokes such wonderful memories; conversely, bad times equate with bad smells. Smells are often evaluated, therefore, by the positive or negative value of the remembered context. So the meanings of odours are extrinsic and individually or socially constructed. Odour, memory and meaning are therefore intimately linked, and reach deep into our personal lives, all day, every day. One 187

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expert remarked: ‘We think our lives are dominated by our visual sense, but the closer you get to dinner, the more you realize how much your real pleasure in life is tied to smell. It taps into all our emotions’ (in Gibbons, 1986:327). Olfactory appreciation, positive or negative, is also constructed, not only by personal memories but also by specific teaching and training, by parents and by experts. We are socialized into what our culture considers to smell fragrant or foul, and into nasal ‘taste’. Some individuals enjoy more olfactory sophistication than others; these are principally people who have ‘trained’ their noses: parfumiers, tea-testers, chefs, oenophiles and others, although the debate rages as to whether ‘the nose’ is born or created. Helen Keller had perhaps the most famous sense of smell, and she explained that her nose helped her to learn much about people. I know often the work they are engaged in. The odors of wood, iron, paint, and drugs cling to the garments of those who work in them. Thus I can distinguish the carpenter from the iron-worker, the artist from the mason or the chemist When a person passes quickly from one place to another, I get a scent impression of where he has been—the kitchen, the garden or the sick-room. (1908:575) Furthermore, Keller stated that adults (but not children, perhaps surprisingly) generally emit a distinct ‘person-scent’; this is more than the ‘smell-print’, unique to each individual like a finger-print which blood-hounds and other dogs can identify, for she raises the interesting question of the relation between odour and personality. She suggests that Some people have a vague, unsubstantial odor that floats about, mocking every effort to identify it. It is the will-o’the-wisp of my olfactive experience. Sometimes I meet one who lacks a distinctive person-scent, and I seldom find such a one lively or entertaining. On the other hand one who has a pungent odor often possesses great vitality, energy and vigor of mind. Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests 188

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all things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness. (1908:575; cf. 1974:246, 314–15) A similar heightened olfactory sensibility is recorded by a medical student, after getting high on amphetamines: I had dreamt I was a dog—it was an olfactory dream—and now I woke to an infinitely redolent world—a world in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell. The man had suffered a form of temporal-lobe epilepsy and had become hyperosmic: I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognized, before seeing them, the twenty different patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, than any sight face. After three weeks his senses returned to normal (he had also enjoyed increased visual perception); but he did experience a certain nostalgia: That smell-world, that world of redolence…So vivid, so real! It was like a visit to another world, a world of pure perception, rich, alive, self-sufficient and full. If only I could go back sometimes and be a dog again! (Sacks, 1987:156–8) The opposite can also happen. Another man entirely lost his sense of smell after sustaining a head injury. He discussed this with Dr Sacks: When I lost it—it was like being struck blind. Life lost a good deal of its savour—one doesn’t realize how much ‘savour’ is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring—maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer. (1987:159) Evidently the physical possibilities exist for a far richer, fuller and more elemental olfactory social life; and we do not even appreciate the muted olfactory life which we have. Our sense of smell is therefore perhaps despised and neglected in large part because it is neither fully understood nor appreciated. 189

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ODOUR AND THE MORAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF

Odour is not only a physiological phenomenon, it is also a moral phenomenon, for odours are evaluated as positive or negative, good or bad. It is this moral dimension of olfaction which makes smell of such compelling sociological, and economic, significance. Odour is a significant component of our moral construction of reality and our construction of moral reality. The fundamental hypothesis is simple: what smells good is good. Conversely, what smells bad is bad. I will illustrate these equations with examples from food and drink, the environment and, the important point, people. I should clarify at the outset that what I am attempting to demonstrate is how people think about odours, i.e. in metaphorical and symbolic terms; I am not concerned with the odours themselves, which are intrinsically meaningless. To paraphrase Hamlet: ‘there is nothing either fragrant or foul, good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. Food and drink: we validate these symbolic equations every day as we smell our food and drink. By their odour we eliminate all things bad: putrid fish, rancid meat, rotten eggs, sour milk, vinegary wine, and the usual burnt rice. The odour indicates the reality, good or bad, edible or inedible, fairly reliably.2 What is bad stinks. And we can and do sniff out the world. This is neither hyperbole nor metaphor; it is simply how we use our noses. Conversely, if the aroma is delicious, the food itself is delicious, for most of the sense of taste is the sense of smell. The phrase: ‘Ummm! That smells good!’ neatly equates the physicalchemical and the symbolic-moral realities. Environment: just as we judge food as good or bad by its odour, so we also judge the environment. We relish the scent of flowers, the fresh air and the sea. And we avoid negative effluvia: human waste products, sewage systems, traffic fumes, air pollution, the stench of pulp and paper mills and meat-packing plants, and now cigarette and cigar smoke. They smell bad; they are bad: toxic, carcinogenic or nauseating. 3 People: we judge people the same way as we judge food and the environment. If a person smells ‘bad’, or deviates from the olfactory cultural norm, the odour may be a sign that there is something wrong with their physical, emotional or mental health. The odour is a natural sign of the self as both a physical and a moral being. The odour is a symbol of the self. 190

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This olfactory symbolism is evident in the extreme case of being downwind of a downtown vagrant. More routinely olfaction is still a useful tool in medical diagnosis. But the symbolism is most apparent in our language, which embodies and reinforces this valuesystem. We may describe someone as smelling ‘divine’ or ‘beautiful’, ‘lovely’ or just plain ‘good’; yet all these adjectives are also evaluations and moral judgements. Description is prescription. The aromas are converted from physical sensations to symbolic evaluations. 4 We may say someone came out of a situation ‘smelling like roses’. Conversely, we may refer to a villain as a ‘stinker’ or as a ‘foul’ person. We may describe immoral activities as ‘stinking to high heaven’ or say ‘I smell trouble’. Foul refers equally to ethics and odours. In sum, to describe someone or something as smelling good or bad is to imply that this someone or something is good or bad. This equation is built into our language. It is also, as we have seen in the examples of food and environment, fairly reliable. In the case of people it may have some scientific value or it may be inaccurate, we shall see; but it is none the less a constituent element in the moral construction of the other, and the symbolic presentation of the self.5 Shakespeare was particularly aware of how we ‘think through our noses’, so to speak, and was adept at painting olfactory portraits, particularly of villainy. Hamlet sniffed out that ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ and soliloquizes: ‘I doubt some foul play: would the night were come!/Till then sit still my soul: foul deeds will rise’ (Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii). The King, who has murdered his brother and married his brother’s wife, laments: ‘O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven’ (Act III, Scene iii). Evil stinks. It is not only offences that stink, so do evil people: the evil is absorbed into the very body and skin of the self. So Lady Macbeth also laments: ‘Here’s the smell of blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’ (Macbeth, Act V, Scene i). Three hundred and fifty years later people tell the Grinch who stole Christmas: The three words that best describe you are stink, stank, stunk.’ The physical and the moral are united in odour. Similarly, the senses reinforce each other. Just as the evil is ugly and stinks, so the good is fragrant and beautiful. In his fifty-fourth sonnet, Shakespeare rhapsodizes how truth gives a sweet odour which beautifies beauty: 191

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O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem By that sweet ornament which truth doth give; The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour which doth in it live. ‘Fragrance is truth, and truth fragrance’, to paraphrase Keats; and the sweet odour beautifies the beautiful. Beauty smells sweet. The reciprocal equations can therefore be reformulated: the good is fragrant and the fragrant is good; conversely the evil is foul and the foul is evil: what smells bad is bad and what is bad smells bad. Confirmations and applications of these (metaphorical) truths can be found in much of our lives, but particularly in the tendencies of conflicting parties to impute foul odours to each other. If people are defined as being evil, they are defined at the same time as smelling foul. Evil stinks, and enemies smell. Examples are legion in class and ethnic relations. Thus odour becomes a method or a tool of self-glorification and other-deprecation. The process starts very young. Even children do it. The last word in the argument goes to the kid who yells at the enemy: ‘Anyway you smell!’ Conversely, the odour of sanctity, a beautiful fragrance, was said to adorn the saints even after death (Classen, 1990).6 Again, the Devil, it is said, smells like hell: a combination of pitch, brimstone and sulphur. Today success is valued more than sanctity; so we refer to ‘the sweet smell of success’. And this too has its opposite: ‘the sour taste of defeat’. Smelling odours is not simply a pleasurable or painful chemical experience, which may or may not trigger memories, and alter moods or behaviour, it is also a symbolic and moral phenomenon. King James I described the evils of smoking in sensory, physiological and moral terms; in his much-quoted A Counterblast to Tobacco he describes smoking as: A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. The ‘loathsome’ looks, the ‘hateful’ smell, the ‘harmful’ physical consequences to the brain and the lungs, the blackness of the fume and the stink resembling hell, all symbolically reinforce each other. The negativities of vision, olfaction, physique, colour and morality 192

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are all aspects of one negative, in the traditional view. They all ‘correspond’. These equations are not simply a medieval conceit or superstition, but deeply rooted in our language and culture and are indeed contemporary. Laundry not only has to be clean, but it has to smell clean (often lemony-fresh!). People are also expected not only to be clean but, in many environments, also to smell clean, but not in all contexts. 7 Criminal acts may be described as ‘stinking to high heaven’, but conversely the police in London may be described as ‘the filth’. Ethics, like odours, are relative; but in the last cultural resort, heaven smells heavenly, and hell stinks. This dichotomous polarization of good against evil and fragrant against foul, and the reciprocal symbiosis of good as fragrant and evil as foul, constitutes the paramount power of olfaction in contemporary society. In this sense, expenditure on colognes, perfumes, after-shave and other fragrances is not only an investment in the presentation of the self, but it is also a major component in the moral construction of the self. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, it is often said; but as Voltaire and Darwin observed long ago, beauty is also in the culture of the beholder. Similarly, smell is in the nose of the smeller, but also in the culture of the smeller (Moncrieff, 1970; Engen, 1982). But the meanings attributed to odours (however defined) can be as significant as the meanings attributed to beauty or ugliness, the fragrant and the foul, in the Western traditions. Smelling good is a sign of being good. The anthropologist, Edward T.Hall, following Marshall McLuhan, has suggested that people of different cultures inhabit different sensory worlds’, and that this may be more important, for cross-cultural communication, than their different languages. For example, ‘Americans and Arabs live in different sensory worlds… Arabs make more use of olfaction and touch than Americans’ (1969:2–3). ‘Arabs consistently breathe on people when they talk …To smell one’s friend is not only nice but desirable, for to deny him your breath is to act ashamed. Americans, on the other hand [are] trained not to breathe in people’s faces’—thus they communicate shame to Arabs while trying to be polite. Similarly, ‘Arabs do not try to eliminate all the body’s odors, only to enhance them in building human relationships’, unlike de-odorized and re-odorized Americans. In match-making, the broker ‘will sometimes ask to smell the girl, who may be turned down if she doesn’t “smell nice”. Arabs recognize 193

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that smell and disposition may be linked’ (Hall, 1969:159–60; emphasis added). So did Helen Keller in a literal sense, and Shakespeare in a symbolic sense, as we have seen. This morality of smell has ‘resonance’ in Patrick Süskind’s recent novel Perfume (1986). A brilliant and murderous Parisian parfumier distils the essences of the scents of beautiful women, and creates the perfect perfume; this perfume has such an intoxicating effect on women that in their extreme desire for him they rend him apart and consume him. Not all the critics enjoyed the novel (e.g. Adams, 1986); but Süskind only took the promises of the advertising corporations at face value, and carried them to their logical conclusions. Consider the Old Spice advertisement: ‘Starts the kind of fire a man can’t put out’ (Largey and Watson, 1972:1030). It is said that ‘we are what we eat’—but it is also true that we are what we smell like: fragrant or foul, good or bad. ODOUR AND POWER

Odour contributes not only to the moral construction of the self, but also to the moral construction of the group. Smell is not simply an individual emission and a moral statement, it is also a social attribute, real or imagined. George Orwell has argued that smell is ‘the real secret of class distinctions’: [The] real secret of class distinctions in the West…is summed up in four frightful words…The lower classes smell …[No] feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot…It may not greatly matter if the average middle class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish and dishonest; it is when he is brought up to believe that they are dirty that the harm is done. (1937:159–60; his emphasis) Another Englishman, Somerset Maugham, had made a similar point In the West we are divided from our fellows by our sense of smell. The working man is our master inclined to rule us 194

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with an iron hand, but it cannot be denied that he stinks: none can wonder at it, for a bath in the dawn when you have to hurry to your work before the factory bell rings is no pleasant thing, nor does heavy labour tend to sweetness; and you do not change your linen more than you can help when the week’s washing must be done by a sharp-tongued wife. I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social intercourse difficult to persons of sensitive nostril. The matutinal tub divides the classes more effectively than birth, wealth or education. 8 (In Orwell, 1937:161) Times change and standards of living have risen. Perhaps the lower classes no longer smell so different from the upper classes. Or perhaps they do. Evidence from France suggests that hygienic practices vary significantly by socio-economic status. According to a 1976 survey, 43 per cent of French women of executive, industrialist or professional status bathe or shower at least once a day, compared to 10 per cent of those in farm worker households and 17 per cent of women in manual worker households (Bourdieu, 1984:205). Comparable data for men are not available. These data suggest the possibility of different olfactory realities by status; but the possibility only, since daily baths or showers are probably neither medically, socially nor olfactorily necessary. None the less, the distribution of odours does symbolize the class structure of society, whether by body odours or by the quality and expense of fragrances. We do sniff each other out, literally as well as figuratively. Where the British have been preoccupied with smell and class relations, North Americans have been equally concerned with smell and race relations. Thomas Jefferson expressed the thoughts of many Whites when he stated that Blacks have ‘a very strong and disagreeable odour’. Edward Long, a virulent Jamaican planter, wrote in 1774 that Blacks have a ‘bestial or faetid smell’. Dr Benjamin Rush, a noted abolitionist in the 1790s, agreed and attributed this smell to leprosy (Jordan, 1969:459, 492, 518; cf. 256–7). The history and politics of olfaction have rarely been studied, but Alain Corbin has investigated odours in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Almost every population group was said to have its own distinctive odour, and some were described in great detail. Peasants, nuns, redheads, Jews, Blacks, Cossacks, cleaners, 195

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Germans, Finns, ragpickers, the poor, virgins, prostitutes…they all smelled different, with the odour tending to reflect the imagined moral status of the population: virgins good, prostitutes bad. Sailors were among the worst: His customs are debauched; he finds supreme happiness in drunkenness; the odor of tobacco, wedded to the vapors of wine, alcohol, garlic, and the other coarse foods that he likes to eat, the perfume of his clothing often impregnated with sweat, filth and tar make it repulsive to be near him. (Corbin, 1986:147) The description of odours, fragrant or foul, therefore becomes a covert moral labelling. And such labelling of class, ethnic and other groups persists today. But such moral labelling, based on olfactory beliefs, does have practical social consequences. Gunnar Myrdal observed: The belief in a peculiar ‘hircine odor’ of Negroes, like similar beliefs concerning other races, touches a personal sphere and is useful to justify the denial of social intercourse and the use of public conveniences, which would imply close contact, such as restaurants, theaters and public conveyances. (1944:107) And, one might add, schools and jobs. He added: ‘It is remarkable that it does not hinder the utilization of Negroes in even the most intimate household work and personal services’ (1944:107). John Dollard discussed the belief ‘very widely held both in the North and the South’ that ‘Negroes have a smell extremely disagreeable to white people’. He described it as one of many ‘defensive measures’ adopted by racist Whites: ‘a crushing final proof of the impossibility of close association between the races’ (1937/1957:380). Thus smell ‘justified’ institutional segregation and racial oppression in the United States, as it ‘justified’ class prejudice and discrimination in the United Kingdom. North Americans have not been alone in this. Adolf Hitler deplored the smell of the Jews, and said it was symbolic of their moral condition: Cleanliness, whether moral or of another kind, had its own peculiar meaning for these people. That they were water-shy was obvious on looking at them and, unfortunately, very often 196

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also when not looking at them at all. The odour of those people in caftans often used to make me feel ill…but the revolting feature was that beneath their unclean exterior one suddenly perceived the moral mildew of the chosen race. (1924/1942:42) For Hitler there was a clear union of exterior and interior, outer and inner impurity, odour and morality. Foul smells were not just unpleasant, they symbolized an inner rottenness. The racist tradition reverts back to the United Kingdom as Ian Fleming, in one of the James Bond novels, refers to the ‘feral smell of two hundred negro bodies’ (1954/1978:55)—Blacks as animals again. And a London dockworker commented on Pakistanis: ‘They smell don’t they?’ (Time, 20.5.70:38; in Largey and Watson, 1972:1023). A rather uncertain prejudice, but it does demonstrate the role of odour. Odours, therefore, both real and imagined, may serve to legitimize inequalities of both class and race, and they are one of the criteria by which a negative moral identity may be imposed upon a particular population. Gender also factors into these equations. Men are supposed to smell of sweat, whisky and tobacco, according to Kipling; and women, presumably, are supposed to smell ‘good’: clean, pure and attractive. Certainly the advertising appeals of perfumes are very different, both pictorially and verbally, for men and women. In general the advertisements seem to promise happiness, luxury, glamour, and the other sex; but in some, the message of violence is overt. In the seventies, an advertisement for ‘007’ cologne stated: ‘007 gives men license to kill…women.’ Another, for ‘By George’ said: ‘She won’t? By George, she will’ (Largey and Watson, 1972:1030). Violence is legitimized. No means Yes. And sexual conquest is a male right. 9 In the nineties the theme persists. In general, the names of the perfumes, colognes and fragrances seem to express not only different but almost opposite self-concepts for the so-called opposite sexes. A partial list of women’s perfumes and fragrances includes the following: Beautiful, Passion, Joy, Lumière, Mystère, White Shoulders, White Linen, Ivoire, Cover Girl, Enchantment, Chantilly, L’Emeraude, Le Jardin, L’Aimant, Paris, L’Air du Temps, Diva, and such spicy brand names as Basile and Coriandre. They express a wide range of values—but very different from this partial list of 197

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men’s fragrances: Boss, Brut, Imperiale, Toro, Eau Sauvage, Aramis, Polo, Hero, Gray Flannel, English Leather, Bogart, Maestro, L’Homme and Gentleman, and such cowboy themes as Stetson, Chaps and New West. The brand names alone socialize and educate the ‘opposite’ sexes into opposite roles, as do the advertising images, the verbal texts, and the packaging colours and styles. As opposite, these brand names transform biological differentiation into social hierarchy and power: pink or blue, Beautiful or Boss, Ivoire or Imperiale, Passion or Polo, Joy or Toro, and so on. There are exceptions to this simple gender dichotomy. Some fragrances are named after the house—Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio, etc.—and these names do not socialize users so forcefully into opposing values, although the advertising shots and the ‘hype’ may do so. Also some products are marketed for both women and men, although the fragrances are different. Third, some women’s fragrances do not fit into these traditional dichotomies at all, like Charlie. Indeed Charlie was perhaps the first fragrance to break the ancient stereotypes with the ‘Charlie’ woman in the advertisements patting the man on the behind and, with a second item of role reversal, using a man’s name. The fragrance sold well, not least because of the image it conveyed of a capable, modern, liberated woman. Since then, new fragrances have been labelled with a more deadly and lethal set of values: Poison, Opium, Obsession and Evil (by Elvira); and others are more active, animalistic and carnivorous: Action, Animale and Panthère. Despite these changes, the traditional beautiful, joyous and passionate images are still the norm for women. Finally, some fragrances for both sexes project not only nonsexual images but also quite bizarre ones: Bazaar, Quorum, Fahrenheit, Blue Grass, Cabochard, Old Spice, Kouros and others. Who would want to smell like a bazaar? Or a quorum? and what does Fahrenheit smell like? But perhaps this is being too literal; maybe the images appeal. The gender polarization is therefore neither complete nor total: there is an overlap and there are exceptions; but the polarization is none the less dominant. Fragrance is politics. The political power of fragrance is reinforced by the texts, the advertising and the packaging of the products (see Goffman, 1979; Williamson, 1978). The sexual politics of odour is much more than the fragrance industry, however, and is more intimate and 198

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personal. Whites may have detested the smell of Blacks (and vice versa, as we shall see), and the upper class may have disliked the smell of the workers (and vice versa), but there is also a long and strong tradition in male humour and literature that, to paraphrase George Orwell, ‘the real secret of gender relations in the West is summed up in four frightful words: the female sex smells’. The number of jokes to this effect are legion and will not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that one of the functions of humour is to put down other people. Sexist jokes, like racist ones, may be funny to some people but offensive to, and also oppressive of, the targeted population. The tradition in the male literature is ambivalent. Men enjoy the smell of women; and virgins smell sweet, according to a French tradition, for ‘the tender odor of marjoram that the virgin exhales is sweeter, more intoxicating than all the perfumes of Arabia’, wrote a Frenchman in 1846 (in Corbin, 1986:183). The loved one may smell lovely, like ‘strawberries and cream’ in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922/ 1971:372). Robert Herrick (1591–1674) flew into nasal ecstasies over Anthea: her breasts, lips, hands, thighs, legs, ‘are all/ Richly aromatical’. And in the breast of Julia, ‘all the spices of the East/ Are circumfused’. Another lady is described as a garden of olfactory delights, of ‘blooming clove’, ‘roses’, ‘spiced wine’, ‘jessimine’, ‘honey’, ‘oringe flowers’, ‘almond blossoms’, warmed amber, the ‘mornings milk and cream’, ‘butter of cowslips’, and more…‘Thus sweet she smells’. Not only did Herrick love these personal scents, but he also attacked the perfume business; he prayed one lady: ‘From Powders and Perfumes keep free/That we shall smell how sweet you be’ (1921:59, 69, 145, 111). But there is another side to this male discourse. Henry Miller was the first to introduce vaginal odour into public discourse, in Tropic of Capricorn (1922/1962:113–14; cf. Corbin, 1986:246). But on what terms? What did it mean? Kate Millett answers, in her forthright style: ‘This is reality, Miller would persuade us: cunt stinks, as Curly says, and cunt is sex. With regard to the male anatomy, things are very different, since “prick” is power’ (1971:307). Miller’s polarization of female and male, stink and power, cunt and prick, is an intrinsic component of his oppression of women. ‘What Miller did articulate’, says Millett (1971:295), was the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence, and the sense of filth with which our culture, or more specifically, 199

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its masculine sensibility, surrounds sexuality. And women too; for somehow it is women upon whom this onerous burden of sexuality falls. The dynamics of sexism, racism and classism are therefore similar in this political definition and exploitation of olfaction. Indeed an entire feminine hygiene industry has been built on this perception that women smell. Commenting on the successful market strategies for ‘intimate deodorants’, Haug has noted that in Germany in the late sixties 43 per cent of females between the ages of 16 and 60, and 87 per cent of 19-year-old females, were protecting themselves, and others, against their own body odours. Haug commented: From now on the human body smells repellant…This process can be called the moulding of sensuality. It demonstrates vividly how blind mechanisms of profit-making, as an essentially indifferent means to an end and a by-product of profit, can alter human sensuality. (1986:77) Germaine Greer angrily satirized the ‘brilliant boffins’ of the toiletries industries for ‘inventing the problem (at one and the same instant as its solution) of vaginal odour…After all, it’s not as if the streets had been littered with those overcome by vaginal fumes’ (1987:63–4). This conjunction of patriarchy and capitalism has created a need, and fulfilled it, at some economic benefit to the few, and perhaps a high social cost to the many. It is difficult to estimate the social costs of the destruction of self-esteem and the creation of self-nausea (if any); but Shere Hite’s survey on female sexuality included a very direct question: ‘Do they [your vaginal and genital area] smell good or bad?’ The responses ranged widely. Thirty per cent replied ‘good’ or ‘great’; 15 per cent said ‘bad’; 1 per cent said ‘neither’; and 8 per cent said ‘sometimes good, sometimes bad’. The rest gave either generally positive answers: okay, good if clean, sexy, natural, exciting, stimulating, unusual, interesting, yummy, funky, earthy, desirable, for a total of 41 per cent; or generally negative answers: 4 per cent. In sum, about 71 per cent of the sample were generally positive and 19 per cent were generally negative (1976:619). If Haug and Greer are correct in their analysis of vaginal deodorants, however, then attitudes may become 200

