Authors' Responses to Commentaries

Abstract

I should begin this response by thanking MAQ editor Gay Becker for the opportunity to have my article enriched by the insightful commentaries provided by Beth Conklin and Marina Roseman. I am also pleased to find my own contribution joined here to that of Cecilia McCallum, whose work among the Cashinahua has been a model of ethnographic depth and theoretical sophistication. Readers of MAQ may not appreciate the nice coincidence: Cecilia and I are the only anthropologists to conduct major research in this very remote site, the Area Indigena Alto Purus, and it is a pleasant and unexpected surprise to find ourselves in the same issue of MAQ. I am in the somewhat embarrassing position of having been treated more kindly by my commentators than I might have been justified in expecting, but the generosity of their remarks offers an opportunity to expand on one or two points. Roseman and Conklin offer complementary perspectives: Roseman addresses a set of general theoretical issues that she graciously finds at least implicit in my framing comments and analysis, while Conklin explores the contribution to these issues made by other work in indigenous lowland South America. Roseman focuses on my opening remarks, a somewhat cranky diatribe against the Body business that has become one of the most profitable growth industries in late capitalist social science and humanities (Featherstone et al. 1991). Roseman points to the important role of feminist scholarship in opening conceptual space for the body, and I should underscore the point that all our discussions are cast at least in part upon a rich background of feminist theory. At the same time, those of us who read Foucault along with the emerging feminist anthropology in the early 1970s may wonder if the Body was already taking shape in scholarly consciousness in ways that were also represented in feminist scholarship and poststructuralism, as well as in a variety of popular and public Body movements (Synnott 1993). Terence Turner's work (1994, 1995), in particular, invites us to consider the historical changes in Euro-American political economy that altered the position of the Body in this period. My first inclination in such a case is to make the Weberian assumption that a variety of social changes and cultural moments in postwar Euro-American political economy, popular culture, and intellectual disciplines converged in mutually reinforcing ways to resonate around the material signs of identity that we have since converted into the trope of the Body (B. Turner 1991). Roseman chides me gently for engaging in unwarranted typification: crystallizing researchers such as Lock, Kleinman, Good, and Csordas in the midst of their own ever-refining trajectories. She is right; the individuals she cites produce work that is more nuanced than I had space to acknowledge and discuss. Indeed, of this Gang of Four only Csordas has focused so exclusively on a particular