Bodily Techniques Research Articles

Recreating the vertical

Asked, a year before his death in 1922, why it was important to climb Mount Everest, the climber and writer George Mallory famously replied: 'Because it is there'. Mallory's intention was to stress the fact that, though the systematic climbing of mountains emerged within explicitly scientific paradigms (Schama 1995), science was not the point of mountaineering. Rather, its main point lay in exploring a meaningful response to the inviting 'there-ness' of landforms that were previously viewed as lying, like medieval forests, beyond the frontier of truly human being. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, such thinking led to the cultivation of specific bodily techniques (Mauss 1934) for climbing mountains and to the parallel development of the material technology required to surmount steep snow, ice and rock. Today, base camp for a distinctly anthropological approach to mountaineering (rock-climbing being one of its offshoots) is the premise that the inviting 'there-ness' of mountains and the technical response of modem actors to this symbolic charge is historically generated and culturally embedded (Ortner 1999, MacFarlane 2004). Three questions suggest themselves. Firstly, what, in modem times, is the cultural nature of this compelling 'there-ness'? Secondly, how do climbing practices technically and culturally elaborate its evocative, if elusive, meaning? And, thirdly, why is it important to ask why? Indeed, should anthropologists even take time out from studying 'matters of life and death' (such as ethnicity, economy, religion or new forms of reproductive technology) to examine a traditionally marginal, if now rapidly growing, pastime? The counter-cultural and the mainstream Rock-climbing began to be distinguished from mountaineering as a specialized sport or 'activity' towards the end of the 19th century. It shared with the latter a passion for grapp ing with forms and degrees of the vertical in natural si uations and a reliance on similar technology. Nowadays rock-climbing equipment consists of ropes, helmets, harnesses, sma l ballet shoe-like rock boots and a rack of metallic protective 'gear' made up of karabiners, 'friends' and 'rocks', as well as fabric slings and 'quick-draws', all of which are either temporarily slotted into cracks in the rock by 'leaders' and taken out by 'seconds', or draped over 'spikes', pinnacles or 'bollards' of rock and then remov . (Alternatively, in 'sports climbing', leaders clip karabiners and rope into metal pegs or bolts, drilled and driven permanently into the rock.) Friction devices and anchors are held by the 'second' so that an active, 'lead' climber can be held without effort in the event of a fall; thus, provided that the equipment is in good operational condition an arranged correctly, and given enough cracks (courtesy of natural weathering), a system of 'protection' can be organized that, relative to high-altitude snow and ice climbing, confers reasonable levels of safety. Indeed, because of the relatively high levels of safety, because they are not normally affected by altitude, and because they wear footwear that adds friction, stays on the tiniest of ledges and toe-pokes the smallest of 'pockets' of rock, rock-climbers can make far more gymnastic 'moves' on uch smaller 'holds' than can high-altitude mountaineers (whose feet are shod with big, tough, insulated

Play in adventure tourism: The Case of Arctic Trekking

This paper discusses narratives of polar adventure tourism from a multidisciplinary perspective of play. Reviewing discussions on the motivation behind this subject, it examines two concurrent approaches in particular: risk and insight theories. Based on empirical evidence obtained from a winter trekking trip to an Artic tourism destination, the paper argues that these theories may be particular components of adult play. The interplay among risk, insight seeking, and play is explored in this paper with a particular emphasis being placed on the competence, materiality, and bodily techniques demonstrated by Arctic adventure tourists.

An anthropology of religious experience: spirituality, gender and cultural transmission in the Focolare movement

The manner in which a religious culture is transmitted and internalised defies conventional ethnographic description. Exterior forms of behaviour, articulated expressions of motivation, observable rules and appearances can be described, but the interior, ascetic dimensions of the experience are less amenable to observation and analysis. In this study the author uses Mauss's notion of habitus, the learned bodily techniques that often appear natural, to discuss some of the ways in which the culture of the Focolare Movement is transmitted to its members. As a member of the Focolare, the author has internalised many aspects of Focolare religious culture, and uses reflexive experience to discuss the methodological issues surrounding spiritual relationships with informants. The article also discusses the importance of a gender-specific analysis and the consequences of doing 'anthropology at home' in a supposedly alien fieldwork setting, that of the Focolare permanent Mariapolis at Fontem in South West Cameroon.

Embodiment and Community

To understand how bodily practices such as folk dance encourage or create community, we must examine the processes that underlie the formation of community feeling and participation. The process of learning movements or positions and the process of learning associated feelings both necessarily take place within a and cultural context, that is, a community. They also depend on specific bodily techniques that are utilized by worship or dance practices-these in turn rely on certain qualities of the Further, like worship, dance makes use of what John Blacking refers to as somatic states (1977b:10). Folk dance can also be understood as a shared text. Dance does not need to be programmatic, like hula dance or indigenous dances that reenact myth, to be experienced as shared text, nor does it need to communicate definable ideas. Rather, the body's knowledge is valuable in itself and pertinent to relations with others. It is not necessary for the intellect, the rational mind, to this knowledge for it to be considered a text. The first issue in writing about bodily practice is to see that we need to start our investigation at the most fundamental level. If we are going to examine the relationship between individual bodies and community, then we must examine what we mean by body. In contemporary American culture, the is understood to be a material, medicalized organism-a biochemical mechanism. Even consciousness is regarded as merely neural firings and does not exist separately from those processes. Bodies are considered to be independent and to be under the direction of the intentions and willpower of some kind of self-this is itself a contradiction to the medical view. Bodies are also generally considered to be local, bounded entities. Other definitions and meanings of include the Christian idea of the mystical of Christ, and concepts of a subtle body, an astral body, and so on. Recent experiments with healing prayer have lead to the idea of nonlocalized wisdom of the body.2 Medical anthropology suggests concepts of social and political as well as the personal (Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987), and current anthropological conversation questions the bounded quality of bodily experience. To begin to speak of the need for a new definition of the body, even a holistic one that acknowledges the necessary condition of our experience of ourselves in the world as embodied, is still to be steeped in a dichotomous culture. Our need to define the as having its own qualities of intelligence and agency is predicated on the fact that we cannot help but think in terms of body and mind if not body and soul, the being merely of a lower or animal nature. Our culture marginalizes the The Buddhist concept of body-mind (we cannot even transmit it without having to use these two terms) is perhaps closer to the working definition we need in order to understand how bodily practice both engenders and is informed by feeling and cultural ideals. In this essay, I am interested particularly in how learning and participating in traditional group dance activities leads to an increased sense of community or experience of spiritual participation. Specific qualities of somatic experience are critical for my discussion, the primary one being the intelligence of the and emotions. The body's intelligence is not based on reason but on direct knowledge of the world. Its immediacy can be seen in the speed with which athletes react to situations or the astounding feats of acrobats. We can observe it in ourselves as well, in quickly hitting the brake in a car-much too fast to be a reasoned response-or riding a bike after many years without one. The latter experience is so ubiquitous that it has become a maxim for memory of this type: you never forget how. Body knowledge differs from the intellectual kind in several ways. …