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increasingly negative. Odour differentiation legitimizes patriarchy and gender inequality, therefore, as it did and does class and race inequality. Although smells are employed to justify hegemony, the same tactics are also employed by disenfranchized populations to challenge the unequal status quo; and the terms of the debate are just as intimate, blunt and crude. Orwell observed that ‘orientals say that we smell. The Chinese, I believe, say that a white man smells like a corpse. The Burmese say the same—though no Burman was rude enough to say so to me’ (1937:174). The Japanese used to describe the Europeans as bata-kusai: ‘stinks of butter’ (Gibbons, 1986:348; cf. Fields, 1985:104–5). Malcolm X also remarked that whites ‘were different from us—such as…the different way that white people smelled’ (1965:17; cf. 26). The olfactory politics of Jefferson, Fleming, Miller and others is therefore countered by the olfactory politics of the Burmese, the Japanese, Malcolm X and others. Diamond Jenness reported a frank exchange with a Copper Eskimo on the subject of ethnic odours during the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–18: There seems to be quite a distinctive odour exuded from their skin different from that of white people. An old woman once asked me whether I had noticed an objectionable odour about them when I first arrived in their country. I stated that all our party had noticed it, and she answered ‘That is not strange, for we noticed the same thing about you.’ (1923:39) As with ethnic relations, so with gender relations. Men also smell. Television advertising in particular ‘shows’ that men, more than women, have bad breath, need powerful underarm deodorants, have smelly feet requiring odour-eating charcoal filter inserts in their shoes, and they have ring around the collar. ‘Secret’ deodorant, for instance, is ‘strong enough for a man but made for a woman’, which implies that men smell stronger, i.e. worse.; and it is boys and men who play in the mud and get filthy. Biologically, men have more apocrine glands than women, and sweat more; and in the semiotics of advertising, as in biology, men seem to be the major polluters of the domestic environment, while women are the major cleaners of the same place. In sum, men are portrayed as dirty and smelly all over, from mud or oil or smoke-smeared faces and 201

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dirty necks to their feet. Men’s smells are dispersed over the entire body. Women’s smells, in contrast, are semiotically centred on the genitals, as discussed earlier. This is not so much ironic as another indication of patriarchal misogyny, the psychic displacement of women from their bodies, as Greer and Haug argued, and the pathologization of corporeal normality. Women sometimes say that men stink, of booze, sweat, smegma or whatever. A survey of women in St Louis recently asked: ‘What one thing do you look for in a significant relationship?’ The number one answer was ‘good hygiene’ (Montreal Gazette, 4.9.90). Not cash nor even passion, but a wash. To paraphrase Orwell again: ‘The real secret of gender relations in the West is summed up in two frightful words: men smell’. Smell is as political as the vote. CONCLU SION

Nietzsche, one of the few philosophers to consider the significance of odour, commented bluntly: What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What avails all decency and mutual usefulness and good will toward each other—in the end the fact remains: ‘They can’t stand each other’s smell!’ (1886/1966:221) Smelling good and smelling bad are constituent elements in the presentation of the self and the construction of the other, whether these odours are natural, manufactured or symbolic. Thus people attract and repel each other. The profound intimacy of olfaction and perfume lies in the fact that one person is breathing and inhaling the emanations of another person. Thus the two people become one, in an olfactory sense; and in the empire of odour, the fragrance is the aroma of the soul. A primary role of odours in our culture is aesthetic. People deodorize and re-odorize to smell nice, to feel good, to be beautiful and to attract. These symbolic interpersonal relations are only a small part of the arena of olfactory sociology. Ethnic, class and gender relations are also all mediated by odours, real or imagined. And odour is not only symbolic and political, it is also, as we have ‘seen’, economic. 202

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The use of artificial fragrances has a long history, going back at least as far as the Egyptians and Babylonians. Fragrances have been used, and often still are, in many religious ceremonies in many faiths around the world, in social and political rituals, from dating to coronations, in food preparation, in healing rituals, to mask unpleasant odours, and in the Arab world in the mortar for the construction of certain mosques (Thompson, 1969). Indeed the origins of artificial fragrances in Judaeo-Christian culture are divine. The Lord himself instructed Moses to create a perfume, and gave him the formula of myrrh, cinnamon, cane, cassia and olive oil (Exodus 30:22–4). Pleasing God and pleasing other people are only two of the many functions of odour. A good nose is still a useful diagnostic tool in medical practice (Smith et al., 1982; and see the correspondence in The Lancet, 5.2.83:292–3). In this ‘sense’, the odour does betray the physical state of the self—but not the moral state, as prejudiced people have argued. Today, however, some of the principal concerns with odour are legal, industrial and sexual. Olfactory pollution is increasingly being debated and researched as a risk to health and to comfort. Smell is now a legal matter. In our terms, the presentation of the self in favourable olfactory terms is negated by an environment of foulsmelling industrial effluvia. Industrial pollution is one aspect of olfactory sociology; yet another is the fragrancing of industrial production. Aromas do have significant industrial application. In Japan studies indicate that exposure to certain fragrances, even subliminally perceived, has positive psychophysiological effects, and results in increased productivity. Some companies waft scents through the central ventilation system; and Shiseido now markets a portable perfumer to freshen up offices, reception areas or lobbies. Tests by Shiseido indicate that in a fragranced environment (lemon or cedar) computer keyboard typists typed 14 per cent more strokes per hour, and made 21 per cent fewer errors. Citrus fragrances are used by one company to stimulate workers in the morning, and after lunch; floral scents aid concentration in late mornings and after-noons; and woody fragrances, cedar or cypress, relieve tiredness at midday and in the evening. Cinnamon and jasmine are thought to raise the spirits and reduce anxiety (Globe and Mail, 27.2.92). It seems that the economic and psychological benefits of fragrancing are only now 203

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being appreciated; and testing will likely continue on the effects of lavender, peppermint, vanilla and so on. Piped fragrance, with the piped and purified air, and piped music: the control of the sensory environment is being maximized. Coordinated colours caress the eye; and food and drink are chemically flavoured and coloured. The senses may now be utilized, not by ourselves to perceive the world and communicate with others, but by others to maximize productivity, lessen fatigue, enhance performance, inspire festivity or induce calmness. The senses are not only a medium of communication with others but also a medium of control by others. ‘Big Brother is watching you’ was the theme of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, but in the 1990s he is also directly controlling you, perhaps subliminally, by odour. The general public has been particularly interested in the search for the ultimate aphrodisiac: a human pheromone. While many researchers doubt that humans will respond to odours as automatically as some animals and insects, none the less, for some people, any response at all would be appreciated (Hassett, 1978; White, 1981; Weintraub, 1986). The irony is that as we de-odorize and re-odorize, we probably destroy, at least temporarily, whatever pheromones we secrete, and indeed prevent the very chemical reactions which we are attempting to induce. The very odours which are sexually attractive may also be socially unacceptable: an aphrodisiacal Catch-22. Perhaps this is why the satyr Pan was a goat (see Robbins, 1984). It is no doubt partly in response to an appreciation of the significance of odour that, in recent years, research into olfaction has increased substantially, both in quantity and in scope. The Fragrance Foundation conducted literature searches of two major scientific bio-medical data bases, M E DLI N E and B IOS I S, produced by the US National Library of Medicine. The two bases overlap somewhat, but ME DLIN E is principally medical, and BIOS IS principally relates to the life sciences. The total number of olfactory-related publications listed in M EDLI NE increased from 710 in 1966 to 2,535 in 1987: a 357 per cent increase; in BIOS IS the increase was almost 586 per cent, from 675 in 1969 to 3,957 in 1987. Since the total number of publications had also increased considerably, however, we need to know the relative, as well as the absolute, increase. The Foundation calculated that: ‘In MEDLIN E the proportion of olfactory related publications 204

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doubled over the time span, while in BIOSIS it tripled’ (Fragrance Research Fund, 1989:3–4). The First International Conference on the Psychology of Perfumery was held in the UK, at the University of Warwick in 1986. This effectively institutionalized research on olfaction and fragrance and was the first multidisciplinary and joint industrial/ academic conference on the topic. The published papers indicate the current range of research (Van Toller and Dodd, 1988), and although no sociologists were apparently involved in the conference, this may mark a turning-point in the recognition of the social significance of olfaction in society. To conclude, olfaction plays important but often unnoticed roles in our culture, and perhaps more important because unnoticed. We have focussed principally on the moral construction of the individual and various populations in the political economy of olfaction. None the less, even with this brief overview it is clear that odour has powerful aesthetic, sexual, spiritual, medical and legal as well as emotional, moral, political and economic implications; and that these are intertwined. Ultimately, odour is a constituent component of individual and group identity, both real and imagined. Yet it is also much more than that, and pervades and invades every domain of our social lives.

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8 SIGHT The eye and the I

Ours is a visual age. We are bombarded with pictures from morning till night. Opening our newspaper at breakfast we see photographs of men and women in the news, and raising our eyes from the paper, we encounter the picture on the cereal package. The mail arrives and one envelope after the other discloses glossy folders with pictures of alluring landscapes and sunbathing girls to entice us to take a holiday cruise, or of elegant menswear to tempt us to have a suit made to measure. Leaving our house, we pass billboards along the road that try to catch our eye and play on our desire to smoke, drink or eat. At work it is more than likely that we have to deal with some kind of pictorial information, photographs, sketches, catalogues, blueprints, maps or at least graphs. Relaxing in the evening we sit in front of the television set, the new window of the world, and watch moving images of pleasures and horrors flit by. Even the images created in times gone by or in distant lands are more easily accessible to us than they ever were to the public for which they were created. Picture books, picture postcards and color slides accumulate in our homes as souvenirs of travel, as do the private mementos of our family snapshots. (Gombrich, 1972:82) Ours is indeed a visual age. It would be difficult to say that it is an olfactory or tactile or oral or aural age; if not impossible. Sight is supreme. In this chapter we will explore the phenomenology of sight. How is sight constructed: what does seeing mean? Or, rephrasing this in more hegemonic terms, how is seeing seen? What are the 206

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implications of the supremacy of sight in the sensory hierarchy? The chapter is divided into three parts. First, we consider the dimensions of visual supremacy in our language, proverbs and literature, and its roots in the ancient Greek and Christian traditions. Yet there is an opposing and negative tradition also; and in the second part we consider the notion of the evil eye and the ascetic distrust of sight; recent critiques include those of Sartre, Foucault and the women’s movement, from very different perspectives. In the third part we view the semiotics of the eye as symbolic of the self, the I. The eye is the I; and the I is the eye. In the conclusion we explore some of the theoretical and practical implications of these alternative ‘views’ of sight. The limits of this chapter should be mentioned. We do not discuss the social psychology of gaze and non-verbal communication, since this has been well reviewed elsewhere;1 nor do we consider the anthropology of sight; 2 and we do not have space to discuss blindness and the visually impaired.3 THE NOBLEST SENSE

The primacy of sight is indicated most easily and directly by surveys I conducted with my students. I asked them which sense they would least like to lose: which sense is most precious to them? 75 per cent of them (sample size 184) said sight; 16 per cent said touch; and 7 per cent said hearing. A few surveys of a non-representative sample do not prove a point; but then probably few would deny the cultural supremacy of sight. The degree of supremacy, however, is immense. Why this immense superiority? Probably for the obvious reason that sight is so necessary and useful for a comfortable life; we tend to think that being blind would be much worse than being deaf or dumb or anosmic. The primacy of sight is particularly clear in our folk sayings. ‘Seeing is believing’, we say, as if this is obviously true; and thus we establish sight as the paradigm of belief. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ establishes sight as the ultimate in empirical verification, and definitive; accordingly we may urge someone to ‘see for yourself. Having seen, we may conclude that ‘There’s more to this than meets the eye’, or perhaps ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes’—but I had to, I saw it for myself. Sight is far more reliable than hearing, according to our folk wisdom, as is ‘shown’ by the advice: ‘Believe nothing of what you 207

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hear, and only half of what you see.’ Robert Herrick’s couplet ‘The Eyes before the Eares’ captures this hierarchy of the senses easily: ‘We credit most our sight; one eye doth please/Our trust farre more than ten eare-witnesses’ (1921:280). The hierarchy is particularly obvious in the ancient dialogue between children and parents: ‘I didn’t do it!’ ‘You did! I saw you!’ One’s own eyes are far more reliable witnesses than someone else’s tongue. In this view, language lies, and hides the truth; sight sees the truth, or at least part of it. For this reason, perhaps, courts refuse to admit hearsay evidence; but eye-witness testimony is acceptable. In this practice justice is not so much blind as deaf. This sensory bias is evident in economics as in law. We are assured that ‘what you see is what you get’. Sight does have limits, however; for we are also told that ‘appearances are deceptive’, and to ‘look but don’t touch’—partly because touching may damage the products, but also because the products may not bear a close inspection. In this ‘sense’ tactility is superior to visibility. Sight is also paradigmatic of knowledge. ‘I see’, we say, meaning ‘I understand’; and ‘I see what you mean.’ When we agree, we ‘see eye to eye’. Leaders of ‘vision’ are required, with a long-term ‘perspective’ and a ‘world-view’. And the same sensory bias applies not only to knowledge but also to people: ‘See you around’, we may call as we wave goodbye; and, as we greet them again, we smile and say, ‘It’s good to see you.’ We do not usually say ‘It’s good to smell you.’ Sight is particularly equated with love; it is ‘love at first sight’, not any other sense. This may be described as the ‘across a crowded room syndrome’, when you may see the proverbial stranger. Occasionally we may ask about apparently mismatched couples: ‘What does she see in him? Is she blind?’ To which the other may reply that ‘love is blind!’ As Dundes (1972:8) has remarked: ‘Americans tend to see the world around them, rather than hear, feel, smell, or taste it.’ Our language also indicates the ocularcentrism of our culture. Sight is equated with understanding and knowledge in much of our vocabulary: insight, idea, illuminate, light, enlighten, visible, reflect, clarity, survey, perspective, point of view, vision, observation, show, overview, farsighted…you see? (see Ong, 1977:133; Jay, 1986). Similarly, the antonyms of these terms imply a lack of knowledge and understanding: blind, unclear, dim, obscure, hidden, dark, invisible, cloudy. And all these terms carry a heavy load of intellectual and emotional negativity. 208

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The symbolic power of vision is reinforced by the allegorical equations of sight=light=sun=God. The sun, a traditional allegory of God, emits the light by which we see; conversely, by our understanding and vision we may come to ‘see’ God; again, omniscience (total illumination) is one of the attributes of God. Furthermore, the all-seeing eye of Divine Providence is everywhere, even today. ‘God is watching us, from a distance’, sings Bette Midler. In a secular age, it is Santa Claus who knows if we have been ‘naughty or nice’, so ‘be good for goodness sake’. Somehow the all-smelling nose of God does not have the same connotations of knowing and loving, virtue and vice. The ocularcentrism of the Christian tradition is therefore congruent with its heliocentrism and theocentrism. Humanity’s noblest sense, sight, coincides with our noblest faculty, reason. Each symbolically reciprocates the other. This hegemony reflects the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, which we discussed in chapter 5; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition reinforces the Greek tradition. The Biblical myth of creation states that ‘in the beginning’ all was in total darkness; ‘then God commanded, “Let there be light”—and light appeared. God was pleased with what he saw’ (Genesis 1:3–4). The equation of God and light is repeated constantly throughout the Old and the New Testament: the psalmist sings: ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation’ (Psalm 27:1); Isaiah affirms that ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light’ (Isaiah 9:2); Christ said: ‘I am the light of the world’ (John 8:12); and he told the disciples: ‘You are like light for the whole world’ (Matthew 5:14). The corollary of this vision of light, sight and God is the binary opposition of the equation of darkness, blindness, death, the Devil and evil. Job despairs: ‘I am going soon and will never come back— going to a land that is dark and gloomy, a land of darkness, shadows and confusion, where the light itself is darkness’ (Job 10:21–2). The divine light of salvation also transfers to the personal light in the eyes and King Solomon sings: ‘Who is this whose glance is like the dawn? She is beautiful and bright, as dazzling as the sun or the vision’ (Song of Songs 6:10). Again, the power of light permeates politics. The image of God as light is reflected in the image of King as light. The dedication of the King James version of the Bible refers to ‘the appearance of Your Majesty as of the sun in his strength’. And Louis XIV was referred to as ‘le roi soleil’; this is entirely congruent with his own 209

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dictum ‘l’état c’est moi’. God=King=state=sun: the unification of these concepts and metaphors not only creates a strong knot, but also reinforces the hegemony of sight. Wordsworth recognized this hegemony, but perhaps surprisingly rejected it, referring to sight as ‘the most despotic of our senses’ (Prelude, Bk 12). But this rejection is unusual: our deepest cultural traditions have valorized and continue to valorize sight. And as our age becomes increasingly visual, the hegemony of sight is consolidated. The equation of sight and reason may have its roots far back in human evolutionary history. Freud has suggested that sight replaced smell as our dominant sense when anthropoids began to walk erect (1985:247, 288–9). The eye replaced the nose. Smelling is the characteristic animal sense; sight the characteristic human sense, in this ‘view’. Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, however, suggested an intermediate sensory transition, arguing that the dominant communication systems in preliterate societies were the proximity senses: oral-aural, in face to face interaction. Humanity lived (and still does live) in ‘acoustic space’. But with the invention of the alphabet and writing by the ancient Egyptians the balance of the sensorium began to shift. ‘Man was given an eye for an ear…The goose quill put an end to talk’ (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967:44, 48). The balance shifted further with the invention of the printing press and further still with the electronic revolution, so we now live in a visual age. To paraphrase McLuhan: The television, the computer and E-mail put an end to talk. Communication is increasingly impersonal, detached, mechanical and visual; bookish or screened. So human history can be ‘seen’ as a progressive sensory shift from olfaction to oral/aural to vision, from the nose to the mouth/ ear combination to the eye. The dominance of sight over the other senses and the ocularcentrism of our culture is therefore indicated by a wide range of linked phenomena: our vocabulary, our proverbs, survey data, physiological development (Freud), and technological change (McLuhan and Ong); also by the ancient philosophical equation of sight and reason (Plato and Aristotle), and by the Judaeo-Christian equation of God and light. The ancient Greek equation of sight and reason is now embodied in our language, proverbs and culture. But Walter Ong has suggested that there are major difficulties with this equation. He cites the Jesuit philosopher Father Lonergan: 210

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For understanding is not like seeing. Understanding grows with time: you understand one point, then another, and a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and your understanding changes several times until you have things right Seeing is not like that, so that to say knowing is like seeing is to disregard understanding as a constitutive element in human knowledge. (In Ong, 1977:121–2) The analogy ‘robs knowledge of its interiority’ and subjectivity, and ignores the insights of phenomenology that knowledge is socially constructed. Sight sees su.rfaces; but knowledge is incremental, it is subjective and culturally relative, and it is constructed from the perceptions of all five senses and past experience. The analogy of sight and understanding therefore has limited utility, despite its popularity; and the primacy of ocularity is based on false premises, according to Ong (1977). This false equation of seeing as believing and knowing has epistemological consequences as well as theological ones. The heavy loads of guilt and fear in traditional Christianity, before Vatican II, may be partly consequential upon the ‘view’ of God as all-seeing, all-knowing and transcendent rather than as all-creative, loving and immanent. (Such categories are not mutually exclusive, of course; but the balance between them may vary.) Similarly, a Cartesian episteme of detachment, rationality and objectivity, the classical model of science as empiricism, is very different from the involved, subjective and lived perspective of existentialism, phenomenology and much contemporary feminism. The high evaluation of sight in our culture is therefore not simply a matter of linguistic and folkloric interest, but has far-reaching implications for many diverse corners of our lives: in the devaluation of the other senses, but also for religion, science, language and social relations. Sight may be the noblest and the best-loved of the senses, as Aristotle said; but such a love affair has serious consequences. And even the bright light of the sun casts a shadow. THE EVIL EYE

Despite the power of the tradition lauding the eye and sight, there is also a countervailing tradition which warns of the visual danger of the eye to the self; and this is evident in the ascetic tradition 211

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within Christianity. Christ warned his disciples particularly about the eye (Matthew 18:9); and John Chrysostom warned that: ‘the beauty of woman is the greatest snare. Or rather, not the beauty of woman but unchastened gazing!’ Chrysostom recommended visual fasting: ‘Let the eyes fast, being taught never to fix themselves rudely upon handsome countenances’ (1956:442, 259). Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, insisted that his retreatants maintain ‘custody of the eyes’ at all times, to minimize distractions and to keep focussed (1963:39). It is interesting that this attitude to sight was exactly opposite to Plato’s, who argued that from seeing a beautiful boy, people are led step by step up ‘the heavenly ladder’ of beauty to the understanding of Absolute Beauty which is God (Symposium 210–12; 1963:562–3). Augustine admitted in his Confessions that: ‘I am tempted through the eye’; but, like the Platonist he was, he defined God as Beauty: ‘I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!’ (Bk X, 1961:259, 231). Sight may lead to God, in one view, or in the other opinion, to ‘the fires of hell’. This moral negativism towards sight persists within the ascetic tradition: ‘unchastened gazing’ is still considered morally risky. But it is complemented now by a secular negativism which Martin Jay (1986) has described as ‘the anti-visual discourse of 20th century French thought’. This negativism is particularly apparent in Sartre and Foucault. For Sartre, sight is not paradigmatic of belief or knowledge, it does not lead through beauty to God, nor does it lead through loss of faith or unchastened gazing to the fires of hell. In a famous chapter entitled ‘The Look’ (Le Regard) in Being and Nothingness, (1943) Sartre displays an almost paranoid fear of being seen by the Other. ‘What does being seen mean for me?’ he asks (1966:347). His answer is: ‘this indication to run away, which dominates me and carries me along and which I am—this I read in the Other’s watchful look and in that other look—the gun pointed at me’ (1966:354). The theme of war is endemic in his discussion; and the trauma of the look is heightened by the extension of the look to other senses: What most often manifests a look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. But the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening 212

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of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain. During an attack men who are crawling through the brush apprehend as a look to be avoided, not two eyes, but a white farmhouse which is outlined against the sky at the top of a little hill. (1966:346) All very sinister, and all very inclusive. The look may be a sound or a movement, perhaps also a taste or a smell, and even a farmhouse. And such looks kill. Sartre adds that ‘we can consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ in so far as we appear to the Other…[so] I am in danger’. Indeed, the subjective reactions to the Other’s look…are fear (the feeling of being in danger before the Other’s freedom), pride, or shame,…[and] the recognition of my slavery… Through the Other’s look I live myself as fixed in the midst of the world in danger…Thus in the look the death of my possibilities causes me to experience the Other’s freedom. (1966:358–9, 362; his emphasis throughout) This is a bleak vision of the look, and of life, and a complete departure not only from the ancient Greek and Christian traditions, but also from the Germanic tradition of ‘the glance’ as symbolic of the self in Hegel and Simmel, which we will consider below. Despite Sartre’s pessimism, the look is central to his philosophy, and thus retains its pre-eminence as the prime sense, albeit with a negative weighting. The look replaces the ‘cogito’ of Cartesian philosophy: Each look makes us prove concretely-and in the indubitable certainty of the cogito—that we exist for all living men; that is, that there are (some) consciousnesses for whom I exist. (1966:374; cf. 376) But what an existence, and what a look! In Sartre’s view, seeing is not the noblest sense, nor is seeing believing; seeing is fear, danger and the gun. Sight reveals the Other, but also the self, and inspires ‘the recognition of my slavery’. This theory of the look is surprisingly cognate with the idea of the God of the Old Testament as seeing everything, and punishing; and it surely clarifies his famous pessimistic dictum: ‘Hell is other people’; and his preoccupation with nausea. Sartre’s one-time friend and colleague, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was far more optimistic about sight. In ‘Eye and Mind’ (L’oeuil et 213

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l’esprit), the last work he saw published, he displays his fascination with seeing and painting in a pro-visual discourse. ‘The eye is an instrument which moves itself, he asserted (1974:186); which is almost identical with the Aristotelian definition of God as the unmoved prime mover. The primacy of vision is indicated by his definition of ‘the enigma’ in primarily visual terms: The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. (1974:283) He not only praises sight, and therefore capsizes Sartrean pessimism, but also directly attacks Sartre’s theory of sensation as subjective illusion, as ‘a pure daydream’ (cf. Sartre, 1966:416– 17). Sensation is reality. The resolution of this enigma is described in sensory and poetic, rather than in Cartesian cogitative terms: There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place—when the spark is lit between sensing and sensible, lighting the fire that will not stop burning until some accident of the body will undo what no accident would have sufficed to do. (1974:284–5) He cited Rilke approvingly: The eye…through which the beauty of the universe is revealed to our contemplation is of such excellence that whoever should resign himself to losing it would deprive himself of the knowledge of all the works of nature, the sight of which makes the soul live happily in its body’s prison, thanks to the eyes which show him the infinite variety of creation: whoever loses them abandons his soul in a dark prison where all hope of once more seeing the sun, the light of the universe, must vanish. (1974:307) 214

