The Body Thoroughly updated and revised throughout with brand new chapters on a ff ective bodies, indeterminate bodies, assemblaged bodies and a new con- clusion, and featuring essay and classroom questions for classroom use, The Body: Key Concepts, Second Edition , presents a concise and up-to-date introduction to, and analysis of, the complex and in fl uential debates around the body in contemporary culture. Lisa Blackman outlines and illuminates those debates which have made the body central to current interdisciplinary thinking across the arts, humanities and sciences. Since body studies hit the mainstream, it has grown in new regions, including China, and moved in new directions to question what counts as a body and what it means to have and be a body in di ff erent contexts, milieu and settings. Lisa Blackman guides the reader through socio-cultural questions around representation, performance, class, race, gender, disability and sexuality to examine how current thinking about the body has developed and been transformed. Blackman engages with classic anthropological scholarship from Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Mar- garet Lock, revisits black feminist writings from the 1980s, as well as enga- ging with recent debates, thought and theorists who are inventing new concepts, methods and ways of apprehending embodiment which challenge binary and dualistic categories. It provides an overview of the proliferation of body studies into other disciplines, including media and cultural studies, phi- losophy, gender studies and anthropology, as well as mapping the future of body studies at the intersections of body and a ff ect studies. Lisa Blackman is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University in London, UK. The Body The Key Concepts Second Edition Lisa Blackman Second edition published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Lisa Blackman The right of Lisa Blackman to be identi fi ed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identi fi cation and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Bloomsbury 2008 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 Names: Blackman, Lisa, 1965- author. Title: The body : the key concepts / Lisa Blackman. Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identi fi ers: LCCN 2020056616 (print) | LCCN 2020056617 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350109452 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350109414 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003087892 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Human body--Social aspects. | Human body (Philosophy) | Body image--Social aspects. | Human physiology. | Identity (Psychology) Classi fi cation: LCC HM636 .B55 2021 (print) | LCC HM636 (ebook) | DDC 306.4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056616 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056617 ISBN: 978-1-350-10945-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-350-10941-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08789-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books Contents Introduction: Thinking through the body 1 Beyond binaries 2 Anthropology of the body 6 The problem of dualism 8 The problem of the body as substance 9 The body as an ‘ absent present ’ 10 The transdisciplinarity of ‘ body studies ’ 11 Horse – human relations 12 The a ff ective body 14 Chapter 1: Bodily Matters 15 Chapter 2: A ff ective bodies 16 Chapter 3: Bodies and di ff erence 16 Chapter 4: Lived bodies 17 Chapter 5: Bodily assemblages 17 Conclusion: Indeterminate bodies 17 1 Bodily matters 19 Introduction 19 The sociological and anthropological body 21 The naturalistic body 24 The materialist body 27 The socially constructed body 30 Fear, fetish and phobia 30 The micro and the macro 31 The disciplined body 33 Agency and the body 37 The somatically felt body 39 Uses of anger 41 Naturally queer 43 Conclusion 46 2 A ff ective bodies 47 Introduction 47 A ff ect studies 48 Social in fl uence 51 Becoming (horse – human) 53 The feeling body 55 Emotional labour 56 Racialization and emotional labour 58 Public Feeling 60 Emotional contagion 63 Self-containment and othering 64 A ff ective transmission 66 The vitalist body 67 The networked body 69 Transcorporeality 70 Racism as a technology of a ff ect 70 Conclusion 71 3 Bodies and di ff erence 72 Introduction 72 Bodily markers of respectability 73 Corporeal capital 74 Feelings and bodily dispositions 75 Bodily a ff ectivity 76 Body image to body without an image 78 Fabulousness and werking ‘ the look ’ 79 Throwing like a girl 80 Beyond the binary (sex and gender) 82 Corporeal feminism 83 Gender performativity 85 Becoming or unpredictable potential(s) 86 Able-ism and non-normative morphologies 87 New materialism 88 Conclusion 91 4 Lived bodies 92 Introduction 92 Sensory bodies 94 Touch 96 Skin knowledge 97 vi Contents Digital skins 98 Taste 99 The mouth 100 The mouth and taste 102 Abjection 104 Abjection and racism 106 Smell 106 The articulated body 108 Health, illness and bodily matters 109 Migrant bodies 111 Self-health 112 Cancer cultures 113 Narratives and bodily matters 116 Morphological imagination: Cripping and queering theories 116 Living with autoimmunity, or shit happens 118 Conclusion 119 5 Bodily assemblages 120 Introduction 120 Process 121 The body-in-movement 122 Bodies without organs 125 Mixed natures 127 Racializing assemblages 129 New materialist assemblages 130 Sociality and historicity of indeterminacy 131 Queer assemblages 132 Actor network theory 135 Doing hypoglycaemia 137 The