Carnal technologies and the double life of the body in Gabon

Abstract

There is enormous reluctance in the West today to envision the body as a mere organic entity. The reduction of the flesh to reified matter – and its corollary, potential circulation in the market – is usually interpreted as a major threat to the core principles of social life. Scholars of many disciplines have documented how people across the world continue to resist emptying out the body, dead or alive, from sacred animacy and personal or social significance. In this exploratory essay, I take seriously the remarkable ability of the human body to retain these qualities in congruent fashion, and to combine them with market value. I propose to use the heuristic device of carnal technologies to explore how people invest such diverse forms of agency and value in human flesh. To ground the notion in empirical facts, I explore the long-standing spiritual and technical processes that used the body for making charms and medicine in Gabon (Equatorial Africa). After the 1880s, French colonialists both altered and confirmed local technologies. While trying to trivialize Gabonese bodies, the French re-sacralized their own as the fetish of colonial rule. The penal system helped to detach the mystical value of Gabonese body parts from the personal and social significance of the person, and encouraged the appraising of the person and her body in cash. As a result, the sacred agency of the body became increasingly predicated on its very organic existence, and on its ability to hold commodity value. The final section of the essay discusses the notion of carnal technology in comparison with biopolitics, biotechnology and biovalue.