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Hence, he added, ‘the eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul—the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun…Vision encounters, as at a crossroads, all the aspects of Being’ (1974:307, 309). The eye brings not fear, but joy; not slavery, but the sun; it sees not danger, but beauty; and it meets not the fearsome Other, but Being. Sartre sees the look eyeing him through the telescopic sight of a sniper’s rifle; Merleau-Ponty sees the eyes, and life, through rose-coloured glasses. Sartre equates seeing with death; Merleau-Ponty equates it with life and love. Michel Foucault, however, sees the eyes not so much as organs of vision but as instruments of power. For Sartre and MerleauPonty, ‘the look’ is personal, whether hostile or loving; for Foucault ‘the gaze’ is political. Sight is not only vision, it is also knowledge and power. Etymologically the three words are cognates in the French language: voir, savoir and pouvoir; each implies the other. Foucault demonstrates the political reality of ‘the gaze’ in extensive research on many of the institutions of social life: the school, the army, the factory, the asylum, the prison and the clinic. He brought Sartre’s speculative philosophy down to earth, citing times and places. He looked at the social world with a new eye, regarding society as an entire system, or set of systems, of institutionalized surveillance. He developed the first inklings of his idea early. In Madness and Civilization (1961) he noted that madness was a ‘spectacle’ in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. The mad were displayed to the curious for a small fee and, on occasion, were made to dance and do acrobatics. The mad were a sight (1967:68–70). The theme of sight recurs: ‘madness is dazzlement’, he says. ‘Dazzlement is night in broad daylight, the darkness that rules at the very heart of what is excessive in light’s radiance. Dazzled reason opens its eyes upon the sun and sees nothing, that is, does not see.’ Madness is ‘reason dazzled’ or unreason (1967:108– 9). As such it required confinement in the asylum, with constant surveillance, and with chains and shackles for those who were dangerous. The chains and shackles were largely removed in the nineteenth century, to be replaced by the mirror. Madness would no longer be punished: Madness would see itself, would be seen by itself—pure spectacle and absolute subject…Madness is made to observe itself, but in others’ eyes, where its absurdity is dazzlingly obvious. Thus 215

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others become the mirror of the self, and the mirror…becomes an agent of demystification. (1967:262–3) First the mad were watched by guards, and stared at by the public for amusement, and then they observed themselves for a cure. The gaze is multi-functional. Foucault then glanced from the asylum to the clinic, where the gaze was not of surveillance but of knowledge and truth. Two ocular phenomena characterized the birth of the clinic in the French revolutionary era at the turn of the nineteenth century. The first was the visual examination: objective, detached, scientific, impersonal and Cartesian. ‘The eye becomes the depository and source of clarity’ (1973:xiii). Students were advised to: ‘Read little, see much and do much.’ And a reformer insisted: ‘One must, as far as possible, make science ocular.’ Thus the sovereignty of the gaze gradually established itself—the eye that knows and decides, the eye that governs (1973:70, 88–9). Furthermore, the eye which sees in silence can hear and can touch; so emerges a multi-sensorial eye: ‘A hearing gaze and a speaking gaze…a speaking eye’ (1973:107–15). The clinical eye also touches; it ‘is no longer the ear straining to catch a language but the index finger palpating the depths’ (1973:123). The second ocular initiative was the development of the new science of pathological anatomy: the autopsy. Foucault asserts that ‘the great break in the history of western medicine dates precisely from the moment clinical experience became the anatomo-clinical gaze’. This was in 1801, with Richard’s instruction: ‘Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dissipate.’ Thus ‘the living night is dissipated in the brightness of death’, and ‘knowledge spins where once larva was formed’ (1973:146, 125). The contrast with Descartes is instructive. Where Descartes plugged up all his senses in order to know, the reformers of the Enlightenment unplugged them: they opened their multi-sensed eyes. In Discipline and Punish (1975), however, Foucault developed his sociology of gaze to its logical conclusion as state control. Beginning with the ‘microphysics of bio-power’, the control of the infinitesimal movements of all the parts of the human body by power figures, in schools, factories, armies and so on, and in times of emergency such as the plague, Foucault argues: ‘Inspection functions ceaselessly. 216

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The gaze is alert everywhere’ (1979:195). From the plague to the prison, and specifically to the panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham. The new model prison reversed the principle of the dungeon, dark and dank and hidden. ‘Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap…[The prisoner] is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication’ (1979:200). Foucault warns that: The panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form…It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct school children, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. In this view, seeing is not believing, it is control. Foucault himself concluded that ‘our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance…We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine’ (1979:217).4 George Orwell had described the panoptic society of the future in Nineteen Eighty-four, with the slogan ‘Big Brother is watching you’. But truth is often stranger than fiction. And contemporary surveillance techniques perhaps validate the pessimism of Orwell, Sartre and Foucault. Spy planes and spy satellites abound. Space is a surveillance system and a panoptic machine. This military surveillance is congruent with political surveillance; bugging devices proliferate: ‘the ears have walls’, as one of the Paris graffiti of 1968 put it; and new techniques of wiretapping and recording and watching are perpetually being developed. The scale of surveillance in Eastern Europe and South Africa probably exceeded or exceeds the darkest (hegemony again) fears of Sartre, Foucault and Orwell. Criminal surveillance is so routinized that we accept the ubiquitous cameras in banks, stores and hotel lobbies; and we are unaware of the hidden ones; moreover, we accept such surveillance as ‘for our own protection’. We condone the institutional eye. The whole world is a Peeping Tom; and not only is it not an offence, it is routine. 5 In our personal relations, also, the eye is associated with surveillance. Sting sang of the obsessive and jealous eye of love: ‘Every breath you take, Every move you make, Every bond you break, Every step you take, I’ll be watching you.’ The jealous eye 217

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of love is entirely congruent with the jealous eye of an all-seeing and all-powerful God, or state. Furthermore, the eye is one with the mouth. Foucault had mentioned this in the context of clinical diagnosis, but it is also true for the neighbourhood. What nosy neighbours see, they say. The all-seeing eye of God has now been replaced as the guarantor of morality by the all-seeing eyes of the neighbours. People fear watching eyes and talking tongues more than hell-fire. Sartre was right, in a metaphorical sense, that the watchers do have guns. Gossips and hidden cameras replaced God. The eye of love and the eye of the neighbour both have power. The rawest dimension of power is therefore still ‘the look’. Michael Argyle has pointed out the laws of looking: Residents of big cities quickly learn the laws of looking. Never make eye contact with a panhandler, or you will be pursued for handouts; with a religious fanatic, or you will be caught in a diatribe; with a belligerent loner, or you will become the object of a menacing tirade; with a lost visitor, or you will feel responsible to help. Never stare back at a stranger who stares relentlessly at you, or your life may be in danger. (1978b:32) Children play at staring their friends down. Adults look away, unless they like each other. Either way, sight is power: jealous (Sting), controlling (the neighbours), aggressive (strangers), ubiquitous (God and the panopticon), or, occasionally, affiliative (lovers, gazing into each other’s eyes). Only this last is positive, in the tradition of King Solomon and of Merleau-Ponty. Sight therefore is not only associated with knowledge, belief, light, love, God, and the supreme sense, as in the Greek and Christian traditions; sight is also potentially a dangerous and an evil power: moral, physical, military and political. Sight constitutes the moral danger of ‘unchastened gazing’ and the jealous watcher, the physical dangers of contemporary urban looking, the military danger of the Sartrean gun-sight, and the political necessity of surveillance over the mad (asylums), the ill (clinics) and the bad (prisons), as Foucault has suggested. The eye is everywhere: God, space, the factory, the city, the bank, school, clinic, battlefield and the bed. But whether loving or hostile depends on the social construction of sight. 218

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THE GENDER POLITICS OF GAZE

Sight is individually subjective and culturally relative. What we see, and do not see, and how we define what we see, the meanings we impose on visual reality, reflect our personal values and interests as well as our cultural norms. The first point, the subjectivity of sight, is particularly well illustrated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in many of his Sherlock Holmes stories. ‘I have trained myself to notice what I see’, said Holmes in ‘The Blanched Soldier’. But Holmes was modelled on Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh, Doyle’s former teacher, whose power of medical observation was startling. Doyle realized that Bell ‘often learned more of the patient by a few glances’ than he himself had with earlier interviews. Doyle offered an example of ‘one of his [Bell’s] best cases’: ‘Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ‘Not long discharged?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘A non-com, officer?’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ‘Stationed at Barbados?’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he would explain, ‘the man was a respectful man, but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.’ To his audience of Watsons it all seemed quite miraculous until it was explained, and then it became simple enough. It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved his cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal. (In Sebeok and Uniker-Sebeok, 1988:32; cf. Truzzi, 1988). What we each see, but do not notice, is not only an individual matter, a Holmes/Watson variation, it is also systematically patterned. Men see things differently from women, artists from zoologists, the rich from the poor—not only metaphorically, in their ‘views’ 219

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on politics or aesthetics, but also quite literally, as they enter a room or meet someone. We all see things differently and live in different visual universes. This may have dramatic consequences, not only for medicine as with Dr Bell, or for crime detection as with Sherlock Holmes, but also for everyday living, as with men and women. Given that the two sexes are customarily defined as opposite, the difference between them in the hierarchy of the sensorium is particularly interesting. According to some feminists, ‘The emphasis accorded the visual in Western thought is not only symptomatic of the alienation of modern man, but is itself a major factor in the disruption of man’s “natural” relation to the world.’ (Sight replaces capital as the villain of the piece.) Thus the logic of the visual is a male logic; touch, however, is different. Luce Irigary suggests that: ‘Woman’s desire does not speak the same language as man’s desire. In this logic, the prevalence of the gaze…is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Women find pleasure more in touch than in sight.’ So, ‘vision is a peculiarly phallic sense, and touch a woman’s sense’ (in Keller and Grontkowski, 1983:207). With this coy contrast, by which a man is reduced to the phallus but a woman remains a woman, the Aristotelian hierarchy of the sensorium is reversed (but double standards persist). Despite the phrasing, the argument has some merit surely. Arguably, however, men also find pleasure more in touch than in sight. On the other hand other Aristotelian hierarchies have also been reversed: mind/body, and rational/irrational, particularly as they were applied to male/female as higher and lower. Furthermore, perhaps women are more tactile than men (chapter 6). The two sexes do seem to differ in the use of sight The anthropologist Edward T.Hall comments: ‘The concept that no two people see exactly the same thing when actively using their eyes in a natural situation is shocking to some people because it implies that not all men relate to the world around them in the same way’ (1969:65). But they do not. He points out that, on archaeological field parties, he would spot arrowheads which his students had not seen: ‘I had been doing it longer and knew what to look for.’ He continues: I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences 220

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convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds…Men and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways. (1969:65–70) Men and women not only see things differently, but they are also seen differently. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first to make this point. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she described women as slaves to ‘the sovereignty of beauty’: to be seen and adorned and exalted by men, but not to be equal in rights and power (1985:145). ‘Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that…should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for at least twenty years of their lives’ (1985:100). Beauty is all: the sight is everything. Beauty, as personal and visual, is one of the prime values of our culture, as we saw in chapter 3. Many feminists have attacked the tyranny of the beauty mystique, arguing not only that it institutionalizes the hegemony of the male gaze, but also that the tyranny involves enormous physical, emotional and economic costs to women (cf. Beauvoir, 1953; Greer, 1971; Baker, 1984; Wolf, 1990). Gaze, body and politics are all tangled in an old and very strong knot: a cultural and aesthetic bondage. Recent feminist scholarship has described the politics of the male gaze as patriarchy: In most popular representations it seems that men look and women are looked at. In film, on television, in the press and in most popular narratives men are shown to be in control of the gaze, women are controlled by it. Men act; women are acted upon. This is patriarchy. (Gamman and Marshment, 1989:1; cf. Berger, 1972:46–7) Women are looked at, not just in film and television, but also on the street, in the office, in peep-shows and pornography and parliament. ‘Girl-watching’ is a popular pastime for some boys. As Camille Paglia understands it: Western culture has a roving eye. Male sex is hunting and scanning: boys hang yelping from honking cars, acting like jerks over strolling girls; men lunching on girders go through the primitive book of wolf whistles and animal clucks. Everywhere, the beautiful woman is scrutinized and harassed. She is the ultimate symbol of human desire…Unfortunately 221

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there is no way to separate the whistling ass on his girder from the rapt visionary at his easel. In accepting the gifts of culture, women may have to take the worm with the apple. (1991:32–3) Jerks, asses and worms…and this from the same woman who praised the poetic construction worker! Henley puts the politics of gaze succinctly: ‘it is little wonder that women feel “observed”. They are’ (1977:167). This male gaze is political surveillance, control, domination and power. The gaze as social control is therefore oppressive, but it also invites resistance; a point that Sartre and Foucault ignored but which feminist scholars and activists are developing. The male gaze, the leering and ogling and staring and watching, is resisted with a glare, or violence, or the lawsuit, or words.6 THE EYE AND THE I

‘The eye is the mirror of the soul’, it is said, and reflects the self. So does the face; and it was Aristotle (or one of his school) who wrote the first treatise on physiognomics. About eyes he said surprisingly little, considering how much they have been eulogized and disparaged since then. He seems to have liked green eyes; he said the colour is ‘the sign of an excellent disposition, and is particularly well adapted for sharpness of vision’ (Physiognomics 492; 1984:783). The eye is the I in disposition. One wonders whom he had in mind, particularly since he said nothing about any other colour. Tastes vary, of course, and recent surveys in the United States suggest that green is not quite as popular as ‘an excellent disposition’ might seem to warrant. Blue is the favourite colour for both men and women, although men are three times more likely to like green eyes than women (Glamour, August, 1983). The eyes are a prime symbol of the self. This is clear in Bruce Chatwin’s description: My father has the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen in a man. I do not say this because he is my father. They are a mariner’s eyes, level and steady. On the Malta convoys they scanned the surface of the sea for mines, or the horizon for an enemy warship. They are the eyes of a man who has never known the meaning of dishonesty. They have never tempted him to anything mean or shoddy. (1989:9) 222

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The eye is symbolic of the self not only in colour but also in expressiveness. John Aubrey had an eye for the eye, and his descriptions of his contemporaries often describe the eye. This is Thomas Hobbes: He had a good eie, and that of a hazell colour, which was full of life and spirit, even to the last. When he was in earnest in discourse, there shone (as it were) a bright live-coale within it He had two kinds of lookys: when he laugh’t, was witty, and in a merry humour, one could scarce see his Eies, by and by, when he was serious and positive, he open’d his eies round (i.e. his eie-lids). He had midling eies, not very big, nor very little. (In Merton, 1965:18) The power of the eye is humorously, but accurately, portrayed in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67 Bk 8, ch 25): An eye is for all the world exactly like a cannon, in this respect; that it is not so much the eye or the cannon, in themselves, as it is the carriage of the eye—and the carriage of the cannon, by which both the one and the other are enabled to do so much execution… Now of all the eyes which were ever created—there never was an eye of them all, so fitted to rob my uncle Toby of his repose, as the very eye, at which he was looking—it was not, Madam, a rolling eye—a romping or a wanton one—nor was it an eye sparkling—petulant or imperious—of high claims and terrifying exactions, which would have curdled at once the milk of human nature, of which my uncle Toby was made up—but ‘twas an eye full of gentle salutations—and soft responses—speaking—not like the trumpet stop of some ill-made organ, in which many an eye I talk to, holds coarse converse— but whispering soft—like the last low accents of an expiring saint—‘How can you live comfortless, Captain Shandy, and alone, without a bosom to lean your head on—or trust your cares to?’ (Sterne, 1977:577–8) How indeed? The eye is seen, and speaks louder than words. The eye has long been equated with love: ‘I looked into her eyes and lost my heart’, sings the country and western singer. Robert Burton was more detailed back in 1621: 223

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All parts [of the body] are attractive, but especially the eyes— sparkling and bright as stars—which are Love’s Fowlers; the shoeing-horns, the hooks of Love…the guides, touchstone, judges, that in a moment cure mad men, and make sound folks mad, the watchmen of the body; what do they not? How vex they not? …The eye is a secret orator, the first bawd, the gateway of love, and with private looks, winking, glances and smiles, as so many dialogues, they make up the match many times, and understand one another’s meanings, before they come to speak a word…The face is the index of the mind, but the eye of the countenance. (1927:679, 685) These long quotations will be excused, I hope, partly because they are so magnificent, but also because they clarify once again the hierarchy of the body, which itself is probably related to the roles of the eye (no pun intended) in social, and sexual, intercourse. Also, poets, philosophers and novelists have written so much more about the eye than sociologists, surprisingly given its cannon-like execution in our lives. The eye is not only symbolic of the self, and expressive of moods, emotions and dispositions, vexing too; it is also one note among the many organs of body language. Shakespeare now: There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive in her body. (Troilus and Cressida, Act IV, Scene v) Robert Herrick was very brief in his couplet ‘The Eye’: A wanton and lascivious eye Betrayes the Heart’s Adulterie. (1921:249) The belief that the eye gives away privileged information persists into the twentieth century as Ray Charles sings: ‘I can see that far-away look in your eyes. It won’t be long before it’s crying time.’ And he is blind. The eye remains the paramount organ of non-verbal communication. That far-away look, the hot glare of anger, the cold stare of contempt, the lecherous leer, the come-hither glance…all 224

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say more than words and may indeed be more reliable. Emerson said: The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but it is understood the world over’ (1968, vol. 6:179–80). 7 Eye language is surely the most expressive component of body language. But even the eye may lie. Lady Macbeth ordered her husband: ‘bear welcome in your eye,/Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower,/But be the serpent under it’ (Macbeth, Act I, Scene vi). The skilled observer, however, can see through the liar’s lies. Freud once said: ‘He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore’ (1977b:114). Experimental research with actors and microphotography is deciphering clues to deception behaviours; the truth will—sometimes but not always—leak out by, among other things, gaze aversion (Ekman and Friesen, 1975; Marsh, 1988:77, 116–19). The social significance of these ‘orbital globes’ can therefore hardly be underestimated. Hegel was particularly fascinated by the eye. It is in the eye, he believed, that ‘the whole soul appears as soul …for in the eye the soul is concentrated and the soul does not necessarily see through it but is also seen in it’. He insisted that ‘through the eyes we look into a man’s soul’; and ‘a man’s glance is what is most full of his soul, the concentration of his inmost personality and feeling’ (1975:153, 434, 732). The eye therefore is the I to others, and in many ways: self, disposition, mood, deception and soul. The eye also creates the I. In the Greek tradition, we look out through the eyes and see beauty, knowledge and ultimately God; so argued Plato and Aristotle. And in the Christian tradition we create ourselves spiritually by controlling and ruling our sight, and our other senses. However, we also look into the eyes of the Other and see the Other’s disposition, mood and soul: the truth about the Other. Thomas Horton Cooley integrated both traditions: the eyes look out into the eyes of the Other, who is looking at the I. The self sees the self reflected in the eye of the Other. We see who we are in their eyes. His couplet makes the point of the ‘looking-glass self: ‘Each to each a looking-glass/Reflects the Other that doth pass’ (Cooley, 1909/1964:184). We look out and see the Other, but we also see in, and see the self. The equations are becoming complex and even fanciful; but 225

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they are not of my making: they are the metaphors we live by, and they exemplify (once again) the hegemony of sight. The German sociologist Georg Simmel developed this theme of interactive seeing even further; like Hegel he is almost poetic: Of the special sense-organs, the eye has a uniquely sociological function. The union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances. This is perhaps the most direct and purest reciprocity which exists anywhere…the totality of social relations of human beings, their self- assertion and selfabnegations, their intimacies and estrangements, would be changed in unpredictable ways if there occurred no glance of eye to eye. This mutual glance between persons… signifies a wholly new and unique union between them. By the glance which reveals the other, one discloses himself. By the same act in which the observer seeks to know the observed, he surrenders himself to be understood by the observer. The eye cannot take unless at the same time it gives. The eye of a person discloses his own soul when he seeks to uncover that of another. (1921:358) The glance at once takes and gives, uncovers and discloses, and thereby establishes the ‘union and interaction of individuals’ which constitute society. Society is founded upon the glance. For Simmel, the glance is union and interaction, and thence society. For Sartre, the look is danger, fear and the gun, and individual isolation in a Hobbesian world; but he did not practise what he preached, nor was he particularly paranoid. For Foucault, ‘the gaze is alert everywhere’ in the maintenance and development of unequal power in the body politic. For MerleauPonty, on the other hand, the glance creates the human being: it is the spark of life; it is love. There is little agreement in these European traditions. This does not mean everyone is wrong, of course; it merely means that the eye is rich enough and deep enough to accommodate many ideas and perspectives, all of which may be useful. Character, soul, mood, danger, power, love and society: the eye is all-seeing, literally and metaphorically. It sees all and it is all. A fit metaphor for God, society and the I.

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CONCLU SION

The eye is active. It searches, peers, seeks and watches. It also touches, dominates and controls. It may pollute both the seer and the seen, and it may corrupt them. It may even kill. The eye measures, estimates and calculates. Sight travels great distances even to the stars, and analyses the invisible with the aid of a microscope. The eye sees into the past, sometimes with the 20–20 vision of hindsight, and gazes into the future, hopefully or fearfully. The eye mediates conversations, imparts information and expresses, or conceals, thoughts and emotions. The eye glances and glares and stares, softens and hardens, winks at a friend and blinks in amazement, and finally closes in ecstasy or horror, sleep or death. Sight may be noble, and equate with knowledge and understanding, as Plato and Aristotle said, and the Judaeo-Christian tradition insisted; but it may also be dangerous, as the Christian ascetics and Sartre insisted, for different reasons. It may lead to God, to death or to the fires of hell. It may contribute to the establishment of society (Simmel), to its control (Foucault), or to its disestablishment (Sartre); it may reveal the soul (Hegel), the character (Aristotle), the mood (Troilus and Cressida) and the deception (Freud), or it may mask them all (Macbeth). It may be oppressive (the male gaze) or it may resist oppression (the female gaze). It may be love (Merleau-Ponty) or hate (the evil eye), life or death. The eye is therefore central to our social lives, the paramount organ of the body social, and symbolically one with the I. What is sight? The responses are various, and the social constructions of the noblest, the most dangerous, and the most personal sense continue.