body multiple 138 Companion species and multispecies ethnographies 140 Conclusion: Enacted materialities 142 Conclusion: Indeterminate bodies 143 Introduction: Imagining the future of body studies within the academy 143 1 A ff ective bodies 146 2 Immaterial bodies 147 3 Biomediation and necropolitics 149 4 Indeterminate bodies 150 Conclusion 152 Contents vii Questions for essays and classroom discussion 154 Introduction 154 1 Bodily matters 154 2 A ff ective bodies 154 3 Bodies and di ff erence 155 4 Lived bodies 155 5 Bodily assemblages 155 6 Imaging the future of the body within the academy 156 Annotated guide for further reading 156 Bibliography 161 Index 180 viii Contents Introduction Thinking through the body With developments in the medical, life and biological sciences, there are now numerous examples of bodies that challenge the assumption that there is anything natural or timeless about the body, or what it means to be embodied. Nikolas Rose (2007) in his book, The Politics of Life Itself: Bio- medicine, Power and Subjectivity , invites us to consider the status of the human within the context of cloning and speci fi cally a cloned child. In his response to this question, he suggests that cloning produces a biotechnolo- gically constructed baby signalling how body-world-technology relations and practices are remaking what we take the human to be. The human body, within this example, is not a discrete stable category or ‘ thing ’ but is always made and remade through new bodily con fi gurations or assemblages of human and non-human elements. This enmeshing of the human and the more-than-human challenges clear-cut and discrete distinctions between inside and outside, human and technological, self and other, and the carbon and synthetic. The question of whether there is anything natural about the human body, encapsulated in the concept of human nature, has been dis- placed to a focus on how bodies are always entangled with environments, producing di ff erent kinds of bodies and arguably ways of being human. However, we might also be cautious about the newness of the present that is often invoked in some accounts analysing the co-production and co-constitution of life. Simone Browne ’ s (2015) book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness , cogently shows how much longer histories of the surveillance of black bodies, including the material practices of branding slaves as part of the brutalizing Atlantic slave trade, are continued within biometric assemblages which perpetuate longer histories of racialization in new forms. What she calls the ‘ prototypical whiteness ’ of these practices produces and reproduces so-called ‘ truths ’ about black bodies based on cultural and scienti fi c myths, that are re-embedded within new technologies of seeing. Although the production of racial di ff erences through these technologies makes more visible the cultures of inequality and oppression that they keep alive, the intransigence of racialized forms of surveillance continue systems for cataloguing and di ff erentiating bodies according to discriminatory and racist logics. This tension between the indeterminacy of our mixed natures, and the reality of the regulation of particular bodies, is one that links colonial accounts of human nature with contemporary scholarship within the fi eld of body studies that is attempting to counter these assumptions. Since writing the fi rst edition of this book over ten years ago, interdisciplinary interest in the body and embodiment has gained ground and momentum. There is no doubt that bodily matters are now being taken much more seriously and viewed as central rather than marginal concerns. The present moment is char- acterized by a growth in approaches that are contributing to and helping to innovate the now established fi eld of body studies. The second edition of this book will cover some of these new developments, taking the premise that there is nothing natural or even distinctly human about the human body, and extending this into new territories, methods, theories and practices. It will also eschew any notion that when we study bodily matters we are studying singular or generic bodily potentialities; bodies are connected and extended into other bodies, his- tories, cultures, practices and processes, inviting analyses of bodies and matter which can also attend to speci fi city and contingency. This includes histories of racialization, gendering and able-lism, for example; what some theorists have referred to as speci fi c histories of mattering (for example; see Pitts-Taylor, 2016b). In di ff erent ways the new ground covered in the book starts from the position that bodies are never singular distinct entities bounded by the skin, but rather bodies always extend and connect to other bodies, human and non-human, to practices, techniques, technologies, objects, processes, histories (human and non- human, molar and molecular) which produce di ff erent kinds of bodies and dif- ferent ways, arguably, of enacting what it means to be human. The anthro- pologist Anna Tsing (2015: 1) argues, rather than the story of ‘ man ’ taming nature, a civilization story that has been told over and over in relation to the human, we should rather focus and attune to ‘ open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life ’ . A key question for body scholars is how we can we study the mediated and relational nature of embodied experience in ways that do jus- tice to the indeterminacy of our mixed natures. The Dutch anthropologist AnneMarie Mol (2002) uses the concept of the ‘ body multiple ’ to identify the more processual, relational, distributed approach to bodily matters that are a shared feature of work across the transdisciplinary fi eld of body studies. The idea of the body as simply something that we both have and are is displaced as the focus shifts to what bodies can do , what bodies could become , what practices enable and coordinate the doing of particular kinds of bodies, and what this makes possible in terms of our approach to questions about life, humanness, culture, power, technology, agency and subjectivity, as well as how to understand speci fi c histories of racialization, gendering and other processes and practices of di ff erentiation and cultures of discrimination that are part of new regimes of population management. Beyond binaries Current reformulations of the body are situated within a historical con- juncture, which is often characterized by its apparent newness . As we have 2 Introduction seen, we are confronted with new ways of making and re-making bodies. The singular, bounded, carbon-based body is being replaced by the proliferation and emergence of technologies and practices which enable the enhancement, alteration and invention of new bodies as much as they might repeat older assumptions, which operate according to scienti fi c and cultural norms that govern legibility, recognition, and even the misrecognition of what is accepted as being part of human life. Some of these practices appear mundane and have become a largely accepted way of living. These include practices of body modi fi cation and enhancement such as cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment or gender-con fi rming surgery and in vitro fertilization. The more far reaching are biotechnological practices, which are challenging the concept of what we understand life , the natural and humanness to mean. These include what Nikolas Rose (2007) has termed ‘ technologies of enhancement and technolo- gies of susceptibility ’ , which are future-oriented technologies that allow intervention at the molecular level of life (codes, enzyme activities, neuro- transmitters and transporter genes, for example). Their interventions, it is argued, have the potential to improve selfhood, vitality, health and lifestyle. These technologies, the mundane, speculative and challenging, are not with- out controversy. The technique of oocyte cryopreservation has challenged conceptions of fertility and womanhood by creating the possibility for post- menopausal women to give birth to genetically related o ff spring well into their fi fties or sixties (Watkins, 2007). Mundane biotechnological practices that shape and alter molecular processes, such as the ingestion of hormones, including testosterone and estrogen, have become part and parcel of new ways of living gendered bodies, often eschewing gendered binaries altogether. Paul Preciado ’ s (2013) book, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era , cogently describes the ‘ pharmacopornographic era ’ as one in which sex, gender, sexuality and the body have become the target and object of biopolitical rationalities (pharmaceuticals, hormones, psychotropic drugs), which trouble any notion of there being any truth or secret to the body. The American anthropologist Emily Martin (2006, 2007, 2010) has done much work to recon fi gure psychotropic drugs used to treat depression, anxiety and psychosis as ‘ co-performers ’ rather than ‘ magic bullets ’ or curative agents. Her writings on the ‘ pharmaceutical person ’ rooted in her own experience of manic depression (the term she prefers) position pharmaceu- ticals as part of broader self-managing techniques and practices which enable people to live and perform certain cultural norms. They do not target any truth or secret to the person (usually understood through a language of disease or psychiatric terminology), but rather enable a co-performance that helps to make ‘ pills into persons ’ (Martin, 2006: 275). What characterizes relationships of people with things – in this case with pharmaceuticals – is ambivalence, reveal- ing, she suggests, their role as both poison and remedy embodied in the Greek term pharmakon Drugs such as Prozac, for example, have been marketed through particular cultural logics. As Metzl (2003) has argued, Prozac was not simply presented Introduction 3 as a ‘ smart ’ drug (as having a biochemical speci fi city for example) but was also marketed as enabling the user to become ‘ optimistic, decisive, quick of thought, charismatic, energetic and con fi dent ’ (Metzl, 2003: 15). After the user ’ s encounter with Prozac they were depicted as ‘ a generative working member of society, holding fruitful employment in her productive days ’ (Metzl, 2003: 153). In other words, the drug was also presented as having the capacity to re-engi- neer personality or lifestyle at the molecular level. Biology is thus socialized and given meaning according to prevailing conceptions of normative personhood. Metzl suggests therefore that drugs perform; they enact particular norms where their potency extends far beyond any speci fi c action on the brain, nervous system, and related processes. In the case of Prozac, it was primarily seen to enact or perform a ‘ productivity narrative ’ (Metzl, 2003: 173). Prozac and related psychotropics might be better thought of as enhancement technologies (Fraser 2001: 59), rather than curative technologies. How do these reformulations of what we understand bodies to be and do reinvent questions and concepts that have been central to anthropological, sociological, psychological, philosophical