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9 BODIES AND SENSES

Bodies proliferate today. Mary Douglas, who pioneered the anthropology of the body, suggested that there were two bodies (1966/1978, 1970/1973). Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987) counted three bodies. For Saint Paul, and Christians generally, there are also potentially three bodies, although two of these, the spiritual and the mystical bodies, are very different from the other three, and from Douglas’ two. Bryan Turner (1984) and Arthur Frank (1991) seem to agree on four bodies, but not the same four. John O’Neill (1985) has reported on five bodies— but these include allegorical bodies. The ancient Greeks recognized the four bodies of humoural science, and the medievals, as we have seen, recognized seven bodies, according to planetary type, and 12, according to the Zodiac, not to mention mixtures of types. Others are not quite so involved in typologies and counting, and concentrate their energies on specific aspects of the body or the senses; in the last few years several general works on the body have been published in sociology and anthropology (Glassner, 1988; Helman, 1991; Featherstone et al., 1991); and there has been a veritable cascade of volumes on specific topics like pleasure (Ferguson, 1990; Tiger, 1992) and pain (Morris, 1991), beauty (Liggett, 1989; Wolf, 1990) and the face (Landau, 1989), illness (Frank, 1992), touch (Barnard and Brazelton, 1990), sex (Laqueur, 1990) and others too numerous to mention on feminism, gender and the women’s and men’s movements, and many more on health, fat, alcoholism, tattooing (Sanders, 1989), the senses (Ackerman, 1990; Howes, 1991) and so on. The body and the senses are finally beginning to be recognized. Evidently there are many bodies social, and they are hard to count. Equally evident, the meanings imputed to the body are 228

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various: definitions are legion and there is little consensus. It is hardly surprising that J.M.Berthelot asks: ‘Is there any meaning in a sociology of the body? Is such a sociology possible?’ (1991:390). We will therefore explore the mathematics of the body from two to five with the expectation that this will perhaps serve to review some of the prevailing theories of the body. We begin with Mary Douglas. MARY DOUGLAS: TWO BODIES

Douglas discussed the body first in Purity and Danger (1966) and effectively introduced the body into mainstream anthropology. ‘The body’, she suggested, ‘provides a basic theme for all symbolism’ (1978:163–4). Her central thesis is as follows: The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. (1978:115) The body is a natural symbol. ‘Just as it is true that everything symbolizes the body, so it is equally true (and all the more so for that reason) that the body symbolizes everything else’ (1978:122). Douglas illustrates her thesis with a number of examples, only one of which will be mentioned here, the Hindu caste system: The lowest castes are the most impure and it is they whose humble services enable the higher castes to be free of bodily impurities. They wash clothes, cut hair, dress corpses and so on. The whole system represents a body in which by the division of labour the head does the thinking and the praying and the most despised parts carry away waste matter. (1978:123) In her next book, Natural Symbols (1970), Douglas developed these bare ideas further into her theory of the two bodies. ‘The two bodies are the self and society: sometimes they are so near as to be almost merged; sometimes they are far apart. The tension between them allows the elaboration of meaning’ (1973:112). These meanings interpenetrate in subtle, complex and various ways. Douglas explained in more detail: ‘The social body constrains the way the physical 229

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body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society’ (1973:93). Every natural symbol derived from the body carries a social meaning, and every culture makes its own selections from the range of body symbolisms. So the body, from smooth or shaggy hair to the location in the caste system, relates to the social structure. In this interesting chapter, Douglas developed several rules and hypotheses on the two bodies referring to formality and informality of roles, conventionalism versus protest, the level of refinement in society and so on. Synchronicity being what it is, similar ideas about body symbolism were being developed simultaneously by other anthropologists in different parts of the world: Victor Turner (1967) on the Ndembu of Zambia, Terence Turner (1969) on the Tchikrin of Brazil, and Griaule (1970) on the Dogon of Mali; and the body aesthetics of the Mount Hageners of New Guinea were studied by the Stratherns (1971) and of the Nuba of the Sudan by Paris (1972). Quite suddenly, it seems, the body became a centre of attention again in anthropology, not as something to be measured as in physical anthropology, but as a symbol system (see Synnott and Howes, 1992). In the seventies the anthropology of the body and the senses was being developed as a substantive area of study. Ashley Montagu published Touching (1971), the first full-scale anthropology of one of the senses. The British Association of Social Anthropologists conference on the Anthropology of the Body was held in 1975, and the papers were edited by John Blacking (1977). This was followed by Ted Polhemus’ Social Aspects of the Human Body (1978) and then by Olivia Vlahos’ Body: The Ultimate Symbol (1979), and various works on the aesthetics of body decoration (including Brain (1979), and Ebin (1979)). Two other areas being developed in the sixties and seventies were Erving Goffman’s discussions of the body, particularly in Stigma (1963), and the field of body language or, more prosaically, nonverbal communication. Edward Hall’s The Hidden Dimension (1969) did much to advance this area of research, and it continued with Argyle’s Bodily Communication (1978c), Henley’s Body Politics (1977) and Desmond Morris’ Manwatching (1977), Gestures (1979b) and later Bodywatching (1985). The eighties and nineties have seen the consolidation of this work and several new developments: the popularization of 230

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anthropology and photography in the publication of coffee-table works on the body as art, notably Malcolm Kirk’s Man as Art (1981) on New Guinea, Angela Fisher’s Africa Adorned (1984), Leni Riefenstahl’s various books, including Africa (1982) and The People of Kau (1986), and recently Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher’s African Ark (1990) on Ethiopia, among others. A second development has been the return of some anthropologists from ‘foreign bodies’ as above to ‘native bodies’. One thinks particularly of Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body (1989). She and her team conducted interviews with 165 women in Baltimore about their experiences of menstruation, giving birth and raising their children, and menopause, and showed that how women think and feel about their bodies is totally at odds with the assumptions made about women embodied in the medical texts by medical science. Such assumptions are often negative; and medical science is frequently unscientific, neither value-free nor objective, but ideological and oppressive of women, with wide-ranging social consequences. Martin argues that: This lack of institutional support in the United States makes it very difficult for women to be whole people—productive and reproductive at the same time…[Indeed] the current structure of work-places in the United States does not easily allow any woman to live with her bodily functions, whether she be menstruating or pregnant. (1989:100–1) Robert Murphy of Columbia University has written a moving account of his paraplegia developing into quadriplegia, and a reflexive anthropology of the body in The Body Silent (1987). Nothing indicates the central but also taken-for-granted, and therefore unexamined, role of the body as much as Murphy’s telling description of his paralysis as creating ‘estrangement from others, from one’s own body, and ultimately from one’s self’ (1987:223); yet this very estrangement enabled him to express new understandings of the body (cf. Frank, 1990). The strange customs and foibles of the English body are scrutinized by Nigel Barley (1990), back from a series of adventures which he portrays as amusing in Northern Cameroon and Indonesia. The discussion is brief but instructive, and indicates the large number of competing constructions of the body prevalent today. 231

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The third development has been the pioneer work of David Howes in the production of the first anthropology of the senses, The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991), which explores the very different sensory worlds in which different peoples live. Finally, feminists have made major contributions to the theory and practice of the body, not only on gender, beauty and the senses, some of which we have considered earlier, but also in health concerns and such somatic issues as violence, incest, abortion, the new reproductive technologies, pornography and prostitution, advertising and media, culture and sexuality (Eichler, 1985; Walby, 1990; Frank, 1990). We have moved too quickly, however; let us return to the next major theorist of the body after Douglas, Michel Foucault. MICHEL FOUCAULT: DOCILE BODIES

Foucault’s major contribution to social science has been to describe the ordering of the body politic in and through and over the body physical. Power originates in power over the body (biopower) and in every microscopic, minuscule activity of the body (micro-physics, in his term), in every institution of the body politic. Society is essentially disciplinary, in Foucault’s view, and physical: The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when the art of the human body was born…What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born…Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. (1979:137–8) ‘Docile’ bodies are not new to history; what was new was Foucault’s superb analysis of the ‘mechanics of power’ in every sector of society: The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penalty of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, indolence), of the body 232

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(‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency)…It was a question of making the slightest departures from correct behavior subject to punishment. (1979:178) Time, activity, behaviour, speed, the body, sexuality: every arena of social life was mechanized, and every sector. The discipline is ubiquitous, so is the punishment, from ‘a certain coldness’ (1979:178) to torture and death. Discipline and Punish, the title aptly summarizes Foucault’s view of the essence of social life, opens with a searing account of the torture and death of the regicide Damiens in Paris in 1757. The man’s body was ripped apart, quite literally, by horses, as he had symbolically ripped apart the body politic; and the moral outrage of the state was expressed in very physical actions. While such punishment was as extreme as the crime, discipline over the citizens is normal everywhere: the microphysics of bio-power. Foucault summarizes the matter epigrammatically and enigmatically: The soul (psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.) is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body’ (1979:30); but the body in turn is an instrument of the state, and is under constant surveillance. All physical actions are now ideological: how a soldier stands, the gestures of a schoolboy, even the mode of sexual intercourse. ‘The gaze is alert everywhere’ (1979:195). Many of Foucault’s early works were concerned with the control of the self through the body: the mad in Madness and Civilization, the sick in The Birth of the Clinic and the criminal in Discipline and Punish. In his three volumes on The History of Sexuality his concern is less institutional (asylum, clinic, prison) and seemingly more intimate. Arguing against the prevailing ‘repression hypothesis’, that sexuality had been increasingly repressed since the seventeenth century, climaxing in the Victorian era, Foucault suggests on the contrary that discourses, not silence, characterize the age. Sex was pivotal: [Sex] was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life. On the one hand it was tied to the disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies. On the other hand, it was applied to 233

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the regulation of populations…Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species…[so] it was tracked down in behavior, pursued in dreams; it was sus- pected of underlying the least follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood…But one also sees it becoming the theme of political interventions, economic interventions (through incitement to or curbs on procreation), and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility: it was put forward as the index of a society’s strength, revealing of both its political energy and its biological vigor. (1980:145–6) In sum, sexuality integrated the individual body and the body politic, (Douglas’ two bodies), and thus became the target of power. The ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’, in Foucault’s inimitable terminology, ‘centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and docility’; while at the other pole, the ‘bio-politics of the population’ centred on the ‘species body’: birth-and death-rates, morbidity, health, longevity, fertility, birth control and demographic power politics (1980:139). After the classical age, therefore, sexuality became the object of ‘a multiplicity of discourses…in demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism’ (1980:33). The church still had a voice, but it was no longer the only one, nor the loudest. Experts replaced clerics. Discourses, not censorship and repression, were the characteristics of Victorianism, suggests Foucault; and the anonymous author of My Secret Life, who detailed his amours, was more representative of the age than his Queen (1980:22). Sex was therefore personal, but also public and professional and political. Foucault’s early institutional analysis of the embodiment of the mad, the bad and the sick is therefore neatly complemented by the seemingly more personal, yet highly political, questions of sex, pleasure and power. Foucault’s contribution was surely to demonstrate that the body is everywhere: the axis of social life, whether docile or sexual, mad or bad, productive or sick, personal and political. One important point should be added here, that Foucault’s theory of power is not gender-neutral. Power in patriarchal society is male; thus the term ‘bio-politics’ conceals the reality of male power over 234

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female bodies, and particularly over female sexuality. The phrase ‘Discipline and Punish’ is therefore gender-specific: the discipline and the gaze are male. THREE AND FIVE BODIES

Foucault’s insight into the politics of the body have been integrated in the work of medical anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock. They distinguish between three conceptions of the body, or three bodies: ‘(1) as a phenomenally experienced individual body-self; (2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society and culture; and (3) as a bodypolitic, an artifact of social and political control’ (1987:6; emphasis theirs). They suggest that these three bodies can be understood partly through the work of Mauss, Douglas and Foucault respectively, and represent three different theoretical approaches: phenomenology, structuralism and symbolism, and post-structuralism (1987:8). The article is a fine synthesis of the work of three of the principal researchers on the body, emphasizing the complementarity of their approaches, valuable for insight not only into societies, but also into health and illness. The article is entitled ‘The Mindful Body’, and the authors emphasize that ‘mind and body are inseparable in the experiences of sickness, suffering, and healing’ (1987:30); and that the mindful body is itself inseparable from society, both as symbolic and as political: Sickness is not just an isolated event, nor an unfortunate brush with nature. It is a form of communication—the language of the organs—through which nature, society, and culture speak simultaneously. The individual body should be seen as the most immediate, the proximate terrain where social truths and social contradictions are played out, as well as a locus of personal and social resistance, creativity and struggle. (1987:31) By-passing four, for the moment, John O’Neill has described the Five Bodies (1985) of his title as the world’s body, the anthropomorphism of the cosmos as a body; social bodies, which develops Douglas’ themes; the body politic, the body as an allegory 235

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of the state and the church and family (but he also goes beyond this to include Foucault); consumer bodies, especially the exploitation of women’s bodies; finally, medical bodies: the medicalization of society and the self, the production of the bionic body, and the politics of the body and the self. Some of these bodies can be integrated with the three bodies of Scheper-Hughes and Lock; ‘medical bodies’ probably fit in as a sub-category of the ‘individual body-self’, ‘social bodies’ is close to their ‘social body’, and ‘consumer bodies’ and the ‘body politic’ could be subsumed under their ‘body-politic’. The world’s body as allegorical, however, constitutes a different body. Not that there is any need to try to force one person’s categories into another’s, but there is a need to see the relationships between the different bodies proposed. TURNER AND FRANK: FOUR BODIES

The first full-length sociology of the body was Bryan Turner’s The Body and Society (1984). He presented four bodies, or four dimensions of the lived body, and thereby began the systematic integration, hinted at by Douglas, of types of bodies to types of society and/or to types of relations with, or roles in, that society. He argues that every society has to solve the Hobbesian problem of order, and this requires the solution of four problems: (1) continuity over time, and therefore solving the problem of reproduction; (2) continuity in space, and thus solving the problem of the regulation and control of the population; these are what he describes as ‘political’ problems. At the ‘individual’ body level, there is: (3) the necessity for the restraint of desire, a problem of the internal body; and (4) the necessity of the representation of bodies to each other, a problem of the external body. He associated each of these four issues, or, in Parsonian terms, the functional prerequisites of society, with a major theorist, but also, which is particularly interesting, with four typical physical pathologies, particularly of young women, subordinate to, and victims of, patriarchal and gerontocratic societies. These ill or deviant bodies vary depending upon the historical type of the society (1984:41, 91). This ‘geometry of bodies’ is presented in Figure 9.1.

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Figure 9.1 Turner’s model of the geometry of bodies Source: Turner, 1984:91

‘All illness is social illness’, says Turner. Hysteria was a metaphor of the social subordination of women, especially middle-class women who were attempting to express their individual independence through professional employment. Agoraphobia symbolized the uncertainty of urban space [and] it is anorexia nervosa which most dramatically expresses the ambiguities of female gender in contemporary Western societies. (1984:112–13) Women’s sicknesses, in Turner’s view, reflect the ‘sickness’ of society…as do men’s, presumably, although Turner does not discuss this. Turner reminds us that ‘these four dimensions cannot be nicely separated’, but he insists that: The value of the model is that it brings into focus the fact that all social structures which institutionalize inequality and dependency are fought out at the level of a micro-politics of deviance and disease’ (1984:91, 114). Turner’s attempt to develop an integrated typology of the body is useful and stimulating, and I hope he will not mind if I attempt to carry it further. Beginning with the Hobbesian problem of order in the first of the four dimensions: to ensure continuity over time involves solving the problems of production (economic) as well as that of the reproduction (demographic) of the population—the babies have to be fed. The appropriate bodies, then, are workers as well as parents, and the theorists are surely Marx as well as Malthus. The problem of continuity over space is political, but the maintenance of geographic integrity does also have economic implications. The appropriate bodies then are voters and politicians, at least in democratic systems, with behind them the police and 237

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the armed forces. The appropriate theorists seem to be Durkheim, for his discussions of integration, and Machiavelli, as the first political sociologist, but the list of political sociologists is long, including Marx, Engels and Weber, among the founders, as well as Rousseau, and most recently Foucault, whose insights on bodypolitics have been original. I do not quite understand Turner’s selection of onanism and phobia as typical somatic symptoms of women in modern populations. Turner is surely correct that women are differentially affected by patriarchal solutions to the Hobbesian problems of order, but the gender-specific somatic problems of economic discrimination and exclusion from political power would seem to me to include physical violence, including the sexual abuse of children, predominantly female, ‘the lack of institutional support for women’s bodies’ (Martin, 1989:10) and such somatic political agendas as prostitution, pornography, advertising and media, the double shift, and beyond. Also, if women’s bodies are affected by patriarchy, both women’s and men’s bodies are affected by capitalism. Turning from the macro to the micro, the body social to the body physical, Turner talks of the necessity of the internal restraint of physical desire, epitomized by Weber’s discussion of asceticism (see below), and the necessity of external self-presentation, developed by Goffman. The bodies for this third cell are surely the religious ascetics, nuns, priests, hermits and the Puritans, plus such secular ascetics as the early capitalists (typically puritanical according to Weber, but not according to Marx), and modern athletes, scholars and others who defer their gratifications for whatever physical, economic or spiritual motives. The characteristic body of the fourth cell is surely ‘the body beautiful’, and its pathology is no doubt the anorexic, as Turner has said, and the other casualties of the beauty mystique. All bodies participate in each of these four cells, however, for all are workers, in one way or another, parents and/or children, more or less self-restrained, and all are actors on the stage of life, playing different roles. Turner’s four-cell typology therefore clarifies not only the macro and micro roles in social interaction, but also the underlying unity of sociological theories founded, ultimately, in the body. Not only are all bodies to be found in each of his four cells in their different roles, but so are most of the substantive areas of sociology: economic sociology, political sociology, demography, family, medical sociology, erontology, social psychology 238

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and, cross-cutting them, gendered sociology. Turner has therefore provided a neat conceptual framework which places the body at the heart of social theory and praxis. Building with constructive amendments on Turner’s model, Arthur Frank has put forward his own theory of the body. His comment is astute: ‘What we have in Turner’s categories are not only four tasks which a society must solve with regard to bodies, but also four problems which a body must solve to be in society’ (1991:45). Arguing that ‘the point of a sociology of the body is not to theorize institutions prior to bodies, but to theorize institutions from the body up’ (1991:49), he begins with how ‘the body is a problem for itself, which is an action problem, rather than a system problem’ (1991:47; emphasis his). He suggests four problems: control, desire, other-relatedness and self-relatedness; which in turn create a fourcell typology: ‘the disciplined body, the mirroring body, the dominating body, and the communicative body’ (1991:53; emphasis his). The typology is presented in Figure 9.2.

Figure 9.2 Frank’s typology of body use in action Source: Reprinted with permission from Frank, 1991:54, Sage Publications Ltd.

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The model looks extremely complicated: more complex than Turner’s and a long way from Douglas’ simple dichotomy; but in fact these cells and variables are only responses to Frank’s critical questions: ‘How predictable am I, do I lack or produce, am I associated or dissociated from my corporeal body, and am I monadic or dyadic towards others?’ Frank responds: Each ideal type of body usage resolves these problems in its respective medium of activity, which is its mode of action. For the disciplined body, this medium is the regimentation, the model of which is the rationalization of monastic order. For the mirroring body, the medium is consumption, the model of which is the department store. For the dominating body, the medium is force, the model of which is warfare. For the communicative body, the medium is what can loosely be called recognition, models of which may be shared narratives, dance, caring for the young, the old, and the ill, and communal ritual. (1991:54; emphasis his) The model readily evokes appropriate ideal-typical bodies: the ascetic holy man or woman, the consumer, the warrior, and the parent or the lover. Frank insists that: The essential quality of the communicative body is that it is a body in process of creating itself (1991:79; emphasis his). Perhaps therefore it is best symbolized by the mother who, in Mary O’Brien’s phrase, ‘reproduces the world’, creates others and herself in the process. Surely she is also the antithesis of the male warrior in the opposite quadrant. Where Turner had related selected ‘diseases’ of the body, or habits of the body, to the structure of the society, Frank related occupational roles and bodies to the society. This typology is, again, an imaginative and insightful formulation, with plenty of room for discussion and development. What are the deviances and diseases in these four ideal-types? What are the intermediate categories along the continua between these four cells? And, more fundamentally, are these the four most useful questions? Well, yes and no. They are not the usual ones we ask ourselves or our friends, surely; but they are fundamental. Also they could be rephrased in more conventional terms: ‘Am I (are you) in control of my (your) life? Or not really? Are you usefully employed? Are you well? (not quite the same as Frank’s questions on association/ dissociation, which seem to be more about being ‘in touch’ or ‘in 240

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tune’ with your body, but close). How do you get on with other people? Are you married, alone, or what?’ Different people ask different questions: bosses, doctors and therapists, police, lovers and friends; but these people fit neatly into the four quadrants. None the less every citizen has to deal with these quadrants: selfcontrol, surviving (consumption), force (it is in some ways a Hobbesian world, and force is not only physical) and communication. Working with these quadrants of embodiment in action, therefore, surely the monastery and the department store can be seen as opposites: the mirrorless abbey and the hall of mirrors, the lash and the cushion, spirit versus things. Similarly, the warriors who kill are opposite to the mothers who give birth and the healers who care and cure, as opposite as the battlefield and the marriagebed or the hospital-bed—but also as close, for the warriors come from one and go to the other; and doctors and nurses are busy on battlefields. So there are intermediate categories and connections between these not-so-watertight compartments. Between the disciplined ascetic and the dominating warrior are, or were, the warrior-priests: the popes who sponsored the Crusades, the monks who preached them, the Jesuits modelled on a military order, and the bishops who blessed the troops on both sides; and, of course, there is the Islamic jihad or holy war. Similarly, the warrior also shops, not least for arms. The defence industry is a corporate producer and consumer. And the shopper is also a warrior, especially at sales. Indeed, people do in their time play all these parts, and we have and are all these bodies to greater or lesser degree. The utility of Frank’s typology is confirmed by, or perhaps based on, an earlier (Frank, 1990) review of the literature on the sociology of the body, which falls into the four categories of medicalized, sexual, disciplined and talking bodies. The point of it all, says Frank, following Michel Feher (1989), is to develop an ethics of the body (1991:90). ANTH ROPOLOGIES OF THE BODY

Douglas was not the first to study the body, just the first to study it as a symbol system. Indeed, the entire tradition of physical anthropology, dating back to Johann Blumenbach, had been concerned with the body, particularly the head. Blumenbach, widely regarded as the founder of physical anthropology, debated a number of questions: the origins of humanity, which hinged on the monogenesis/polygenesis debate and also involved the question of 241

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the literal versus the metaphorical interpretations of the Bible; the nature of humanity, particularly the number, origin and equality of races; and the relation of humans to the apes, later resolved by Darwin’s theory of evolution. During the nineteenth century, anthropologists devoted their scientific energies to measuring the various lengths, widths, angles, areas, cranial capacities, rates of growth and indices of various parts of the body, comparing groups and populations and debating their social and political significance, and their relevance for the origins, unity and equality of humanity. One of the foremost American craniologists was Dr Samuel Morton. Morton had collected more than one thousand skulls by the time he died in 1851, and was intent on proving a scientific ranking of races by measuring the cranial capacity of the skull. He published three volumes and in his first had calculated the capacities, in cubic inches: Caucasian 87, Mongolian 83, American 82, Malay 81, Ethiopian 78. The data were widely reported and reprinted and, as Gould suggests, ‘they matched every good Yankee’s prejudice—whites on top, Indians in the middle, and blacks on the bottom’. They also matched his own. Thus Morton seemed to offer a scientific, biological explanation for racial inequality. Unfortunately for science and for equity, and for Morton’s reputation, Stephen Jay Gould recalculated his data, and concluded that: ‘Morton’s summaries are a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions…[Furthermore] the corrected values reveal no significant differences among races for Morton’s own data’ (Gould, 1981:50–69). There was also considerable interest in the number of races, but no agreement. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin noted: There is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether we should be classified as a single species or a race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawford), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. (1981, Vol. 1, ch. 7:226) There are as many opinions as there are capable judges; but many, not including Blumenbach, believed that the races could be ranked hierarchically. 242

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The standard American text in physical anthropology at this time was Nott and Glidden’s Types of Mankind, first published in 1854. The social construction of race and colour is as interesting and important a process as the construction of gender, or the body; and this volume is particularly interesting as a ‘classic case’. For a start, the illustrations of Blacks in the text are complete caricatures: the faces are simianized, the skulls fore-shortened and shrunk, and so on. Also, the authors offer their racism as sober common knowledge and scientific truth. A few examples will suffice. In the Cape Colony, they wrote, ‘we find the lowest and most beastly specimen of mankind: viz., the Hottentot and the Bushman. The latter, in particular, are but little removed, both in moral and physical characters, from the orang-utan.’ Of the people who live along the east coast of Africa they say: ‘All attempts at humanizing them have failed.’ Again: ‘To one who has lived among American Indians, it is in vain to talk of civilizing them. You might as well attempt to change the nature of the buffalo’ (1868:182, 184, 69: emphasis added). Finally, the doctrine of Caucasian destiny and supremacism is articulated: The Creator has implanted in [the Caucasian races] an instinct that, in spite of themselves, drives them through all difficulties, to carry out their great mission of civilizing the earth. It is not reason, or philanthropy, which urges them on; but it is destiny. When we see great divisions of the human family…encroaching by degrees upon all other races… and gradually supplanting inferior types, is it not reasonable to conclude that they are fulfilling a law of nature? (Nott and Glidden, 1868:77; cf. 79) The divine hands of God and nature were thus invoked to legitimize conquest and colonization, slavery and inequality, oppression and even genocide. Moreover, this supplanting of ‘inferior types’ was not only divinely ordained and a law of nature, it was also ‘scientific’, biologically determined, written in the skull.1 On the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Broca founded the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859. His interests in craniometry lay more with gender than with race, and we have discussed his findings in chapter 2; they ‘legitimated’ gender inequality as Morton, Nott and Glidden and others had ‘legitimated’ racial inequality. Similarly in England, Edward Tylor, the founder of British ethnology, while admitting that ‘all the varieties of mankind are 243

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one species’, none the less followed the conventional wisdom of craniology in asserting that there were major differences in cranial capacity between different races; he cites one authority for average values in cubic inches: ‘Australian, seventy-nine; African, eightyfive; European, ninety-one’. Not surprisingly, therefore, he concludes that of all the races, ‘it may perhaps be reasonable to imagine as latest-formed the white race of the temperate region …gifted with the powers of knowing and ruling which gave them sway over the world’ (1881:85, 60, 113). Craniology and indeed anthropology at this time exerted profound political influence, justifying conquest and imperialism, and inequalities of both race and gender. The body is thus not only physiological and measurable, but, more important, it is political.2 This brief review is not intended to impugn anthropology, of course, but merely to demonstrate the processes by which meanings can be imputed to the body, and to show the evolution of anthropologies of the body. It is not as if sociologists were doing much better. We are all creations of our times. Le Bon, as we have seen, heartily concurred with Broca’s anthropological theory of gender; and Emile Durkheim seems to have accepted these craniological rankings of humanity, and used them to explain his distinction between ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity in the division of labour. He cites approvingly the phrase ‘one who has seen an aboriginal American has seen all aboriginal Americans’, although he never visited the Americas. He also believed that ‘the organic likenesses correspond to physical likenesses’. Furthermore, not only do ‘primitive peoples’ look alike, and think alike, they also act alike: ‘Everything is common to all. Movements are stereotyped; everyone performs the same ones in the same circumstances, and this conformity of conduct only translates the conformity of thought’ (1893/1964:134; 1915/1976:6). The physical body having now been thoroughly mapped (and politicized), anthropologists turned to measuring the senses; and the British Torres Strait Expedition of 1898–9, led by A.C. Haddon, initiated the anthropology of the senses, measuring again (see chapter 5). The new century saw fresh paradigms of the body being constructed, as anthropologists began to stop measuring and to start watching and listening, and to consider the roles of the body in society. We can distinguish three separate schools here: the American (Boas, Benedict and Mead), the French (Mauss, Hertz 244

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and van Gennep) and the British (Malinowski). Each ‘school’, for want of a better word, contributed new insights on the body.

The American school: Boas, Benedict, Mead By the beginning of the twentieth century, craniometry and anthropometry were falling into decline, partly because Franz Boas (1912) seemed to have measured almost everything, with no conclusive results; later he showed that ‘the difference between the averages of different races is insignificant as compared to the range of variability that occurs within each race’ (1940:42); but principally because Alfred Binet had devised the first intelligence tests, and attempted the precise quantitative and qualitative assessment of intelligence and intellectual abilities. The focus of research shifted from body to mind, and from inches to IQ, but the debates about differential intelligence by race and gender continued; and still continue. Same war, different battlefield. Boas paid little attention to the body as a social phenomenon; this was a problem he bequeathed to his students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Both were primarily interested in the cultural generation of personality—Benedict among the Plains Indians and the Kwakiutl, and later the Japanese, and Mead in Oceania; but whereas Benedict focussed more on cultural differences between populations, Mead became particularly involved in gender differences, both within and between groups. For both anthropologists, however, the body is a critical variable in how cultures and genders are lived. They were therefore the first North American anthropologists to go beyond the usual descriptions and listings of tattoos, clothing, diets, body-paintings, and so on, to show how variously bodies and the senses are lived. Some of the sensory dimensions of this research were discussed earlier in chapters 5 and 6: the different sensory worlds of the Apollonians and the Dionysians (Benedict), and the comparison of touching and child-raising in the South Seas and North America (Mead). But they both went far beyond this. In her classic work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), Benedict contrasted Japanese and Occidental philosophies of the body: In Japanese philosophy the flesh is not evil. Enjoying its possible pleasures is no sin. The spirit and body are not opposing forces in the universe and the Japanese carry this tenet to a 245

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logical conclusion: the world is not a battlefield between good and evil. (1965:189–90) From these polar premises about the body follow very different lifestyles. For the Japanese, the senses can and should be gratified, and the body can and should be enjoyed to the fullest. This is not the supreme purpose of life, but it is good. Mead, however, was more interested in the importance of body rituals in the social production of sex roles: Every parental behest that defines a way of sitting, a response to a rebuke or a threat, a game or an attempt to draw or sing or dance or paint, as feminine, is moulding the personality of each little girl’s brother as well as moulding the personality of the sister. (1956:211) Here she may have anticipated Foucault’s theory of the micro-politics of bio-power. Mead’s conclusion that ‘the personalities of the two sexes are socially produced’ (1956:209) through the body shocked an audience which took biological determinism for granted, and had hitherto assumed the existence of ‘natural’ behaviour for both sexes. In Male and Female, in a chapter entitled ‘Ways of the Body’, Mead explored this production process more carefully, specifically: ‘the way in which our bodies have learned, throughout their lives, how to be male, how to be female’ (1949:5). She analyses the body chronologically through the life-cycle, and cross-cuts this process with discussions of variations by culture and gender. She mentions societies where the bearing and rearing of children is detested, and others where children are treasured; societies where sexual intercourse is a shameful matter, and others where it is considered a delight; societies where women do not enjoy being women, and others where they do, and men envy them and try to imitate their roles. Pointing out that: ‘We are trained by our society to keep our bodies out of our minds’ (1949:79), Mead went on to criticize ‘the impaired sensuousness of American women’, the deficiencies of American birthing procedures, the rejection by most mothers of their own bodies as a source of food for their own children, the contradictions between sexual needs and sexual ethics in the United States, and a host of problems, as Mead described them, in the ways of the American body. 246

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The anthropology of the body is not simply an academic exercise, therefore, it is also about how we live our bodies.3 Mead herself was actively involved in changing these American ways of the body, both in her writing, and also in practice, hoping to give birth to her daughter, Cathy, in the squatting position with which she was so familiar, and also, as she specified, with: ‘(1) as little anesthesia as possible, (2) a film of the birth and (3) breast-feeding adjusted to the infant’s schedule’ (Howard, 1984:216–17).

The French school: Hertz, van Gennep and Mauss Meanwhile in France the anthropology of the body was developing in rather different directions. Robert Hertz, a student of Durkheim’s, later killed in the trenches, began his paper ‘The Preeminence of the Right Hand’ (1909) exclaiming: What resemblance more perfect than that between our two hands! And yet what a striking inequality there is! To the right hand go honours, flattering designations, prerogatives; it acts, orders, and takes. The left hand, on the contrary, is despised and reduced to the role of a humble auxiliary: by itself it can do nothing; it helps, it supports, it holds. (1960:89) So he asked, whence the nobility of the right hand and the servitude of the left? He suggested that the hands symbolize the polarity of the universe in the body: a polarity of good and evil, life and death, male and female, light and dark, inside and outside, sacred and profane. Hertz drew his data largely from Maori, Hindu and Celtic rituals, but also from Indo-European linguistics, tribes of the lower Niger, Christian mythology, war and contemporary French popular culture; but he pointed out that these dualistic ideas go back to Pythagoras. Hertz’ essential point was that patterns of thought are reflected in the body. Cosmology, gender and morality divide the body.4 The physical body is also social. Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960) considered the other side of this relation, emphasizing how the body is used to symbolize the social transitions of the individual in society; i.e. the social body is inscribed on the physical. ‘The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages’, he pointed out; birth, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood or motherhood, passages from age to age and occupation 247

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to occupation, initiations, and finally death. For all these events there are ceremonies: the ‘rites of passage’ of his title. Thresholds are crossed and new people are created, with new roles. But these essentially social processes are also essentially physical, and they are marked variously by eating and drinking, or perhaps special clothes and decorations, changes in hair style, ritual cleansing, bodypainting or cicatrization, body mutilations of various sorts (tooth removal, clitoridectomy, circumcision, subincision, and so on), with the rites and symbolisms varying from culture to culture. The person is made ‘new’, changed by a new role, and this requires a new body which in turn symbolizes, physically, society’s new demands on the individual, and the individual’s new rights and duties in society. While Hertz stressed the social aspects of the physical, van Gennep emphasized the physical implications of the social. It had finally come to be recognized just how the body and the society ‘embody’ each other. Marcel Mauss however, was the first to outline a systematic anthropology of the body. His essay ‘The Techniques of the Body’ was published in 1936. By techniques, he explained, ‘I mean the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies.’ The body’, he explained, ‘is the first and most natural instrument of man’; but, like other instruments, it must be learned, and it may be learned well or badly, and it is certainly learned differently in different cultures. He offered a series of anecdotes on how techniques of swimming and running had changed recently, how English and French techniques of digging differed, and how people are even taught to walk in particular styles: For example: I think I can also recognize 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?’ (1979:100) His engaging anecdotal style is quite uncharacteristic of North American and British social science; however, the point of the anecdotes was his suggestion that ‘there is perhaps no “natural way” for the adult’; and that to understand these techniques we need ‘the triple viewpoint’ of physiology, psychology and sociology to understand the ‘total man’ (1979:101–2). Mauss offered two 248

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classifications for the techniques of the body. The first classification is in terms of variations by gender, efficiency (some techniques are more efficient than others, e.g. in the case of swimming, the crawl as opposed to the breast-stroke) and culture (a pious Muslim adopts techniques others do not, as a matter of cultural tradition). The second classification is simply chronological: it follows ‘more or less the ages of man’ beginning with techniques of birth and adolescence and adulthood, including sleep; he had to tell us: ‘I have often slept on a horse, even sometimes a moving horse: the horse was more intelligent than I was’ (1979:81); and also resting, walking, running, dancing, jumping, climbing, swimming, throwing, and so on. There are techniques of hygiene—Mauss taught a little girl how to spit: ‘I gave her four sous per spit. As she was saving up for a bicycle she learnt to spit. She is the first person in her family who knows how to spit’ (1979:118). There are also techniques of eating and drinking, sexual reproduction, massage, and so on. Mauss’ interest in these techniques, so far as one may infer from his essay, was complex. Partly he was fascinated by the whole range of these body practices, changing over time and varying from society to society, and the apparent absence of a ‘natural way’ of doing anything. Partly he was pragmatic—the new jumping, running and swimming techniques were more efficient than the old ones; the fact that the little girl did not know how to spit had made every cold she got worse. Learning the body is also cultural; people even dig differently: 8,000 spades had had to be replaced every time French and English divisions relieved each other at the front in World War I. He was also interested in the ‘psychological cogwheel’ linking sociological causality and biological and physiological causality. But above all, he seemed to think that in the West the techniques of the body were not well understood in some fundamental way; for example, the breathing techniques learned in Taoism and Hinduism seemed to him to facilitate ‘communication with God’ (1979:87). Despite the originality of Mauss’ essay, his call went largely unheeded; indeed it was not translated into English until 1973. But Margaret Mead was thinking along similar lines—the learning of male and female bodies—in the late forties, as we have seen. Moreover, Mauss’ work did influence Mary Douglas, who called it ‘a gem of an essay’ (1973:91). 249

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The British school: Malinowski The phrase ‘British school’ is not a very happy one, since Bronislaw Malinowski was Polish-born not British, and one person does not, presumably, constitute a school. On the other hand, he did pioneer the method of participant observation (perforce, since he could not leave the Trobriand Islands during the war). His particular contribution was to introduce sex into the anthropology of the body. Two of Malinowski’s later works bore the dramatic titles Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), a rather technical piece on the Oedipus complex, and The Sexual Life of Savages (1929). This second book was far more sexually explicit, and sported a preface by the renowned sexologist Havelock Ellis. In his introduction, Malinowski suggests that ‘Sex…is rather a sociological and cultural force than a mere bodily relation of two individuals’; and he argues that: ‘That which means supreme happiness to the individual must be made a fundamental factor in the scientific treatment of human society’ (1929:xxiii, 1). Malinowski’s intent was, perhaps, to present as complete a discussion of the sexual life of the Trobrianders as Ellis had presented of Europeans in his seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1919–1928). Certainly, he wrote a very complete discussion of their sexual lives, from pregnancy, birthing, nursing and weaning, to adultery and abortion, including sexual games and sexual intrigues, sexual manners and sexual positions, erotic dreams and modesty, courtship, incest, dancing, menstruation, prostitution, beauty and self-decoration, orgiastic assaults by women on strangers, nakedness, the failure to acknowledge biological paternity and extended discussions on attitudes to the various parts of the body such as hair, colour, height and proportions. 5 Malinowski’s achievement is all the more remarkable when it is noted that his peers had said so little about sex and ‘supreme happiness’. Whether this reticence was from delicacy or ignorance, or a deprecation of mere bodily desire, or some combination of these factors, is not clear; but it was another six years before Mead published Sex and Temperament (1935), although writing about people in the same cultural area and from rather similar perspectives. By then the body was being recognized in anthropology as not only physical but also sexual. Cumulatively, we can see any number of bodies created by anthropologists in the 200 years since Blumenbach founded the 250

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discipline with the measured body of the early physical anthropologists. This body was followed by the political body of Social Darwinists who ‘legitimized’ racial (Nott and Glidden, etc.) and gender (Broca, Le Bon) hierarchies, the symbolic bodies of Hertz and van Gennep, the cultural bodies of Mauss, Mead and Benedict, and then the sexual bodies of Malinowski (see Synnott and Howes, 1992). SOCIOLOGY AND THE BODY

Sociologists have had ‘a curiously “disembodied” view of human beings’, suggests Peter Freund (1988:839); and anthropologists have had a head start over sociologists in this area. There are two main reasons for this: the central concerns of classical sociologists with industrial society rather than the individual, and the insistence on a contradiction between culture/society and nature/ biology, and the supremacy of the former. This in turn was congruent with the anti-body pro-mind tradition which we have seen was so characteristic of the ancient Greek, Christian and Cartesian traditions. Sociology has, in general, reflected the values of its own times and places. Anthropology, with its interest in other places and other values, and its strong tradition of physical anthropology, has given more recognition to human embodiment (Freund, 1988; Turner, 1991:6– 18). None the less, as archaeologists of the body, we should explore what the classical sociologists did say about the body. And they did pay much more attention to embodiment than perhaps some people are aware of, and certainly more than many contemporary sociologists. We have already mentioned Veblen on beauty, and Marx and Simmel on the senses; we will now consider Marx and Engels on the exploited working body, Durkheim’s theory of dualism with the sacrificed body, and Weber on the ascetic body, followed by later authorities.

Marx and Engels: working bodies In 1843, one year before he met Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. It was a damning indictment of capitalism, carefully researched and comprehensive. In this work, Engels developed many of the ideas usually attributed to Marx: the two classes; the class war; the 251

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exploitation, oppression and alienation of the working class; the law and politics as the expression of capitalist economic power; the emergence of protest and the inevitability of violent revolution. He also documented in detail how capitalism cripples and kills the bodies of the workers. The workers in the industrial slums, he explains, are riddled with consumption, and decimated by periodic epidemics of typhus and scarlet fever. London workers are ‘pale, lank, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed ghosts [with] languid, flabby faces, incapable of the slightest energetic expression’. Living conditions are appalling, so are working conditions in factory, mine and foundry, for man, woman and child. In Manchester in the 1840s, 57 per cent of the children died before the age of 5, according to official reports. And the working class died young. A commission reported from Liverpool in 1840 that: The average longevity of the upper classes, gentry, professional men, etc., was thirty-five years; that of business men and handicraftsmen, twenty-two years; and that of operatives, daylabourers, and serviceable classes in general but fifteen years.’ Engels deliberately accused the English bourgeoisie of ‘social murder’ (1969:126–40). Every occupation and industry creates its own body: its own physique, pain, pathology and death. Citing medical reports to various government commissions of enquiry, Engels describes body after body. Mill hands in Yorkshire and Lancashire: ‘Malformations of the spine are very frequent…The knees were bent inward, the ligaments very often relaxed and enfeebled, and the long bones of the legs bent.’ Metal and steel workers in Sheffield: ‘Crooked backs and one leg crooked, “hind-leg” as they call it, so that the two legs have the form of a K from constantly filing at a lathe; and lung disease, from constant inhalation of the metal dust particles, especially for the grinders.’ Pottery workers in Staffordshire: skin disease, arsenic poisoning, paralysis of the hand and other limbs, colic, epilepsy, lung disease and death by consumption or convulsion…‘to the greater pecuniary benefit of the bourgeoisie’. Glass workers: in children general debility and disease, stunted growth, and especially affections of the eye, bowel complaint, and rheumatic and bronchial affections. Many of the children are pale, have red eyes, often blind for weeks at a time, suffer from violent nausea, vomiting, coughs, colds and rheumatism. 252

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Dress makers in London: the foul air, the bent posture, the bad food and the long hours affect the body: Enervation, exhaustion, debility, loss of appetite, pains in the shoulders, back and hips, but especially headache, begin very soon; then follow curvatures of the spine, high, deformed shoulders, leanness, swelled, weeping, and smarting eyes, which soon become short-sighted; coughs, narrow chests, and shortness of breath, and all manner of disorders in the development of the female organism. (1969:180–238) The miners, of coal, lead, copper, zinc and tin, in Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, the North and West: The women seem to suffer especially from this work, and are seldom, if ever, as straight as other women.’ The pelvis is deformed and child-bearing is difficult, even fatal. Diseases of the digestive organs, the heart and lungs are followed by early deaths, if the frequent, often preventable, ‘accidents’, do not kill them first (1969:267–75). Furthermore, the b ody who protests, violently or nonviolently, may be fined or fired, imprisoned, transported, beaten or shot (1969:239–66). The body is an instrument of production, bearing in itself the deformities and diseases and death of the specific production process; it is also an instrument of repression: Foucault developed this point further in Discipline and Punish (1979). The human costs of capital were of particular concern to Engels; Marx was less interested in the physical, or perhaps he just took Engels’ contribution for granted and moved in a different direction. At any rate his Capital. Vol. 1 (1867) is crammed with mathematical equations and economic calculations, not human suffering. None the less, Marx did devote some attention to ‘industrial pathology’ and to the ‘crippling of body and mind’ (n.d.: 342–3), particularly in chapters 10, 15, 25 and 27. He describes how people are quite literally ‘worked to death’ (n.d.: 435), slaves of machines and of capitalists, cheap substitutes for steam, water or mule-power. ‘Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality at the other pole’ (n.d.: 604). Furthermore, the body is not only an instrument of production, it may also have intrinsic economic value, dead: 253

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Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly, set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744…the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50. (n.d.: 705) Dead or alive, bodies were worth much the same. Marx sums it all up: ‘One capitalist always kills many’ (n.d.: 714), and cripples many more. Marx and Engels were therefore pioneers of medical sociology, particularly in the area of occupational diseases and mortality, and the health-gap between rich and poor. These matters are still of concern. In the United Kingdom, the Black Report found that the death-rates for men in 1971 ranged from 79 per 100,000 among professionals to 123 per 100,000 among the poorest men in Class V occupations in a steep class gradient linking amount of money and number of years lived; the death-rate is 56 per cent higher in the poorest than in the richest jobs. In practice ‘men and women in occupational Class V had a two-and-a-half times greater chance of dying before reaching retirement age than their professional counterparts in occupational Class I’ (Townsend and Davidson, 1982:51–6, 221). In Canada men in the highest income quintile can expect, on average, to live six years longer than men in the lowest quintile, for 73.4 years; for women the difference is three years, for 79.4 years (Hay, 1988:30). Poverty kills, and wealth is a life-saver. The mathematics of the body therefore reflects the political economy of the body. In the United States the Surgeon-General reported that: ‘Each year 100,000 Americans die from occupational illnesses and almost 400,000 new cases of occupational diseases are recognized’; perhaps 20 per cent of all cancers are related to workplace carcinogens. He suggested that perhaps 20 per cent of all premature deaths—and a vast amount of disease and disability—could be eliminated by protecting our people from environmental hazards. Furthermore, another 13,000 people are killed in workplace accidents; mining, agriculture, forestry, fishing and construction are particularly hazardous. (United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1979:101, 106–13) 254

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Other industries are still more hazardous, not so much to production workers but to consumers. The tobacco industry may or may not be highly profitable, but it is extremely costly. A recent World Health Organization study of smoking in 22 industrialized nations reports 20 per cent of all those living there (here!) will die from smoking: 250 millions taken by cancer, heart disease and other smokingrelated diseases (Globe and Mail, 25.5.92). The tobacco industry will perhaps take more lives than the highly profitable armaments industry. The ideas of Marx and Engels are still alive and well; profits, capitalist or socialist, Bhopal or Chernobyl, tobacco or armaments, are still built on blood.

Emile Durkheim: the sacrificial body Durkheim’s principal interest in the body was philosophical rather than practical. He cared little for Marx’ industrial pathology of the working body; indeed for him the division of labour united society in organic interdependence, rather than divided it in a brutal class war (1893/1964). In an important essay, ‘The Dualism of Human Nature’ (1914), however, Durkheim did attend to the individual, unusually for him, arguing that sociology cannot ‘deal with the human groups that are the immediate object of its investigation, without eventually touching on the individual who is the basic element of which these groups are composed’. And one of the ‘characteristic peculiarities’ of these individuals is, he said, ‘the constitutional duality of human natures’. Durkheim then outlined the familiar theory in the tradition of Plato, Paul and Descartes: In every age, man has been intensely aware of this duality. He has, in fact, everywhere conceived of himself as being formed of two radically heterogeneous beings: the body and the soul …And not only are these two beings substantially different, they are in large measure independent of each other, and are often even in conflict…The body is an integral part of the material universe, as it is made known to us by sensory experience; the abode of the soul is elsewhere, and the soul tends ceaselessly to return to it. This abode is the world of the sacred. (1964:326) 255

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Expanding on this, Durkheim distinguishes between on the one hand…sensations and sensory tendencies; on the other hand, conceptual thought and moral activity. Each of these two parts represents a separate pole of our being, and these two poles are not only distinct from one another but are opposed to one another. Our sensory appetites are necessarily egoistic: they have our individuality and it alone as their object. (1964:327) This body—soul dualism therefore coincides with self-society, personal-impersonal, profane-sacred dichotomies: The old formula homo duplex is therefore verified by the facts…This inner contradiction is one of the characteristics of our nature…The result is that we are never completely in accord with ourselves for we cannot follow one of our two natures without causing the other to suffer. Our joys can never be pure; there is always some pain mixed with them; for we cannot simultaneously satisfy the two beings within us …It is true that we are double, that we are the realization of an antinomy. (1964:329–31) This dualism is deeply resonant of both Paul and Augustine; but Durkheim asks ‘Where do this duality and antinomy come from?’ (1964:330). His answer, in brief, is from society: The soul is opposed to the body, which is regarded as profane…The duality of our nature is thus only a particular case of that division of things into the sacred and profane that is the foundation of all religions, and it must be explained on the basis of the same principles… In brief, this duality corresponds to the double existence that we lead concurrently: the one purely individual and rooted in our organisms, the other social and nothing but an extension of society. (1964:334–5, 337) The crux of the matter is that ‘society cannot be formed or maintained without our being required to make perpetual and costly sacrifices’ (1964:338). For Hertz the origins of dualism lie in the cosmos itself; while for Durkheim it lay in the conflict between 256

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the individual body and society, a duality that coincides with bodymind, profane and sacred. Conflict it was, and is, requiring ‘perpetual and costly sacrifices’. His point was made with particular poignancy in the following years when both his son and Robert Hertz sacrificed their lives in the trenches. Durkheim himself died only two years after his son, and Marcel Mauss never recovered from World War II. Durkheim’s difference from Marx is instructive. For Marx the bodies of the workers are sacrificed, for the direct benefit of the bodies of the bourgeoisie who enjoy better health, better living conditions, and longer lives—precisely because of these sacrifices. Whereas for Durkheim all bodies are sacrificed (possibly not equally, but he did not discuss this), and they are sacrificed for society, not for capitalism. Society demands the sacrifice of our embodied selves, to greater or less degree—either for the greater good of the collectivity as a whole, allegedly, or for our greater good in the long run…if we should live so long. Certainly Durkheim’s theory relates to Marx’ discussion on the workers’ sacrifices of their health and lives, and to Foucault’s theory on the sacrifices imposed on citizens for the production of docile bodies, and Weber’s theory of asceticism, which is but self-sacrifice.