and cultural theorizing? These include how to apprehend the relationships between what have often been characterized as separate entities; the natural and the cultural, micro and the macro , the indi- vidual and the social, structure and agency, mind and body , the human and more- than-human , the biological and the social, matter and meaning and the inside and outside , for example. Dualist approaches to bodily matters are challenged by theories that start from the position that what are being studied are entangled processes and practices. These are identi fi ed by concepts such as co-evolution, co-emergence, co-implication, co-performance, conjoining, co-assembling, intra- action, co-enactment, assemblage, becoming, compossibility, co-poeisis, body- ing, and the ‘ event ’ , to name some of this new theoretical language. The refor- mulation of what it means to have and be a body has also demanded an imaginative re-engagement with method. If the body is not simply a natural body, the rightful province of the life and biological sciences, then how can bodies be examined and interrogated through frameworks that have been understood as more social or cultural? How can we take our enmeshing with the more-than-human or non-human seriously? What are the implications for our study of the interrelationships between bodies and cultures? All of these questions and more have longer histories which have shaped the fi eld of body studies as it has taken form across anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, science studies, philosophy, feminisms, critical race studies, queer theory, disability studies and the fi eld of a ff ect studies. Some of these longer histories will be explored in a newly revised Chapter 1, which revisits debates in anthropology, sociology, and black feminist work which placed matters of corporeality and the fl esh as central rather than marginal concerns. As we will explore, the 1980s and 1990s were particularly fertile times for work on bodily matters, which in some cases predates contemporary thematics and issues, whilst at the same time this work is often overlooked within the contemporary fi eld of debate. This includes the work of anthropologists such as Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, 4 Introduction the black feminists Hortense Spillers and Audre Lorde, as well as sociologists associated with the emerging ‘ sociology of the body ’ in the 1980s, who were all challenging the absence or lack of attention given to bodily matters in key debates of the time. Revisiting work that is often left out of contemporary histories of scholarship on bodies and embodiment is important to establish what is new about the pre- sent, but also what we might have forgotten or be in danger of erasing when we consider the broader contributions of key fi gures to the fi eld of debate. This is especially so when there is so much that is seen as distinctly new about con- temporary scholarship and practices, including approaches that have used the pre fi x ‘ new ’ to signal something speci fi c about their orientation vis-à-vis the past. The discussion in Chapter 1 will also consider the value of re-exploring land- mark or classic studies of the time, and those that have been re-energized and brought to life through a decolonization agenda that rightly is at pains to argue that we give credit to and properly recognize the work of scholars who have been marginalized within a broader fi eld. This includes the writings of black and brown scholars and those that speci fi cally centre gender, race, sexuality, class and disability, including the importance of intersectional approaches. As we will see, the question of the place of the body within humanities theo- rizing relates to a much broader question. What counts as a body if we accept the proposition that we have never been distinctly human or singular? Starting from the position of co-evolution and co-constitution, a focus on the mediation of bodily processes opens up to the indeterminacy of life and to the speci fi city and contingency that has been a key feature of anthropological inquiry. This book advances arguments that connect anthropology with debates across a range of academic traditions that have developed critical re fl ection and examination in relation to this and a number of other key questions. We will engage with these central questions, and the call from many disciplines to re-embody theory with- out re-entrenching colonial legacies based on fi xity, di ff erentiation and hierarchy. As we will see throughout the book, there is not a coherence that unites the dif- ferent perspectives, but most, if not all, start from the premise that ‘ to achieve an adequate analysis of the body we need to regard it as a material, physical and biological phenomenon which is irreducible to immediate social processes or classi fi cations ’ (Shilling, 1993: 10). Or to quote the anthropologists Scheper- Hughes and Lock (1987: 7) bodies are simultaneously ‘ physical and symbolic artifact(s) ... both naturally and culturally produced, and (as) securely anchored in a particular historical moment ’ This gesture towards the interplay or interdependence of biological, physical, material, social, historical and cultural processes may not seem so radical in the context of how we might embody our own sense of subjectivity. For example, we may feel that of course our sense of who we are is an amalgam of our materiality, biological processes, and our place and position as particular kinds of social subject within speci fi c milieu, environments and settings. However, we will see that the question of how to bring the biological and physical together with the social is not merely linked to the recognition of this intersection. As Stacey Introduction 5 Alaimo (2010: 2) has cogently argued, ‘ we also need more robust and complex conceptions of the materiality of human bodies and the more-than-human world ’ . These might draw from the biological, life and psychological sciences in inventive ways in order to advance non-deterministic accounts of materiality. This includes ‘ new materialist ’ approaches, which strike a distance from con- ceptions of materiality tied to mechanistic conceptions of the body. However, body studies as a fi eld has done much to develop more materialist accounts of bodily matters that are not based on mechanist or determinist analyses. One of the ongoing problems central to the call to ‘ think through the body ’ is exactly how we can bring together processes that are often viewed as separate entities. Indeed, this assumption of separation is one that historically has underpinned the development of the kinds of disciplinary specialization that led to a split between the natural and human sciences. This split is being undone and remade by contemporary theories and practices across the sciences and humanities challenging the idea that biology is fi xed and culture the site of mutability and change. This appears to not be the case either in theory or practice, including in scienti fi c fi elds such as epigenetics, practices of gene engineering and gene spli- cing, microbiome science, immunology, as well as the life sciences, to name some that have caught the attention of humanities scholars. As we will see, these fi elds hold much promise as well as re-entrenching particular assumptions about bodies that have come under scrutiny by anthropologists, cultural theorists and body scholars more generally. Anthropology of the body Let ’ s consider the work of Margaret Lock, a medical anthropologist who has been pioneering studies of the anthropology of bodies since at least the 1980s. In more recent work she has critically engaged with epigenetics, which is a scienti fi c fi eld of research which challenges genetic determinism and reduc- tionism. Rather than gene determination, the focus within this scienti fi c fi eld has shifted to the interdependence and co-evolution of genes with environ- ments. Epigenetics has caught the attention of many humanities scholars who see much potential in the fi eld to explore the co-constitution, co-evolution and co-implication of biological or vital processes with processes and prac- tices that are simultaneously technical, cultural, symbolic, historical, material, economic and immaterial (see Blackman, 2016). Epigenetics explores how environmental events get under the skin, right down to the cellular and molecular structures of our DNA, potentially causing damage through the in fl ammatory potential of oxidative stress, which confounds and demonstrates the complex interplay between the endogenous and exogenous (the internal and external). It has been found that these epigenetic changes can trigger systemic autoimmunity in the context of trauma, for example (see Souliotis et al., 2020). This attention to the enmeshing of bodies and environments illus- trates how we are folded into the world and the world is folded into us (Cohen, 2017). Autoimmunity paradoxically reveals this and raises the 6 Introduction question of how toxic environments register at the molecular level as ‘ cell- death ’ , DNA damage, lesions, and multiple tissue injury. According to some molecular biologists these processes can ‘ prime ’ systemic and ‘ aberrant ’ immune reactions. These observations are of note given the discovery during the Covid-19 pandemic that there is a higher incidence of severe reactions and death amongst BAME populations subject to histories of systemic racism, for example. However, Lock (2013) has also identi fi ed some of the limits and scope of such aims to integrate the social sciences or humanities with emergent fi elds across the life and biological sciences. In the case of epigenetics, she has argued that although the fi eld o ff ers much hope and promise, particularly in understanding how bodies are enmeshed with their environments, including the relationships between trauma and toxicity, the fi eld tends to work with molecularized versions of bodily matters. In many cases this prevents an adequate analysis of environments that we might identify as more cultural or social, or indeed which are related to cultures of inequality and oppression. The fi eld is in danger of reinstating new forms of ‘ somatic reductionism ’ rather than the contextualization of epigenetic fi ndings within the ‘ speci fi c historical, socio/political, and environmental realities of lived experience ’ (Lock, 2013: 291). The fi eld needs more complex understandings of body- technology-world relations that are not reduced to particular reductive or even deterministic criteria or measures of ‘ the social ’ or ‘ the cultural ’ . The challenge of developing non-dualist approaches that can do justice to all the entangled processes (human and more-than-human) which shape bodily mat- ters remains a central one for scholars interested in the body and embodi- ment, as we will explore throughout the book. Anthropology of the body is a particularly interesting sub- fi eld to explore some of these concerns as they have been articulated both in the past and present (see Mascia-Lees, 2011). In Chapter 1 we will explore some of the classic scholarship that has contributed