Max Weber: the ascetic body Where Marx had been passionately concerned about the body and the senses, particularly in their exploitation, and Durkheim had been interested in the body from a philosophical perspective, Weber was not directly interested in the body at all. Indirectly, however, the body kept on appearing, unexpectedly almost, in much of his work on economics, religion and rationalization. Furthermore, his insistence on ‘verstehen’, or interpretive understanding, i.e. the subjective in sociology, provided one of the foundations of social psychology and later phenomenology, in which the body began to play a prime role. The control of the body is central to Weber’s discussion of religion; and it is also central to his theory of capitalism; yet religion and capitalism connect both in society and in the body. There is tension, however, between the rationalization of religion and industrialization on the one hand, and the body, particularly sex, on the other. This polarity between reason and passion mirrors the duality of society 257

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and self, culture and nature, which Durkheim had earlier described as reflecting the dualism of human nature: mind and body. Weber argues in The Sociology of Religion that ‘the power of the sphere of eroticism enters into particular tensions with religions of salvation’. Hence the hostility towards eroticism and sexuality in some mystical and ascetic faiths. This is partly because ‘sexuality, the drive that most firmly binds man to the animal level, furnishes the most powerful temptations to withdrawal from the mystical quest’; and also because: ‘Rational ascetic alertness, self-control, and methodical planning of life are seriously threatened by the peculiar irrationality of the sexual act, which is ultimately and uniquely unsusceptible to rational organization’ (1964:236–8). Hostility towards sexuality is not an idiosyncrasy of Christianity, Weber insists; none the less: The preaching of the Jews, with its demand of absolute and indissoluble monogamy, went far beyond all other religions in the limitations imposed upon permissible and legitimate sexuality.’ This included also the condemnations of adultery and prostitution, which were institutionalized in other faiths, the esteem for chastity, the widespread misogyny, the condemnation of birth control, and so on (1964:238–40). The demands of the body, the Pauline ‘flesh’, were believed to threaten ascetic and mystical Christianity, and so were condemned; later they were believed to threaten the development of industrial capitalism, and so were doubly condemned. The laity and the workers (the same people, very often, in different roles) were therefore abjured to restrain gratification both to achieve salvation and mastery over the self, and also to earn profits and to acquire wealth, and no doubt mastery over others. The demands of the body jeopardized the possibility of achieving both goals. Marx believed, very strongly, that capitalism was founded on violence: the expropriation of the physical labour, the land, and indeed the health and the lives of the working class. Weber disagreed with this ‘one-sided materialistic’ explanation of the origins of capitalism, and suggested that ‘the Protestant ethic’ also influenced the development of capitalism (1968:183). Capitalism is the economic expression of Calvinist theology; for labour is not only an economic necessity (as Marx had said so often), it is also pious, a virtue, a spiritual goal. Hard work and thrift, rather than violence, ensure capital accumulation. Indeed the parable of the lazy servant, condemned because he did not increase his master’s money (Matthew, 258

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25:14–30) seemed to the Puritans to give Biblical justification for their ethic. John Wesley wrote: We ought not to prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich. (In Weber, 1968:175; Weber’s emphasis). This was, of course, a total capsize of the traditional interpretation of Christ’s teaching, for he blessed the poor and eulogized poverty. But the new post-Reformation asceticism consisted not in the infliction of physical or even emotional pain on the body, but in working that body hard, for mundane gain and to achieve salvation. On the other side of the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin coined his popular aphorisms: ‘time is money’, ‘credit is money’, ‘money can beget money’, ‘honesty is the best policy’ (i.e. it pays), and others. This was the spirit of capitalism and Methodism (Weber, 1968:48– 52). The Protestant ethic therefore sacralized work, frugality, thrift, honesty, sobriety, moderation and financial gain. Some of these virtues relate to the body, and most were identical with the ancient ascetic, monastic virtues (all but gain). The sexual ethic related more directly to the body: The sexual asceticism of Puritanism differs only in degree, not in fundamental principle, from that of monasticism… [S]exual intercourse is permitted, even within marriage, only as the means willed by God for the increase of His glory according to the commandment, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ Along with a moderate vegetable diet and cold baths, the same prescription is given for all sexual temptations as is used against religious doubts and a sense of moral unworthiness: ‘Work hard in your calling.’ (Weber, 1968:158–9) The body was severely circumscribed in Puritan Europe and America: vegetable diets, cold baths, no dancing in Calvin’s Geneva, no theatre in Cromwell’s England, no alcohol, no cosmetics, sombre dress, and not much sex, and hard work. The capitalist-Methodist ascetic was not very different from the traditional Catholic asceticism (Weber, 1968:118–22). 259

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Bryan Turner has suggested that Weber’s notion of ‘rationalization’ of bodies anticipated Foucault’s theory of ‘disciplined’ and ‘docile’ bodies (Turner, 1984:2–3, 164–5). The suggestion is interesting as connecting two leading twentieth-century theorists of the body, both of whom emphasized the control of the body in emergent capitalism. The differences are also instructive. First, Weber prioritized religion whereas Foucault emphasized politics, and Marx economics. Second, the locus of control, for Weber, was the self in Puritanism; for Foucault it was the panopticon, surveillance by others in all the micro-institutions that constitute society; for Marx it lay in the violent hands of capitalists. And where Marx was concerned with how much the workers suffered under capitalism, and Durkheim noted that social life itself required sacrificial suffering, Weber was interested with how much the puritans/capitalists made themselves suffer, for both salvation in the next world and profit in this one. European sociology has been more concerned with the body than perhaps has been realized: the body as exploited, sacrificed, ascetic or docile.

Sumner to Miner: the invisible body From Europe to the United States: William Graham Sumner’s classic, Folkways (1906), has much to say about the body. Sumner’s fundamental proposition was that ‘the mores make everything right’. In a work of remarkable erudition, scanning anthropology and history, he gave numerous examples from all areas of life, including body rituals and symbols, the relativity of beauty, sexual practices and attitudes, dress and taboo parts of the body, nudity, eating and drinking rituals, kissing, and a chapter on asceticism. Yet he never focussed on the body directly; it remains subordinate to his main interest, the mores. The relativity of the body is clear, but not the processes of social constructions. Sumner had some background in anthropology, which perhaps explains his interest in, and knowledge of, the folkways of the body; but American sociologists have tended to write more about the mind. Charles Horton Cooley’s Social Organization (1909/ 1962) is subtitled ‘A Study of the Larger Mind’—a strange phrase for what we would now probably describe as the body politic; and his first chapter is entitled ‘Social and Individual Aspects of Mind’. Similarly, George Herbert Mead’s notes and papers, published after his death, were titled Mind, Self and Society (1934). Apart from the occasional 260

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reference and footnote, the body is conspicuous by its absence (Mead, 1970:137, 186–7). Indeed the body of the biological individual is often identified as animal, and the mind is thought to be the medium by which a rational self develops in society. The traditional mindbody polarity has meant the neglect of the body. Robert Park also had a highly mentalistic understanding of social science: It is only when minds meet, only when the meaning that is in one mind is communicated to another mind so that these minds mutually influence one another, that social contact properly speaking, may be said to exist. (In Coser, 1971:359) No one can object to a meeting of minds, but minds do not exist in a vacuum, nor without bodies, as Feuerbach had insisted. Furthermore, as Simmel had noted, the first contact is ‘the glance’— which is often enough to terminate or facilitate further social contact (exceptions include contacts by phone or mail). This is said not to disparage such great workers as Sumner, Cooley, Mead and Park, whose contributions to the social sciences have been so enormous; but at least we can see their priorities and concerns more clearly. Ironically, it was probably Horace Miner’s famous essay ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’ (1956) which made the body visible. The Nacirema, ‘a magic-ridden’ and a ‘preponderantly masochistic people’ who live south of the Canadian Cree, are an intriguing group: While much of the people’s time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labours and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique. The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. (1956:503) 261

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He reported on the ritual visits to the medicine-man, the ‘holy mouth man’, male self-laceration rituals and women’s head-baking practices, mouth-rites and ‘latipso’ ceremonies. Miner also described local aesthetic practices: There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large’ (1956:506). Odd that the first attention paid to beautification and body aesthetics should be in satire! Perhaps this is indicative yet again of mind-body hierarchy. None the less, the social sciences are beginning to concern themselves, finally, with what the Nacirema are also so concerned about: the body. Indeed, it was not long after Miner’s anthropological research on the Nacirema (‘American’ spelt backwards) that Douglas published her first work on the body. CONCLU SION

Every sociologist and anthropologist seems to construct his or her own sociology of the body; and every culture constructs its own body differently. So we are a long way from developing some simple grand theory of the body, even if such a theory were possible, or useful, or desirable. None the less, sociologists and anthropologists have come a long way in their/our theorizing of the body over the last 150 or so years. The body social changes constantly, as society changes; so the research has a future as long as humans are embodied. The body is at the heart of social life and social interaction, and also at the heart of personal identity. The formal recognition of this pivotal role of the sensate body in the social sciences has been some time in the making, yet it has also been recognized from the beginning, in segmental perspectives, with various authorities sometimes contradicting, but more usually oblivious of, others, and often, with hindsight, complementary. Cumulatively, the insights on the relation between body, self and society have been of immense theoretical and practical significance; and the possibilities are endless. What is the sociology of the body? It is the study of the self as embodied, and of the various attributes, organs, processes and senses that constitute our being embodied; it is the study of the body as a symbolic system and a semiotic process; it is the phenomenology of the body, i.e. the subjectively and culturally created meanings 262

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of the body; it is the study of the lifelong socialization and political control of the self in and with and through the body until death; it is also the anthropology, history and psychology of the body and, if one enjoys post-modernist terms, the politics (Foucault), economics (Ong) and geometry (Turner) of bodies. In sum, the sociology of the body is about how we are our bodies, how we live our bodies and our senses, and how we use them and die them too. This is not simply a new substantive area in the discipline, although it is that; I think it is also a transformation of sociology— a new type of sociology with new perspectives on society, on the self, and on the body also. The sociology of the body attempts to answer the question: ‘What is the body?’ The question is not quite so simple as it seems, for the body is not just a physical ‘thing’: all objects are culturally mediated. This is why there is, and always has been, such a wide range of constantly changing answers. Also the deceptively simple question involves the other closely related questions: ‘What is the self?’ and ‘What is society?’ Difficult though these questions are, I think sociologists and anthropologists have developed far clearer notions of the cultural reality and meanings of the body. The sectoral insights of the early researchers have, cumulatively, contributed towards a deeper understanding of the individual as embodied, and of society as embodied in the self. Sociologists have gradually built a social science grounded and rooted, ‘embodied’, in our experience and in our corporeal lives interacting with each other…not just as (supposedly) rational animals, or political or urban or family animals, but as physical animals and as ‘sensible’ beings. We know better who we are, what society is, and, from other cultures, the range of other somatic and sensory possibilities and options. The sensate body has been many things for sociologists and anthropologists: a clue to an evolutionary past (physical anthropologists); an index of racial and/or gender superiority (Nott, Glidden, Broca); an instrument of production, repression and intrinsic economic value (Marx and Engels); a medium of learning (Mauss, Mead); a symbol of society (Hertz, van Gennep, Douglas); a personal sacrifice to society (Durkheim); ascetic or self-indulgent (Weber); a status symbol (Veblen); the foundation of society in the glance (Simmel); a symbol of the self (Goffman); and an instrument of political control (Foucault), with much of the work being done by 263

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feminists from different perspectives (e.g. Greer, Martin, Wolf, Lock, Scheper-Hughes and others). As many authorities have noted, the body has been relatively neglected in sociology, but not totally. Many of the founders of sociology did concern themselves with the body and the senses. Furthermore, many traditional topics in sociology are about the body social, most obviously gender and sex roles, gerontology, race relations, medical sociology and, in part, deviance and social psychology. Yet the body social is the common denominator of all these core substantive areas: it is the central concept which unifies and underpins the rest. Similarly, the senses, as our prime system of knowledge and communication, deserve our closest attention, not as physiological systems but as social systems. The mind has been endlessly studied, but not the face, still less the tired feet upon which the whole socio-physical edifice stands…or falls.

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2 3

4

5

The body plays an important role also in Plato’s political philosophy: the three types of men ruled by three parts of the body, head, heart and belly, and pursuing different goals, with suitably different jobs in the Republic, and indeed different types of soul (see Republic, Bk 3, 414, Bk 4, 440–1, and Bk 9, 580–1; also Phaedrus and Timaeus 69– 70, 89–90). Greek medical science of the body, predicated on the four humours, was pioneered by Hippocrates (1983) and Galen and persisted in British medicine until Victorian times (Haley, 1978:23–32). Astrological men and women illustrated texts up to the sixteenth century. The body was believed to be influenced not only by the seven planets and the 12 star clusters defined as the zodiac, but also to be cosmically linked to almost everything: the four elements, humours, seasons and types of physique, the seven colours of the spectrum, notes of the scale, ages of ‘man’ and days of the week and the 12 apostles and months of the year. All is one, and can be divined (see De Vore, 1947; Tillyard, 1963; Klibansky et al., 1964; Brau, 1982; O’Neill, 1985; Tester, 1989). Peter Brown has argued that ascetic thought was not dualistic, and was not motivated by hatred of the body (1988:222–4, 235–40); but with respect I must disagree. Ascetics from Paul to Ignatius said the body was an enemy; they treated it like an enemy, bruising, scourging, torturing this enemy (Teresa of Avila). And they constantly polarized body and soul: sacrificing the joys of the one for the salvation of the latter. Four of the seven Cardinal Sins are lust, covetousness, greed and sloth: highly corporeal. And the Baptism and Easter services in the Catholic church still require Catholics ‘to renounce the devil, the world and the flesh’; and by the flesh was always meant the body. No doubt the theology of the body is gentler since Vatican II; none the less the tradition of body-negativism is deep and strong (see Nelson, 1978; Pagels, 1988). See Bynum (1987) and Steinberg (1983) for their different portraits of medieval bodies. Note that the dividing lines between physical, spiritual and political, and between individual and office, were not 265

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6

7

8

9

drawn as we draw them. So, for instance, in Tudor doctrine, the monarch had two bodies: one natural and physical, the other political and mystical. Kantorowicz has discussed some of the problems, origins and consequences of this belief; it does explain the 1649 charge of high treason, committed by the King against the King (1957:39). The notion is congruent with the doctrine of the two bodies of Christ developed by Paul, but not derived from it, he suggests (1957:268– 72). The concept probably originated in ancient Rome, for the pagan emperors of the second and third centuries were believed to have two bodies, or ‘a double body that divided when he died, yielding two bodies, one for men, one for gods’. So emperors had two funerals: one for each. Hence Vespasian’s last laugh: ‘Alas! I believe I am becoming a god!’ (Dupont, 1989:418, 401). This mechanistic view of the body as machinery breaking down, then being fixed, and wearing out contrasts sharply with others. In the Book of Job, for instance, illnesses and horrors of various sorts are directly from God, but can be negotiated; or they may be from the Devil, in a type of retribution by God, for the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children (Exodus 20:5). In the ascetic views of Saint Francis or Saint Ignatius, illness is a gift from God, to be accepted. In the modern holistic view, illness may be seen as ‘all in the mind’ or as a consequence of neg ative social relationships or lifestyles. The paradigms of illness reflect the paradigms of the body, as Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) and Turner (1984) have suggested. Our attitudes to machines are complex. We do not seem to resent them for their physical capacities. We know we cannot run as fast as a car, dive as deep as submarines, nor fly at all. Mental capacities are different, however. Homo sapiens has traditionally been distinguished from the animal kingdom by rationality. ‘Intellect more than anything else is man’, said Aristotle; Descartes echoed him (1968:106). Yet now machines are, or seem to be, more rational than human beings: they can calculate faster and win at chess. One expert on artificial intelligence wrote: ‘The human mind not only is limited in its storage and processing capacity but it also has known bugs: it is easily misled, stubborn, and even blind to the truth’ (Rheingold, 1983:33). Not so computers. These machines have therefore challenged traditional definitions of homo sapiens, and facilitated a redefinition from rational animal (Aristotle) to rational machine (Descartes) to feeling machine (see Turkle, 1984). But animals can feel too. So how should homo sapiens be defined? A central tenet of the Hare Krishna movement is the belief, from the Bhagavad Gita, that ‘I am not my body, I am spirit—soul’. In this view, ‘false identification with the body and bodily senses [is] the root and cause of all man’s problems’ (Burr, 1984:141). Police in Uruguay recently arrested about 20 people, suspected of being involved in trafficking human organs for transplants abroad, particularly Brazil (Globe and Mail, 27.11.91).

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2 GENDER 1 2 3

4

5

6

7

Some of the relevant texts are John 8:12; 11:25–6; Matthew 25:33– 46; Mark 16:19. Daly states that ‘in Christian doctrine, the “fact” that god-the-son became man (male), assuming a human—that is, male—body, enabled males to become gods’ (1978:187). These persecutions, crusades and wars include the nine crusades from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries; the persecutions of the Jews in Europe from the Black Death, revived again in the Holocaust; the crusade against the Albigensians proclaimed in 1208, which led to the formation of the Inquisition; the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1609; the massacre of the Huguenots in 1572 and their expulsion from France in 1685; and indeed the general pattern of mutual persecutions of faiths and sects both within nations and between nations, with religious differences often coinciding with, and camouflaging, ethnic, political and economic conflicts, then as now. There is some debate over numbers. Trevor-Roper accepts estimates that under 1,000 persons were executed for witchcraft in England between 1532 and 1736, and under 5,000 in Scotland (1969:89). Thomas agreed (1971:450–2). Twenty people were executed in the Salem trials in Massachusetts. The ferocity of persecution varied from country to country; but one nineteenth-century writer asserts that: ‘It is computed from historical records that nine millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft after 1484.’ This figure was repeated recently in a Canadian National Film Board production, and then in the press, as ‘true’. While exact numbers will never be known, Mary Daly cites a ‘typical conservative estimate of 200,000’ (1978:83). Thomas Laqueur (1990) has suggested that the notion of woman as a ‘defective’ man on a vertical continuum, which he called a ‘onesex’ model of a biological body, prevailed until the Enlightenment; this model then shifted to the horizontal, oppositional two-sex model that we are familiar with today. Gender was rank more than biology. Laqueur’s model applies particularly for biology; but dualism seems to me to have greater resonance, with a long tradition in Hesiod, Pythagoras and Parmenides, also Plato and Aristotle, Genesis, Paul, Tertullian and others. In metaphor, however, unlike in space, vertical and horizontal continua are not mutually exclusive, and indeed may be mutually reinforcing. Jones adds that: ‘This [dualism] was of course most pronounced in his basic classifications: love—hunger; ego-sexuality; auto-eroticismhetero-eroticism; Eros—Thanatos; Life-Death; and so on. We used to say he couldn’t count above two’ (1954:470). Murder is only the tip of the iceberg of violence against women, which includes physical, emotional, moral and institutional violence (see Miles, 1991; Status of Women Canada, 1991). On women who kill, see Jones (1988).

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3 BEAUTY AND THE FACE 1 The literature on the empirical sociology of beauty is reviewed by Cash and Pruzinsky (1990) and Patzer (1985). The role of the face in non-verbal communication and body language has been extensively discussed, first by Darwin (1955), and more recently by Morris (1977), Knapp (1980), Henley (1977) and Hall (1990). On the face and beauty in history, see Clark (1980), Banner (1983), Steele (1985), Freedman (1986) and Marwick (1988). General works include Brophy (1963), Liggett (1974), Landau (1989) and Liggett and Liggett (1989). 2 There were apparently beauty contests on the island of Lesbos; but in Sparta the women were not allowed to use cosmetics, jewellery or perfumes, nor could they wear colored clothing (Pomeroy, 1975:83, 55; Lefkowitz and Fant, 1977:52). 3 Aristotle also defined the beautiful, or the noble in the Bollingen edition, as ‘that which is desirable for its own sake and also worthy of praise; or that which is both good and also pleasant because good’ (Rhetoric 1366a:33; 1984:2174). 4 Christina Rossetti wrote a poem called ‘Beauty is Vain’. Anticipating contemporary feminists she asks ‘Shall a woman exalt her face/ Because it gives delight?’ She concludes, gloomily, ‘Whether she flaunt her beauty/Or hide it away in a veil/…Time will win the race he runs with her/And hide her away in a shroud,’ 5 Hegel’s insistence that the ‘external human form’ is symbolic of the inner spirit is surely reflected in our modern body-culture and our practices of dieting, tanning, body-shaping courses, weight-lifting, cosmetic surgery, body-building, hair-styling and beautification generally. 6 In The Mikado, Katisha protested this admiration of facial beauty: You hold that I am not beautiful because my face is plain. But you know nothing. You are unenlightened. Learn, then, that it is not in the face alone that beauty is to be sought…I have a left shoulder-blade that is a miracle of loveliness. People come miles to see it. My right elbow has a fascination few can resist. 7 Note that, according to Plato, this is higher up the ladder of beauty than the beauty of objects. 8 Popular wisdom may be changing, and now warns against ugliness. Two sayings express this, my students have informed me: ‘Beauty is skin deep, but ugliness goes right to the bone’; and: ‘I know I’m fat; but you’re ugly, and I can always go on a diet.’ 9 See Greer (1971); Kinzer (1977); Lakoff and Scherr (1984); Brownmiller (1984); Chapkis (1988); Seid, 1989; Kanin (1990); Wolf (1990) Rodia, 1992.

4 HAIR 1 Hair symbolism has been extensively researched by anthropologists (Malinowksi, 1922; Frazer, 1935; Firth, 1936; Leach, 1958; Hallpike, 268

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1969). Other anthropologists have studied hair symbolism in Nigeria (Houlberg, 1979), Kenya (Cole, 1979), Sri Lanka (Obeyesekere, 1981), Brazil (Turner, 1969), Mali (Griaule, 1970), among Hindu Punjabis (Hershman, 1974), among the Powhaten Indians of early Virginia (Williamson, 1979) and the early Christians (Derrett, 1973). 2 There is a fourth opposition which has some application in many societies: adults and children have opposite hair. Changes in status are frequently symbolized by changes in hair: length, colour, style, etc. (van Gennep, 1960). In Edwardian times, young ladies would wear their hair up to signify their eligibility for marriage. Today young men may grow moustaches or beards, or wear their hair long after high school—depending on their politics and their occupations; and young women may have their long hair cut to more manageable lengths, if it has not been cut already. For both men and women, the first full-time job often requires a rite of passage: a new hair style. 3 For this and other romantic records see the Guinness Book of Records (Matthews, 1993:61). 4 Western norms do not necessarily apply in other societies, of course. Firth points out that among the Tikopia, hair styles used to be ‘the exact reverse’ of Western styles (1973:272); and the situation is similar among the Sambaru of Kenya (Cole, 1979). 5 Competitions for beards were commonly held in the Navy and on Polar expeditions, with prizes being given for longest, bushiest, best effort, and so on. 6 Nor do all women, of course, but women, unlike many balding men, can change their hair styles and, unlike men, are indeed often encouraged to do so. 7 The Punks and the Skins are some of the obvious exceptions to the male norm, but their case exemplifies the third proposition and is discussed below. 8 Margaret Thatcher, who, as Prime Minister was allegedly a dyed blonde, may be an exception to Molloy’s rule. 9 This colour symbolism is exactly reversed in some other cultures (Firth, 1973:68). 10 This is not true for ideological rebels, as a recent press report indicates: ‘Doidge, 21, whose hair was mauve at last week’s court hearing, said his hair had been black at the time he was accused of being the blondhaired driver of a yellow Austin Mini’. (Punch, 25.4.84). 11 For an excellent history of false hair, see Woodforde (1971). 12 An interesting example can be found in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1972:27) where an admiring policeman described a tough lady as ‘a woman with hair on her chest’, i.e. she is manly. The book was first published in 1933. 13 The Hippy revolt against the short-haired establishment is reminiscent of the Puritan revolt against the long-haired Cavalier aristocracy. Indeed 300 years after the Civil War, the Hippies rebelled against the selfsame Puritan ethic. The same ideological conflict continued under different names, with the same hair symbols.

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14 Just as Hippies opposed the establishment, so the establishment opposed them; and Firth has offered a number of examples (1973:276–83). The examples these days, however, are of opposition to Punk or Skinhead styles, a famous example being the firing of Peter Mortiboy from his job with Rolls Royce because his four-inch spikes ‘represented a safety hazard’ (The Times, 12.10.83). The establishment also opposes feminist styles: Judith Quirst was fired from her job as a waitress because a customer objected to her unshaven legs (Levine and Lyons, 1980:206). 15 Greer’s argument is not entirely convincing, I think. Men do not cultivate all their hair (=bestiality=aggressive sexuality). They mostly shave their facial hair and cut their head hair short. If shaving the legs or axillary hair is ‘infantile’ then surely so is shaving the face. Furthermore, women do not suppress all their hair (=vigour=libido); indeed they ‘cultivate’ their head hair in many different ways, and with even more attention than men ‘cultivate’ their hairy chests or legs. And finally, while feminists have opposed depilation of the legs and under the arms, they have not opposed depilation of ‘unwanted facial hair’, nor have they described this as ‘infantile’; which seems illogical. A moustache could also be a symbol of feminism. Finally it is unclear why male hair is a mark of the beast, whereas female hair is a sign of vigour. 16 The same logic applied, or applies, to long-haired Hippies, to afros (‘the bigger the badder’) and to dreadlocks. 17 Ovid said something similar: ‘A head without hair is like a field without grass’ (in Firth, 1973:287). 18 Shaving the head is found in many faiths and cultures as a symbol of dedication to God; these include ancient Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the Yoruba (Leach, 1958; Derrett, 1973; Hershman, 1974; Houlberg, 1979). 19 Teeth also survive death, and some people do keep their children’s baby teeth. But they are not such a popular symbol of the self, perhaps because smashing out the beloved’s teeth after death is not so congenial a pastime as snipping a lock of hair. Nelson did not bequeath his teeth. Bones, too, survive death; but their utility as a symbol of the self is marred by the decay of the flesh which must happen first, and also by the possibility that the bones may be more reminiscent of death than of the deceased; furthermore we never see the bones in life, but we do see, and touch and smell, the hair of the beloved.