to debates within body studies. This will include writings by anthropologists, including an important landmark article written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock in 1987, which was important to the shaping of the fi eld known as the anthropology of the body. This work will be discussed and put into dialogue with the emerging fi eld of the sociology of the body in the 1980s and 1990s, which in di ff erent ways argued that sociology both lacked and needed an account of the inter- relationship of the body and society to understand some of its key concerns. Both sociology of the body and anthropology of the body drew from each other, doing the important work of attempting to decolonize both disciplines and show their colonial legacies. Sociology was framed by some of the early founding fi gures of the dis- cipline as an examination of social reproduction: of how ideas, beliefs, prac- tices, traditions and so forth are reproduced in such a way that they appear uniform and become part of the social fabric. Sociology took as its object what was considered social about the ties and obligations that bind Introduction 7 individuals and groups to each other. This assumed a separation between the biological and the social that was reproduced in the di ff erentiation between the natural and human sciences, with the former focusing upon what was taken to be distinctly biological about what it means to be human. As we will see, this question of what disciplines can rightfully claim as their object and subject matter is central to exactly what we might mean within the humanities when we call for the body to be taken seriously. One of the focuses of this book will be on the various ways in which body scholars have attempted to bridge this schism and produce work that starts from the assumption that if we are to work towards adequately re-embodying social and cultural theoriz- ing, this split and separation is part of the challenge. We need to move beyond binary thinking. As we will explore, this focus is a key feature of many contemporary approaches that start from the position of entanglement or entangled processes, rather than separate entities interacting, for example. The problem of dualism One of the key splits or separations that have been reproduced in di ff erent ways across the natural and human sciences is the mind – body dualism. We will encounter this dualism and its revision and rethinking in di ff erent ways throughout the chapters that make up this book. However, let us start by considering what is meant by the concept of dualism, and how it might ela- borate the relationship between the mind and body, for example. The mind is often used to refer to and make possible those processes that allow us to think, reason, argue, re fl ect, debate and write. These processes of thinking are usually referred to as cognitive – those that arise from the mind ’ s ability to engage in activities that are distinct from those located within the body, such as respiration and digestion. The latter processes are largely viewed as invo- luntary. This mind – body dualism is also often known as Cartesian dualism with reference to the writings of the 17th-century philosopher, René Des- cartes. Descartes argued that rationality was the key determinant of human existence. He termed this the cogito , which is enshrined in the saying ‘ I think therefore I am ’ . This foundational dualism has a number of other key dual- isms which overlay it. For example, we can already see how another dualism maps onto the separation of mind and body; the idea that the mind is subject to voluntary control, usually characterized as will , and the body is subject to laws, which govern and regulate processes which do not require conscious e ff ort or attention. This distinction between what is taken to be involuntary (and therefore fi xed), and what is taken to be voluntary (and therefore subject to change) produces the mind and body as distinct entities. The mind is the location of thought and the body the location of a fi xed set of physiological processes. But of course that is not all there is to say. One example that complicates this distinction is what is sometimes referred to as the ‘ Aha ’ experience, which readers might identify with. Perhaps after expending a lot of time trying to work through a problem, you may have 8 Introduction given up and fallen asleep, only to awake with a solution. Other solutions might come after going for a walk or explicitly not thinking about the pro- blem. This kind of experience suggests more of a ‘ mindful body ’ (Scheper- Hughes and Lock, 1987) that complicates distinctions between what is con- sidered voluntary and involuntary, and conscious and unconscious, inviting us to consider thought or cognition as embodied and extended through processes and practices that challenge dualist thinking and approaches. This example, which could be extended to other very commonplace experiences, such as feeling moved by a fi lm but fi nding it di ffi cult to say why, capture some of the tensions which studies of the body are making visible, in particular challenges to the idea that the body is the container of a fi xed set of physical processes, and that the mind is more fl uid and subject to cultural in fl uence. Although this recognizes how the mind, at least, is not fi xed and exists within a cultural milieu that shapes cognition, the body is still approached as a separate entity or substance. Contemporary body scholarship has thoroughly refuted these claims, showing how they are part of a colonial legacy which has