5 THE SENSES 1 Aristotle does not explicitly rank the senses; the ranking is clearly implied however; see also: ‘Smell and its object are much less easy to determine than what we have already discussed [sight and hearing]; the distinguishing characteristic of smell is less obvious than those of sound and colour’ (On the Soul 421; 1984:670). Elsewhere he ranks sight above hearing (Sense and Sensibilia 437; 1984:694). See also Eudemian Ethics 1230–1; 1984:1949–50. 270

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3 4

5

Aquinas believed that his arguments successfully refuted the errors of the ancient Epicureans, including Aristippus, and the Cerinthians, or Millenarians, who believed that after the Resurrection there would be ‘a thousand years of carnal pleasures of the belly’ (1956:113), that is, a superabundance of tactile and gustatory sensations. Such ideas about the afterlife show quite different evaluations of the senses of taste and touch Since Vatican II, the sensorial and embodied nature of humanity has been substantially re-evaluated (cf. Nelson, 1978; Bodo, 1984; Pagels, 1988). There is a probably apocryphal tale to the effect that Descartes’ corpse stank beyond measure. Defining himself as ‘A thing that thinks’ (1968:106), Descartes would never have considered his own smell as proof of his own existence, but posterity certainly did (see Robbins, 1984:148–9). In his Sixth Meditation, Descartes does admittedly seem to reintegrate self and body: Nature also teaches me by these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body, like a pilot in his ship, but, besides, that I am joined to it very closely and indeed so compounded and intermingled with my body, that I form, as it were, a single whole with it. (1968:159)

6

Hume does not draw out the implications of this insight; but later the contradictions were more clearly exposed. Rousseau in Switzerland, and Blake, Wordsworth and the Romantics in England, glorified nature and the senses, which they associated with life, love, intuition and passion, in contrast to sterile and death-dealing ‘reason’, industry, commerce, law and society. The tradition persisted with Nietzsche, Whitman and D.H.Lawrence (see Benthall, 1976). Note their enthusiasm for the body and beauty.

6 TOUCH 1

2 3

The literature on the skin is primarily about body decoration: painting, tattooing, scarification and so on. See O’Hanlon (1989); Sanders (1989); also Strathern and Strathern (1971); Faris (1972); Ebin (1979); Brain (1979). On the social psychology of touch, see Thayer (1986a, 1986b, 1988); Heslin and Alper (1983). Harlow’s later research consisted of the systematic emotional destruction of monkeys, including the creation of ‘monster mothers’. Harlow reported: ‘One of their favourite tricks was to crush the infant’s skull with their teeth.’ Another was ‘that of smashing the infant’s face to the floor then rubbing it back and forth’. He was also the creator of ‘the well of despair’ and the ‘tunnel of terror’ and other gruesome experiments; some were designed to induce ‘psychological death’. He later provided some explanation for his pathological efforts to study psychopathology: 271

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The only thing I care about is whether the monkeys will turn out a property I can publish. I don’t have any love for them. Never have. I really don’t like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys? (Day, 1989:84–6; Singer, 1977:41–4) He was probably not too keen on people either. 4 A similar incident deeply affected Shirley Strum, researching baboons in Kenya: I suddenly felt small hands touch my back, so softly that at first I could not identify the sensation. Surprised and puzzled, I slowly turned my head and saw that it was Robin, Naomi’s two-year-old daughter, grooming the thin cotton of my shirt. It was a gesture that thrilled me…I forgot everything else. (1975:673)

7 SMELL 1 The ranking and evaluation of the sensorium is discussed more fully in chapter 5 (see, especially, Figure 5.1). 2 There are exceptions, notably cheeses, and some cheeses more than others. 3 This is why Reynolds Tobacco is now re-odorizing its cigarettes with a vanilla fragrance. The physical effects on the smokers and other inhalers of the side-stream smoke will be similar: it is still carcinogenic. But it is expected that the emotional reaction of the public will be different. The odour will be coded differently. People will still get sick, but they will feel better about it! And so will Reynolds! 4 Smell is like sight in this, that beauty, looking ‘good’, is equated with goodness, truth and many virtues and positive attributes; while ugliness, looking ‘bad’, is equated with sin (‘as ugly as sin’) and negative attributes (see chapter 3). 5 Hitler and Stalin are two examples of individuals who are widely regarded as evil: they are normatively defined in negative terms by the majority of Europeans and North Americans. I am not suggesting that they actually did smell ‘horrible’ in chemical terms, as determined by research tests or anecdotes. We are discussing symbolic, not chemical, odour. But we do impute foul odours to immoral or evil people, i.e. those who are culturally defined as deviant in negative terms; furthermore, if we hate people we probably hate their odours and even their perfumes or fragrances; and if we love them, we tend to love their smell too. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so also fragrance is in the nose of the smeller. 6 In discussing this odour of sanctity, Gonzalez-Crussi, a physician, cites an investigation which suggests that some, at least, of these odours may have been caused by, for instance, an overdose of medication, or in the case of Saint Teresa of Avila by her diabetes. In this case, he concludes, ‘the odor of sanctity has the formula CH COCH COOH. 2 2 Is there nothing sacred anymore?’ (1989:78; cf. Corbin, 1986:244–5). 272

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8

9

The evaluation or decoding of odours is not only subjective, it is also contextually relative. An odour which is acceptable on a building site or a farm or a rugby pitch is not necessarily equally acceptable in a lecture-hall, a bus or a bedroom, and vice versa. Maugham was no socialist, unlike Orwell; but his remark that ‘the working man is our master’ is just silly, particularly since he wrote this in 1930, just before the Great Depression. His assumption that working-class wives are ‘sharp-tongued’ is unnecessary. Why not hardworking? And his failure to relate the matutinal tub to ‘birth, wealth or education’ is another example of blaming the victim. These advertisements may be ‘only’ media hype, but they do subliminally reinforce and recreate a climate of violence against women. The tradition is long enough and vile enough already, including as it does Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, Marc Lepine, and many others.

8 SIGHT 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

The social psychology of sight has been discussed extensively: Henley (1977); Argyle (1978a, 1978b); Knapp (1980); Marsh (1988); Hall (1990); and others. On the evil eye, see Maloney (1976). There is an extensive literature on blindness, but Simmel (1921) was the pioneer in sociology. In his well-known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman (1959) argued that we are all actors on the stage of life and, as Shakespeare pointed out in As You Like It, we all play many parts, to changing audiences and with different casts. Foucault evidently finds this a trivial insight, or at least vastly overshadowed by his own point that this stage is ‘in the prison of the Panopticon’. There is some resistance to this surveillance. Dark glasses and tinted windows reduce visibility. Curtains are drawn. At highly emotional times we hide our faces in our hands; and veils used to be worn at funerals. Criminals wear masks; the cautious acquire de-bugging devices; and mirrored glasses reflect the observers back to themselves. A recent example was ‘the case of the lecherous prof’ at the University of Toronto. A female student complained that a male faculty member swam alongside her at the university pool, watching her, then bought goggles to see her better, and did not stop when asked to do so. He was found guilty of sexual harassment by a university tribunal. His defence was that he did not touch, nor did he say anything (Toronto Star, 18.3.89). Looking and watching may cause annoyance, pain and anger, and limit possibilities. Sartre was right: the eye is dangerous. Despite Emerson, this ‘ocular dialect’ is not universal but culturally relative. See Henley (1977:158–60).

9 SOCIOLOGIES OF THE BODY 1

The idea of racial superiority, struggle, destiny, the divine choice, the civilizing mission, and the law of nature are not only classical Social Darwinism, but remind one of Hitler’s doctrines in Mein Kampf. 273

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2 Foucault (1979) made the same point, much later, as we have seen; but although the phrase is the same, the meaning is different. 3 Mead edited a manual for health workers, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change (1955), in which she contrasted Western mechanism with the holism of other cultures, and drew some of the practical implications of these alternative constructions of the body for health care. 4 This right-left polarity also reflected the male-female polarity in Pythagoras. 5 Edmund Leach, one of Malinowski’s students, remarked that these reports were rated as ‘near pornography’ by his contemporaries, and that Malinowski himself was regarded as ‘a prophet of free love’ (1970:8); but this, he observed, only added to his renown.

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van Gennep, Arnold. (1960). The Rites of Passage. Trans. by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L.Coffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Lawick-Goodall, Jane. (1971). In the Shadow of Man. New York: Dell. Van Toller, Steve and George H.Dodd (eds). (1988). Perfumery. London: Chapman and Hall. Veblen, Thorstein. (1953) [1899]. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: The New American Library. Virel, André. (1980). Decorated Man. New York: Harry N.Abrams. Vlahos, Olivia. (1979). Body: The Ultimate Symbol. New York: Lippincott. Voltaire. (1972) [1764]. Philosophical Dictionary. Edited and translated by Theodore Besterman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Vrooman, Jack Rochford. (1970). René Descartes. New York: Putnam. Walby, Sylvia. (1990). Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Walker, Benjamin. (1977). Encyclopedia of Esoteric Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wall Street Journal. 20.11.90. Ward, Benedicta (ed.). (1975). The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. London: A.R.Moybray. Warner, Marina. (1976). Alone of All Her Sex. New York: Knopf. Warwick, Eden (pseud, of George Jabet) (1848). Nasology: Or Hints Towards a Classification of Noses. London: R.Bentley. Washburn, S.L. and Irven De Vore. (1963). ‘The Social Life of Baboons’, in Charles H.Southwick (ed.), Primate Social Behavior. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Watson, John B. (1966) Behaviorism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Watson, John B. (1972) [1928]. Psychological Care of Infant and Child. New York: Arno Press. Weber, Max. (1964). The Sociology of Religion. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press. Weber, Max. (1968). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. London: Unwin University Books. Weintraub, Pamela. (1986). ‘Sentimental Journeys’, Omni, April: 48–52, 114, 116. Wells, Samuel R. (1981) [1871]. How to Read Character. Tokyo: Tuttle. White, David. (1981). ‘Pursuit of the Ultimate Aphrodisiac’, Psychology Today, September: 9–10, 12. Wilde, Oscar. (1974) [1899]. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Oxford University Press. Williams, E.N. (1965). A Documentary History of England. Vol. 2. 1559–1931. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Williamson, Judith. (1978). Decoding Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars. Williamson, Margaret Holmes. (1979). ‘Powhaten Hair’, Man (n.s.), 14, 3:392–413. Wilson, Edward O. (1979). On Human Nature. New York: Bantam Books. Wilson, Edward O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1968). Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. Wolf, Naomi. (1990). The Beauty Myth. Toronto: Random House. 294

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Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1985) [1792]. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Woodforde, John. (1971). The Strange Story of False Hair. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. York, Peter. (1983). Style Wars. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Young, Lillian. (1984). Secrets of the Face. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

295

NAME INDEX

Abrams, M.H. 89 Ackerman, D. 128, 182, 228 Adams, R.M. 185, 194 Aquinas, St Thomas 17; and beauty and face 84–5, 86, 91; and gender 38, 43, 44, 45–6, 61; and senses 137, 138, 156, 185, 271 Archer, J. 69 Ardrey, R. 170 Argyle, M. 153, 171, 179, 218, 230, 273 Aristotle 220; and beauty and face 79, 80, 81, 268; and body 10, 17, 266; and gender 38, 40–1, 42–3, 49, 50, 54, 61, 69, 267; and God 214; and sensesgenerally 132, 138, 152, 155, 270; and sight 209, 210, 211, 222, 225, 227; and touch 156, 181 Augustine St:and beauty and face 82, 84, 85; and body 10, 15–16; and gender 45, 46; and senses 135, 212 Aurelius, M. 11 Bacon, F. 80, 87–8, 93 Baker, J.O. 78 Baker, N.C. 102, 221 Baker, S.S. 81 Bakhtin, M. 21 Banner, L.W. 76, 110, 268 Barley, N. 231

Barlow, H.B. 154 Barnard, C. 29, 30 Barnard, K.A. 129 Basil the Great 16 Beauvoir, S.de 20, 60, 101, 221 Beckwith, C. 231 Bedichek, R. 184 Beekman, D. 161 Belenky, M.F. 169 Bellack, L. 81 Benedict, R. 145–7, 152, 244–5, 251 Benthall, J. 271 Berger, J. 221 Berscheid, E. 74 Berthelot, J.M. 229 Blacking, J. 230 Bly, R. 63–4 Boas, F. 27, 244, 245 Bodo, M. 21, 271 Boethius 83–4 Bogdan, R.D. 99 Bonaventure, St 16 Bourdieu, P. 195 Bowles, P.P. 76 Brain, R. 230, 271 Brandt, A. 81 Brau, J.-L. 265 Brazelton, T.B. 128, 176, 177, 181, 228 Brophy, J. 268 Brown, P. 265 Brown, R. 16 Browne, T. 88–9

296

NAM E I N DEX

Brownmiller, S. 106, 268 Burckhardt, J. 87 Burr, A. 266 Burton, R. 223–4 Burwell, B.P. 76 Butler, Bishop 23 Bynum, C.W. 136, 137, 265 Calero, H.H. 82 Calvino, I. 129 Camden, C. 88 Capellanus, A. 18, 48 Carpenter, E. 151, 152 Carritt, E.F. 8 Cash, T.F. 99, 268 Castiglione, Count B. 18, 21, 87 Chapkis, W. 268 Chardin, Teilhard de 12 Chatwin, B. 222 Cherry, S. and A. 81 Chodorow, N. 67 Christ see Jesus Christ Christie, A. 96, 101 Chrysostom, John 15, 45, 134–5, 212 Clark, K. 268 Classen, C. 192 Clement of Alexandria, St 85, 136 Cohen, H.A. 126 Cole, H.M. 269 Coleman, V. and C. 74 Colton, H. 129, 171, 180 Cooley, C.H. 225, 260, 261 Cooper, W. 104, 120 Corbin, A. 129, 195–6, 199, 271, 272 Corea, G. 35 Coser, L.A. 201 Curtis, L.P. 95 Dahl, R. 98 Daly, M. 39, 44, 47, 238, 267 Dante 48, 86, 89 Darwin, C. 24–5, 31, 53–4, 81, 92, 193, 242, 268 Davidson, N. 254 Davis, A. 124 Davis, C. 97–8

Day, D. 272 DeVore, I. 179 De Vore, N. 265 Deford, F. 102 Derrett, D.M. 126, 269, 270 Descartes, R.:and body 4, 7–8, 10, 19, 22–4, 32; and senses 130, 139–40, 141, 160, 216, 271 Dobb, E. 186 Dodd, G.H. 205 Dollard, J. 196 Douglas, M. 37;and hair 123;and anthropology and sociology of body 228, 229–32, 235, 236, 240, 249, 263 Dundes, A. 154, 208 Dupont, F. 266 Durkheim, É. 39, 147;and sociology of body 238, 244, 247, 251, 255–7, 263 Ebin, V. 230, 271 Eco, U. 8 Eichler, M. 232 Ekman, P. 225 Elias, N. 19 Ellis, H.H. 27, 250 Elwell, C.E. 98 Emerson, R.W. 93, 225 Engels, F. 24, 59, 238, 251–3, 263 Engen, T. 193 Epictetus 11 Erasmus, D. 18–19 Faludi, S. 62 Fant, M.B. 268 Faris, J.C. 230, 271 Fast, J. 82, 121 Featherstone, M. 228 Fee, E. 67 Feher, M. 241 Feinberg, J. 33 Ferguson, H. 129, 228 Feuerbach, L. 24, 52, 92, 261;and senses 142–3, 154, 161–3 Fields, G. 201 Finkelstein, J. 81 Fiore, Q. 150, 210 Firth, R. 124, 268, 269, 270 297

TH E BODY SOCIAL

Fisher, A. 231 Fisher, H. 68 Fix, C. 107, 122 Fleming, I. 97, 101, 197, 201 Foucault, M. 27; and sight 207, 212, 215, 216–17, 218, 222, 226–7, 273; and sociology of body 232– 5, 236, 246, 260, 263, 264, 274 Fowler, O.S. and L.M. 81 Frager, R. 175–6 Frank, A.W. 228, 231, 232, 239–41 Franz, C.E. 161 Frazer, Sir J. 268 Freedman, R. 109, 268 French, M. 62 Freud, S. 24, 25–6, 27, 94; and gender 55, 61, 63; and senses 148–9, 185, 210, 225, 227 Freund, P. 251 Friedan, B. 60 Friedenthal, R. 21 Friesen, W.V. 225 Gamman, L. 221 Gibbons, B. 186, 188, 201 Gibran, K. 82, 94, 99–100 Gilbert, A.N. 186 Gilligan, C. 67 Glassner, B. 228 Glidden, G.R. 245, 251, 263 Goffman, E. 32–3, 95, 198, 230, 237, 238, 264, 273 Goldwyn, R.M. 101 Gombrich, E.H. 206 Gonzalez-Crussi, F. 128, 272 Gould, S.J. 53, 242 Graham, V. 108 Gravelle, K. 155, 186 Greer, G. 33, 264, 268; and gender 60, 61; and hair 118, 119–20, 270; and senses 200, 202, 221 Griaule, M. 230, 269 Griffin, S. 85 Grontkowski, R. 220 Guthrie,W.K.C. 41, 130

Hall, E.T. 82, 230; and senses 151, 152, 173, 193–4, 220–1, 273 Hall, J.A. 268 Hallpike, C.R. 123, 268 Hammell, D. 269 Hardison, J. 166, 180 Harlow, H. 177–8, 271–2 Hart, C.A. 84 Hassett, J. 204 Haug, W.F. 200, 202 Hay, D.A. 254 Hebdige, D. 118 Hegel, G.W.F.: 50;and beauty and face 81, 91–2, 268;and senses 132, 141–2, 152, 156, 185, 213, 225, 226, 227 Helman, C. 228 Hemingway, P.D. 105 Hening 110 Henley, N. 168–9, 222, 230, 268, 273 Herrick, R. 199, 208, 224 Hersham, P. 269, 270 Hertz, R. 244, 247, 248, 251, 256–7, 263 Hesiod 40, 42 Heslin, R. 271 Hippocrates 265 Hirsch, B. 121 Hite, S. 67–8, 165, 167, 172, 200 Hitler, A. 31–2, 94, 196–7, 272, 273 Hobbes, T. 22–3, 140, 223, 226, 236, 238, 241 Hollender, M.H. 167 Holt, L.E. 158–9, 161, 163, 178, 181 Homer 78 Hopkins, G.M. 149 Houlberg, M.H. 269, 270 Howard, J. 129, 148, 176–7, 247 Howarth, D. 122 Howes, D. 129, 154, 228, 230, 232, 251 Hume, D. 89–90, 140–1, 143, 154, 271 Institoris, H. 46–7

Haddon, A.C. 144, 244 Haley, B. 265

Jay, M. 208–11 Jenness, D. 201 298

NAM E I N DEX

Jerome, St 83, 85, 135–6 Jessel, D. 65 Jolly, A. 179 Jonas, H. 154 Jones, A. 170, 267 Jones, E. 55, 267 Jordan, W.D. 96, 195 Jourard, S.M. 171 Joyce, J. 187, 199 Jung, C.G. 55–6 Kaczorowski, J. 76–7, 95 Kampling, J. 95, 119 Kanin, R. 268 Kant, I. 91, 185 Kanter, R.M. 107, 111–12, 121 Kantorowicz, E.H. 266 Keller, E.F. 220 Keller, H. 156, 185, 186, 188–9, 194 Kempis, Thomas à 17–18, 85 Keyes, R. 78 Kimura, D. 65 Kinzer, N.S. 268 Kirk, M. 231 Klibansky, R. 265 Knapp, M. 268, 273 Knight, N. 116 Kushi, M. 82 La Mettrie, J.O.de 24, 160 Laertius, D. 8, 79 Lakoff, R.T. 268 Landau, T. 228, 268 Langland, W. 17 Laqueur, T. 228, 267 Largey, G.P. 128, 183, 194, 197 Lavater, J. 81 Leach, E.A. 124, 268, 270, 273 Leek, S. 81 Lefkowitz, M.R. 268 Lella, J.W. 33 Levine, S. 119, 270 Liggett, A. 268 Liggett, J. 228, 268 Lloyd, B. 69 Lock, M. 228, 235, 236, 264, 266 Locke, J. 140 Lombroso, C. 96

Longmore, P.K. 99 Lorenz, K. 170 Loyola, Ignatius 20, 21, 134, 138, 212, 266 Lynd, R. 33–4 Lyons, H. 119, 270 McCormick, L.H. 81 McDaniel, S.A. 35 MacLean, I. 48 McLuhan, M. 128, 148–9, 149–50; and sight 210; and smell 193; and touch 171–2 McNeely, D.A. 129, 176 Magli, P. 81 Malcolm X, 33, 96, 125, 201 Malinowski, B. 27, 245, 250–1, 268, 274 Maloney, C. 273 Mar, T. 81 Marchand, P. 149, 150 Marion, R. 73, 156 Marks, L. 155 Marsh, P. 225 Marshment, M. 221 Martin, E. 54, 231, 238, 265 Martines, L. 45, 50, 59 Marwick, A. 268 Marx, K.: and body 10, 24, 26, 59; and senses 136, 142–4, 154, 155; and sociology of body 59, 238, 251, 253–5, 257, 260, 263 Matson, F. 175 Mauss, M. 39, 163–4; and sociology of body 235, 244, 248–9, 251, 257, 263 May, R. 94 Maybury-Lewis, D. 152–3 Mead, G.H. 260–1 Mead, M. 71; and senses 147, 148, 152, 162–3, 171; and sociology of body 244, 245, 246–7, 249, 274 Mercer, A.J. 167 Merleau-Ponty, M. 213–15, 218, 227 Merrick, J. (‘Elephant Man’) 97, 99 Merton, H.W. 81 Merton, R.K. 223 Merton, T. 22 Meunier-Tardif, G. 128 299

TH E BODY SOCIAL

Miles, R. 38, 61, 62, 70, 267 Mill, J.S. 51, 52, 59 Miller, H. 56, 199, 201 Miller, J. 30 Miller, P.S. 78 Millett, K. 47, 56, 58, 60, 61, 199– 200 Millman, M. 78 Miner, H. 261–2 Moir, A. 65 Mollon, J.D. 153 Molloy, J.T. 107, 109, 110, 111, 120, 121 Moncrieff, R.W. 193 Montagu, A. 31, 97, 128; and touch 157, 161, 165, 168, 170–3, 175, 178, 181, 230 Montaigne 88, 90, 138–9 Moravia, S. 23 Morgan, R. 169 Morris, David B. 129, 228 Morris, Desmond 173, 174, 179, 230, 268 Mouroux, J. 21 Moyers, B. 63 Murphy, R.F. 33, 78, 231 Myrdal, G. 196 Nader, R. 101 Nelson, J.B. 136, 265, 271 Nierenberg, G.I. 82 Nietzsche, F.: and body 24, 25, 31, 32; and gender 51–2, 53, 54; and senses 146, 202, 271 Nott, J.C. 245, 251, 263 Oakley, A. 38 Obeyesekere, G. 269 O’Brien, M. 62, 240 O’Faolain, J. 45, 50, 59 O’Hanlon, M. 271 Okely, J. 66, 165, 166 Olkes, C. 153 O’Neill, J. 11, 228, 235, 265 Ong, W.J. 128, 151–2, 208, 210–11, 263 Orwell, G. 98, 217; and smell 187, 194–5, 199, 201, 202, 204 Ovid 11, 18, 113, 270

Pagels, E. 39, 44, 136, 265, 271 Paglia, C. 63, 221–2 Park, R. 261 Patzer, G.L. 75, 268 Pawluch, D. 33 Perutz, K. 108, 113 Pesman, C. 105 Phillips, J.A. 39, 44, 45, 48 Plato: and beauty and face 78–9, 80, 82, 83, 86–7, 90, 268; and body 4, 7, 9, 15, 17, 265; and gender 38, 41–2, 43, 57, 267; and senses generally 130–2, 137; and sight 209, 212, 225, 227 Plotinus 82 Pogrebin, L.C. 165 Polhemus, T. 230 Pomeroy, S. 268 Porter, R. 26, 27 Raines, M.L. 74 Ranke-Heinemann, U. 45, 46 Redfield, J. 81 Reynolds, R. 121 Riefenstahl, L. 95, 231 Rivlin, R. 155, 186 Robbins, A. 129, 271 Robbins, T. 183, 204 Rodin, J. 76, 102 Rosenblatt, R. 119 Rousseau, J.-J. 49–50, 58, 97, 237, 238, 271 Rubinstein, C. 36 Ruddick, S. 67 Ruether, R.R. 39, 44 Ruskin, J. 50–1, 52 Sacks, O. 73, 189 Sanders, C.R. 228, 271 Sartre, J.-P. 4, 7–8, 32, 56, 154; and body 4, 7–8, 32; and gender 56; and senses 154; and sight 207, 212–13, 215, 217, 218, 222, 226, 227 Scarry, E. 168 Scheper-Hughes, N. 228, 235, 236, 264, 266 300