disregarded and denigrated non-dualist and often non-Western approaches to what it means to have and be a body. As Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987: 11) remind us, ‘ There have always been alternative ontologies ’ (see De Castro, 1998; MacKenzie, 2016; Picq and Tikuna, 2019). Despite the recognition of the historical and cultural construction of dualistic thinking, privileged Wes- tern thinking tends to persist, showing the important need for decolonial approaches to body studies (see Lathabo-King, 2019). What it means to be embodied and to have and be a body is shaped by local theories of mind, perception, sensation and attention that shape what counts as a body, and how speci fi c conceptions of corporeality are lived and experienced in di ff erent cultural contexts, settings and practices (also see Martin, 2013). The problem of the body as substance We can also interrogate the persistence of a mind – body dualism further in the context of academic study. The exercise of rationality is often aligned with those practices linked to academic study, where the academic project is often viewed as a work of thought. This presumes that thinking primarily takes place independently of the body. I am sitting here writing this introduction, you are reading it, perhaps hoping that you will be able to make better sense of what can be a confusing fi eld of study. We all have bodies; this is the common sense response to what is often seen as the relegation of the body to the work of thought. Whilst writing this I am aware of my posture, of how I embody the movement of my fi ngers on the keyboard through my muscu- lature and my skeleton. You might be aware of your digestion, your respira- tion, your nervous system, or at least your focus of attention might now have shifted to these processes, which continue, often beyond your conscious awareness. Is this the body, which we wish to include in social and cultural theory? The answer is neither a simple ‘ yes ’ nor ‘ no ’ . It is rather more Introduction 9 complicated, and in order to address what ‘ thinking through the body ’ might mean we need to be aware both of the bodily basis of thought and the cog- nitive component of bodily processes and vice versa. We also need to move beyond thinking of bodies as substances, as special kinds of things or entities, to explore bodies as sites of potentiality, process and practice. We also need to be mindful of what happens to our view of bodies if we continue with the tradition that would locate re fl ection and reason within the mind. What happens to the body within these formulations? What do we make of the view that many philosophers who located thought within the mind, as distinct from the body, su ff ered from bodily in fi rmities and diseases which helped to produce an omnipotent fantasy that the body could be overcome or even dispensed with? This is embodied in the maxim, ‘ mind over matter ’ (Porter, 2003). But the body does matter and as we will see through- out this book, it is taken to matter in countless di ff erent ways. One way the body matters that I have already alluded to is in the writing and reading process itself. When we write or read we take up particular bodily orienta- tions; posture, musculature, breathing, and certain habits or dispositions. We do not simply think, but relate to the keyboard or book (analogue or digital) through particular bodily dispositions and practices, through turning pages, swiping, browsing, and particular forms of bodily comportment. These might appear to be automatic or involuntary, but they are learnt dispositions that become habitual through repetition. Particular forms of habituation are sup- ported through the manner in which bodies are situated within space (the library or lecture theatre for example), or sitting behind a screen, or through the regulation and punctuation of time (where the body ’ s cyclical rhythms for sleep, food and so forth may be ignored and overridden). The body as an ‘ absent present ’ Though it provides an incomplete picture, the view I have just reproduced is a view of the body that entirely fi ts within the dualism or separation of the mind or body. Although I might be recognizing the contribution of corpore- ality to the process of thought, the body is itself assumed to be almost machine-like in its formulation. That is, that the body is a mere physical substance that, although a silent presence in thought, can, through an act of will or recognition, be attended to so that it is not taken for granted. We can all become more aware of that which is often distorted or forgotten as we go about our daily lives. This is yet another variant of the mind over matter argument that always elevates the mind and thinking to that which is super- ior, in relation to a conception of the body that tends towards its formulation as a physico-chemical adjunct to thought. This dualism is based on a concept of disembodied reason that is insidious and rather di ffi cult to think against. It recurs again and again in how we think about practices of sense-making. As an example, the humanities have long traditions of approaching sense-making through focusing on the role of cultural symbols and codes in the formation of 10 Introduction identities. This work has often come out of semiotic, or what are often referred to as social constructionist traditions (see Chapter 1). Within these traditions, if we want to explore the role of social and cultural processes in our formation, then we might explore the di ff erent interpretations that we give in response to particular events