NAM E I N DEX

Scherr, R.L. 268 Schiller, F. 91 Schopenhauer, A. 51, 52, 92 Schutz, W. 176 Sebeok, T.A. 219 Seeger, A. 129 Seneca 10–11 Shelley, M. 97, 99, 101 Shuter, R. 172 Simmel, G. 93; and senses 128, 147–8; and sight 213, 226, 227; and sociology of body 251, 261, 264 Singer, P. 101, 272 Skinner, B.F. 29 Smith, J. 128, 157, 184 Smith, M. 203 Sparks, J. 179 Spicker, S. 17 Spinoza, B. 23–4 Spock, B. 161, 181 Sprenger, J. 46–7 Stallings, J.O. 95 Steele, V. 268 Steinberg, L. 265 Steinem, G. 67, 69 Sterne, L. 223 Stevenson, Ray 117 Stevenson, Robert Louise 97, 101 Stoller, P. 129, 153–4 Strathern, A. and M. 230, 271 Strum, S.C. 272 Stubbes, P. 84 Sumner, W.G. 260, 261 Süskind, P. 129, 194 Synnott, A. 29, 97, 160, 230, 251 Tannen, D. 66–7, 153 Taylor, F.W. 29 Taylor, P. 122 Tester, J. 265 Thayer, S. 271 Thomas, K. 267 Thompson, C.J.S. 203 Tiger, L. 129, 228 Tillyard, E.M.W. 265 Tolstoy, L. 99, 101 Townsend, P. 254 Trepp, L. 126

Trevor-Roper, H.R. 46, 267 Turkle, S. 266 Turner, B.S. 4, 228, 236–40, 251, 260, 263, 266 Turner, T.S. 230, 269 Turner, V.W. 124, 230 Tylor, E.B. 243–4 Tytler, G. 81 Umiker-Sebeok, J. 220 Ussher, J.M. 54, 57 Van Gennep, A. 245, 247–8, 251, 263, 269 Van Lawick-Goodall, J. 180 Van Toller, S. 205 Veblen, T. 93–4, 106, 147, 251, 263 Vlahos, O. 230 Voltaire 90, 193 Vrooman, J.R. 139 Walby, S. 60, 232 Walster, E. 74 Ward, B. 15 Warner, M. 48 Warwick, E. 81 Washburn, S.L. 179 Watson, D.R. 128, 183, 194, 197 Watson, J.B. 28, 159–60, 161, 163, 178, 181 Weber, M. 147, 237, 238, 251, 257– 60, 263 Weintraub, P. 204 Wells, S.R. 81 White, D. 204 Wilde, O. 98, 101 Williams, E.N. 26 Williamson, J. 198 Williamson, M.H. 269 Wilson, E.O. 65, 94, 170 Wittgenstein, L. 92–3 Wolf, N. 102, 221, 228, 265, 268 Wollstonecraft, M. 58, 59, 221 Woodforde, J. 269 Wysocki, C.J. 186 York, P. 117 Young, L. 81 301

SUBJECT INDEX

Adam 39, 47, 63, 88–9, 133 Alacoque, M.M. 20 Albert the Great 45 Alexander, M. 176 Alipius 15 Alper, T. 271 Anaximander 40 Anderson, H.C. 97 Angela of Fuligno 20 animals: beauty and 92; as machines 23; resembling humans 80; senses and 132, 141–2, 144; and smell 185; and touch 177–80, 271–2 anthropology: and beauty 90–1, 92; and body 27, 37; and gender 52, 71, 246–7; and hair 127, 268–9; and senses generally 129, 145–7, 151–4; and sight 220–1; and smell 193, 201; and theories of body 228, 229–31, 232, 241– 51, 260, 261–2, 265–4; and sound 131, 150, 154; and touch 162–3, 170–4, 181; see also sociology of body Anthony the Great 15 Apollonian culture 145 Arafat Y. 125 Arisstippus 8, 129, 271 aromatherapy 129, 138–9, 203–4 Aryan body 31–2 asceticism: and beauty and face 82– 3, 101; and body 8–9, 14–20, 22, 25, 265; and senses 133–7, 211; and sociology of body 238, 257–60;see also mortification

astrology 228; and beauty and face 80–1; and cosmic body 11, 265 Atlas, Charles 27 Aubrey, J. 223 Ayer, A.J. 28 Baglivi, G. 23 Baker, Josephine 27 balance of senses 149–55 baldness 105, 110–11, 121–2 Barnum, P.T. 76 beards and moustaches 111–12, 114, 269 beautification 34, 74–5, 86–7, 101– 2, 262, 268; see also beauty, hair beauty contests 60, 76–7, 101–2, 268 beauty and face 9, 18, 27–8, 73– 102, 214–5, 221, 228, 237, 238, 268 see also beautification; face; ugliness Bell, Dr J. 219–20 Bentham, J. 217 Bernard of Claivaux 83–4 Binet, A. 245 birth 68, 240, 241, 247 bisexuality 55 Blake, W. 89, 271 Blandford, G. 54 blood 31–2, 33; see also race and racism Blumenbach, J. 241, 242, 250–1 Boadicea, 49, 65 body 7–37, 160–1; theories of 228– 64, 265–6 see also asceticism; beauty and face; gender; hair;

302

S U B J ECT I N DEX

senses; sociology of body Boccoccio, G. 18, 21, 48 Botticelli, S. 18, 87 brain weight 52, 53 breast-feeding 163 Breuer, J. 25 Broca, P. 52, 54, 243, 244, 251, 263 Buddhism 146–7 Byron, G.G.Lord 49, 89 capitalism 59, 251–5, 257, 258–9 Cardan, J. 81 Cartesianism see Descartes in name index celibacy 14–15 Cervantes 21, 48 Chapin, H. 174–5 Chaplin, Charlie 29 Charles, R. 224 Chaucer, G. 18, 48 children: beauty/ugliness in books for 97, 99, 101; birth 68, 240, 241, 247; child care manuals 158–61; death of 70, 252; and genetics 35; hair 269; as machines 29, 160–1; naming 69; and touch 156, 158–64, 174–5, 177 Christianity: and beauty and face 82–6, 101; and body 11–18 (see also asceticism); and gender 43– 9; and senses 133–8; and sight 210–11, 212, 213; and sociology of body 228, 257–60; and touch 168 Churchill, W. 3 Ciprian 84 class 31, 229; and morbidity and mortality 251–5; and smell 194– 5, 273 clothing 65 Close, G. 62 Coleridge, S.T. 89 colour: eyes 222–4; hair 104, 107, 108–10, 124, 269; skin 157;see also race and racism Comte, A. 147 Conan Doyle, Sir A. 219 cosmetic surgery 34, 75

courtly love 18 craniometry 242, 243–6 creation myths: and beauty 88–9; and gender 39–40, 45, 47, 49, 63; and senses 133 criminals 95, 96, 169, 217, 233; see also violence Curie, M. 65, 67 dancing 66 Darwin, E. 154 David, King 39 death: and capitalism 252, 253–4; of children 70, 252; and gender 64, 70–1; and hair 122, 126, 270; from lack of touching 156, 174–5, 181; as release from body 9, 11; respect for body 33–4 deformity 87–8, 90–1, 97, 99;see also disability; ugliness deities, male 39–40, 267;see also God deprivation, sensory 144–5, 146; see also asceticism Derek, Bo 108, 125 Dionysus 8–9; dionysian cultures 145–6 Direx, Dr 54 disability and handicap 231, 252; see also deformity disciplined body 232–5, 239–42; see also Foucault in name index diseases and illness: and gender 54, 70–1, 237–8; infectious 16, 19, 28; mental see madness; occupational 254–5; psychosomatic 26, 35, 36; and womb 54; see also medicine Disraeli, B. 31 distrust of body and senses 17, 130 docile bodies 232–5, 260 Donne, J. 19 dualism: and beauty 77, 82–3; body and mind 10, 11, 22, 25, 35–6, 235, 260–2; body and soul 9– 11, 15–18, 23, 24–5, 77–8, 255– 6, 266; good and evil see evil and goodness; oppositesex see 303

TH E BODY SOCIAL

gender; and sociology of body 235, 255–6, 260–2;see also senses under mind and reason Duncan, Isadora 27 ears see sound eating see taste Eckhart, Moister 17 economics: of beauty 74, 77, 102; and gender 43, 60; and senses 182, 208;see also capitalism egalitarianism and gender 38, 41–2, 44–5, 48, 50–1, 52 ‘Elephant Man’ 97, 99 Eliot, T.S. 149 Empedocles 130 environment and smell 190, 203–4, 272 Epicurus 8; epicureans 271 Euripides 79, 101 Eve 39, 40, 45, 47, 49, 63, 88–9, 133 evil and sin 265; and beauty 79, 83–4, 102; and sight (evil eye) 209, 212–19, 227; and smell 190–3, 200, 202, 272; and ugliness 77, 78, 85–8, 94–5, 98 evolution 24–5, 210; see also Darwin in name index existentialism: and body 29, 32–4; see also Sartre in name index eye: evil 209, 211–18, 227; see also sight eyebrows 112 face and fascism: 73–102, 105, 111– 12, 119–25, 142, 148, 269, 270; see also beauty and face; sight; smell Farrakhan, L. 118 fashion: and hair 105–6, 127; see also beautification fasting 134, 136–7, 146 Feldenkrais, M. 228 feminism: and beauty and face 101–2; and gender 38, 58–63; and hair 105, 118–19, 121, 270; and sight 200, 202, 207, 220;

and smell 200, 202; and sociology of body 228, 232; and touch 161 Firenzuola, A. 87 flagellants 16, 137 Fonda, Jane 166 food see taste Francis of Assisi, St 16 Franklin, B. 259 Galen 155 Galilei, Galileo 139 gaze and power 212–13, 215–18, 226–7; and gender politics 212, 219–22, 273; see also surveillance Geddes, P. 54 gender 38–72, 267; and beauty 75, 85–8, 93–4, 101–2; and biology 38, 61, 65, 267; and Christianity 43–9; and creation myths 39–40, 45, 47, 49, 63; and disease 54, 70, 237–8; and Greeks 40–3; and hair 105–15, 118–22, 269, 270; and lives and deaths 64–71; men’s movement 63–4; and senses 148, 151; and sight (politics of gaze) 212, 219–22, 227, 273; and smell 186, 197, 198–202; and sociology of body 228, 231–2, 237–3, 246–7; and touch 164–9, 220; women’s movement see feminism; see also men; sexuality; women Genet, J. 56 genetics and biology: and body 34– 5; and gender 38, 61, 65, 267; and hair 104; and touch 166, 170 George, Boy 117–18 geometry of bodies 236–7 Ghandi, I. 67 Gilbert of Hoyt 83 glance 213, 226–7, 261 Gnosticism 39, 44 God 209, 213, 214; and beauty 83, 84, 86–7, 212; and body 9, 23; and light and sight 209, 210, 211; male 39

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goodness: and beauty 18, 74, 78–9, 82–9, 91, 93, 99–100, 101, 268; and gender 40–1, 42, 57; and sight 215; and smell 190–3, 200, 202, 272 Gouges, O. des 58–9 Greeks, ancient: and body 8–10, 228; and gender 40–3; and senses 129–32, 209, 212;see also in particular Aristotles;Plato in name index Gregory the Great, Pope 46 Grimm brothers 96–7 group therapy 176–7 Gutenberg 150 hair 102–26, 268–70 halo effect 74, 77–8 Hammett, Dr 178 handicap see disability hands 247 happiness 136 Hare Krishna movement 266 Harlow, H. 177–8, 271–2 Hayes, Isaac 122 head; touching 179;see also craniometry; face; hair phrenology; physiognomy healing 13, 168, 177; see also diseases; medicine hearing see sound hedonism 8, 129 Heraclitus 130 Hinduism 47, 229 Hippies 115, 116, 121, 269–70 holism 35–6, 175–6, 274 Hollander, N. 60 horns effect 74, 77 humours of body 265 Incarnation 12 Innocent VIII, Pope 46 intelligence 245 invisible body 260–2 Irigary, L. 220 Isaiah, 39, 82, 209 Islam 124; and gender 44, 47 Jackson, Michael 118, 125

Jefferson, T. 195, 201 Jenner, E. 26 Jeremiah 82, 85, 126 Jesuits 211; see also Loyola in name index Jesus Christ: and beauty and face 82; and body 12, 13; and gender 39, 44; miracles 13, 168; and senses 133, 168, 211–12 Job 209 Johnson, Dr S. 168 Judaism and Jews: and beauty 100; and gender 39, 44; and hair 125–6 Keats, J. 89–90, 94, 192 Kipling, Rudyard 186, 197 knowledge and senses 131, 154, 188, 208, 211 language: and beauty 94–5; body see non-verbal; and gender 66; and sight 207, 210; and smell 184, 191–2, 272; and touch 157– 8 Lawrence, D.H. 56, 271 Le Bon, G. 52–3, 54, 244, 251 Leibniz, G.W. 23 Lennox, Annie 117 Leo XIII, Pope 45 Leonardo da Vinci 18, 80, 87 life rituals 134–5, 247–8; see also birth; death Lilith 39 Linnaeus 184 Lonergan, Father 210–11 Long, Edward 195 Louis XIV, King 209–10 love: beauty as 79; courtly 18; as search for unity 42; and sight 215, 218, 224, 227; see also sexuality Lowell, R. 30 Lowen, A. 176 Luther, Martin 20–1, 37, 47–8 Machiavelli, N. 18 madness 54, 215–16, 233 Madonna 65, 109 305

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Mailer, N. 56 Malcolm X 33, 96, 125, 201 Malthus, T. 237 Marconi, G. 150 Marley, Bob 125 marriage 135–6 martyrs 14–15 mathematics of body 228, 229–32, 235–41, 266 Maugham, S. 194–5, 273 Mayo, E. 29 meaning and smell 187–8, 193–4 measurement of body and senses 52, 53, 145, 242–6 mechanism 7, 22–3, 24, 27–30, 160– 1, 234 medicine; and body 26, 28, 30, 265; cosmetic surgery 34, 75; Greek theory of humours 265; healing 13, 168, 177; and sight 216; and smell 203; and sociology of body 231, 233, 235, 236–8, 254, 274; and touch 174, 175–6; see also diseases Meir, Golda 67 memory and smell 186–7 men: and beauty and face 75–7, 87; and hair 104–23, 269–70; and face 219–22, 273; and self defined as good 40–2; the men’s movement 63–4; as problem 71; smell 201–2; andtouch 164–70; women’s attitudes to 60–3, 70–1, 222; see also gender;patriarchy; sexuality; violence mental illness 54, 215–16, 233 Merton, H.W. 81 metaposcopy 80 Milton, John 49, 88–9, 106 mind and reason: and body see under dualism; and gender 67; as self 32–4; and senses 129–30, 133–4, 137, 139–41, 143, 209, 211 mirror: face as 80–2; mirroring body 239–41; of soul, eyes as see under sight monarchy: and beauty and face 85; and body 27; and gender 48; and senses

192, 209; touch 168; two bodies 266 monasticism 15, 16, 19–20, 126, 135–6 Montessori, M. 53 morality: and gaze 212–13; smell and moral construction of self 190–4; see also evil and sin; goodness mortification of body 16–17, 20, 21, 137, 138 Morton, s. 242 Moses 39, 203 mouth see speech;taste Mystical Body 12, 45 mystique of beauty 86–92 names 69 nature—nurture debate 64–5; see also genetics and biology Nazis: and beauty 95; and body 31–2; racism 196–7, 273; and smell 196–7, 272 noetic economy of senses 151 non-verbal communication and body language 73, 82, 172, 230, 268 O’Connor, Sinéad 122 opposites see dualism; gender; hair Origen 14, 15 Orpheus, 8–9 Orphism 8–9 Other 239–41; and sight 212–13, 226 pain 129, 228; self-inflicted see mortification; and ugliness 91 Paine, T. 58 Pandora 40 Pankhurst, Emily 59 panopticon principle see surveillance Parmedides 40–1, 130, 267 Parson, Talcott 152, 236 Pascal, B. 25 Pasteur, L. 28 patriarchy 42–3, 44, 48, 57, 59, 62– 3, 221, 234; see also men 306

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Paul, St 228; and beauty and face 82; and body 4, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 14, 37, 266; and gender 44–5, 46, 49, 267; and hair 103, 105; and senses 133–4, 137 penis envy 55, 148 perfumes 182, 197–8, 203 Peter, St 82 pheromones 204 phrenology 80 physiognomy 80–1, 92, 222 Picasso, P. 27 pillar ascetics 15, 136 pleasure 8, 22, 91, 228;see also sexuality political body/politics: and beauty and face 95, 102; and body 11, 17, 26–7, 31–2, 265; and gender 43, 48, 53, 60, 68; and hair 115– 21, 124, 125; and sight 219–22, 227; and smell 195–7; and sociology of body 235, 236, 237–8, 260; and touch 169 pollution 203, 272 Porphyry 83 power: and sight see gaze; and smell 194–202; and sociology of body 232–5, 239–41, 260; of state see political body; and touch 167– 70;see also capitalism; violence Praxiteles 80 prejudice see racism and race; ugliness primate studies and touch 177–80 Prince 118, 125 printing 149, 150 prison 217, 233 Protestant ethic see Puritanism psychology 26, 28, 30, 35–6, 176–7, 205 psychosomatic illness 26, 35, 36 Ptolemy 11 Punks 116–17, 124, 125 Puritanism and Protestant ethic 259; revolts against 115, 269;see also capitalism Pythagoras 9, 40–1, 43, 267 Quant, Mary 120

Rabelais, F. 21, 48 race and racism: and beauty 95–6; and body 31–2, 33; and hair 117, 125; and smell 195–6, 199, 201; and sociology of body 242–4, 273–4 ranking of sense 131, 137–8, 140, 151–2, 154–5, 156, 183–9 Raphael 18, 87 reason see mind and reason Redfield, Robert 152 Reich, W. 176 religion: and persecutions 46–7, 267; and senses 133–8, 146–7; see also Buddhism; Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Judaism Renaissance and body 18–27 reproductive technologies 35 resonance and smell 194 resurrection of body 12–13 Rich, A. 57 Richard, Doctor 216 rights, human: appearance not mentioned 100; and gender 58–9, 64 Rilke, R.M. 214 rites of passage see life rituals Rolf, I. 176 Romans 10–11, 266 Rossetti, C. 268 Rush, B. 195 Russell, B. 28 sacrificial body 255–7 Samson 126 secularization of body 18–27 self: and body 7, 25, 32–4; face as symbol of see beauty and face; and hair 103, 115–21, 122; moral construction and smell 190–4; and sight 213, 222–7 self-mutilation 14;see also mortification senses 128–58, 270–1; and animals 131, 141–2, 144; and anthropology 129, 145–7, 151–4; and asceticism 133–7, 212; balance of 149–55; and Christianity 133–8; face as 307

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location of 73; and Greeks 129– 32; and mind and reason 130–1, 134, 137, 139–41, 143, 209, 211; modern thought 138–45; ranking of 132, 137–8, 141, 151–2, 154–5, 156, 183–9; and sexuality 135–6, 144, 147, 154, 167, 173, 174, 200, 220, 222; and sociology of body 148–9, 228, 230, 232, 244, 245, 246; see also sight; smell; sound; taste; touch sexuality: and beauty 94, 101; as bestiality 46; and body 11, 18, 27; and gender differences 67–8; and hair 113–14; and senses 135–6, 144, 146, 154; sexual harassment by sight 220, 222, 273; and smell 200; and sociology of body 228, 233–4, 236, 238, 250–1, 258, 274; and touch 167, 173, 174; see also gender; love Shakespeare, W. 21, 48, 88, 95; and senses 190, 191, 194, 224, 227 Shelley, P.B. 89 sight 13, 128, 141, 206–27, 273; and anthropology 220–1; and beauty 79, 83, 92, 214–15, 221; and Christianity 209–10, 211, 212; custody of 138; evil eye 209, 212–19, 227; eyes as mirror of soul 79, 83, 92, 141, 222, 223, 225; gender and politics of gaze 212, 219–22, 227, 273; and knowledge 132; as noblest sense 131–2, 134–5, 137, 139–40, 148– 9, 154–5, 207–11, 214, 227; ranking 132, 141, 152; and science 184; and self 213, 222–7; and technology 139–40, 149–50 Simeon Stylites 15 sixth sense 147, 155 skin see touch Skinheads 116, 125 smell 128, 129, 142, 154, 182–205, 270, 271, 272–3; and anthropology 193, 201; as moral metaphor 190–3, 200, 202, 272; and gender 186, 197, 198–202; and goodness 190–3, 200, 202,

272; and moral construction of self 190–4; andpower 194–202; ranking 138–9, 183–9; therapy (aromatherapy) 129, 138–9, 203–4 smoking 65, 190, 192, 255, 272 social body/society 11, 35, 37; see also anthropology; body; capitalism; socialization; sociology socialization 248–9; and gender 56– 7, 64–5, 68; and smell 188; and touch 165–7, 170 sociology of body 228–64, 273–4; and anthropology 228, 229–31, 232, 241–51, 260, 263–4; ascetic 238, 257–60; docile bodies 232– 5, 260; and gender 228, 231–2, 237–8, 246–7; invisible 260–2; mathematics of 228, 229–32, 235–41, 266; and medicine 231, 233, 235, 236–8, 254, 274; sacrificial 255–7; and senses 147–8, 228, 230, 232, 244, 245, 246; and sexuality 228, 233–4, 236, 238, 250–1, 258, 274; working 251–5, 257, 258–9; see also body Socrates 9, 43; and beauty and face 79, 88, 89; and senses 130–1 Solomon, King 39, 48, 82, 209, 218 soul and spirit: and beauty 80, 83, 92, 93; and body see under dualism; body as tomb of 7, 8– 10; and body unity 17, 18; eyes as mirror of see under sight; and gender 43, 266; and senses 130– 1, 134 sound 129, 135, 142, 148; and anthropology 131, 150, 154; ranking 132, 141, 152; and science 184; and technology 149–50 speech 67, 72, 138, 147–8 sport and athleticism 11, 22, 66, 78, 165–6, 249, 268 state see political body status: and beauty 94, 101; and hair 106, 111–12, 127, 269 308

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stereotypes, gender 69 Stoicism 10, 11, 20 Stylites 15, 136 suffrage, women’s 59–60 suicide 64 surveillance 212–13, 217–18, 273; see also gaze swaddling 164 symbolism: and beauty 72; and body 2, 19; and face 72; and hair 102, 103, 108, 115–22; of odour see smell;see also sociology of body talking see speech taste 132, 136, 138, 141–2, 184, 190, 271 Taylor, F.W. 29 technology and senses 149–50, 210 teeth 270 Teresa, Mother 65 Tertullian 44–5 Thatcher, M. 65, 67, 269 Theocritus, 78, 100 Theognis 40 Theophrastus 79, 101 therapy: smell (aromatherapy) 129, 138–9, 203–4; touch 174–7 Theroux, P. 62 Tonnies, F. 152 touch 128, 147, 156–81, 228, 230, 271–2; and animals 177–80, 271– 2; and cultural differences 162– 3, 170–4, 181; and children 156, 158–64, 174–5, 177; and gender 164–9, 220; and power 167–70; primate studies 177–80; ranking 132, 138, 141, 156; and science 184; therapy 174–7 transplants 34, 266; hair 122 Treves, Dr 97 truth: and beauty 93, 94, 101; and sight 225 Turner, John 179 Tyson, Cicely 125 ugliness 21, 73, 74, 92–100, 268; and metaphor of evil 78, 79, 86– 9, 95–6, 99; and pain 91; see also beauty and face

unity: of body and soul 17, 18; love as search for 42 violence: against children 160; and patriarchy 62; and racism 32; and smell 197–200, 273; and sociology of body 233, 253, 258; and touch 160, 165, 168– 70; against women 47, 58, 61, 64, 168–70, 267, 273; by women 170 Virchow, R. 28 virginity 14, 135–6 Vitruvius 80 Von Frey 155 walking 248 Walkington, Thomas 88 Weismuller, Johnny 27 Wesley, J. 259 Weyl, H. 94 Whitehead, A.N. 9 Whitman, W. 25, 271 witchcraft 46–7, 267 womb 54 women: and beauty and face 74, 84–7, 93–4, 101–2; men’s attitudes to 33, 39–58; hair 105– 23, 269, 270; hatred of 33, 44, 45, 51–2, 56, 57, 61 (see also women under evil and violence); and illness 54, 237–8; movement see feminism; and sight 220–2; and smell 185, 186, 188, 197, 198–201; and sociology of body 228, 231–2, 237–8; suffrage 59– 60; and touch 165–9, 220;see also gender; sexuality; violence Wordsworth, W. 89, 210, 271 working bodies 251–5, 257, 258–9 writing 150, 210 Xenophanes 129 Yeats, W.B. 149 Zen Buddhism 147 Zeus 9, 40, 42 309