Techniques of the Body

'The Material Subject' emphasises how bodily and material cultures combine to make and transform subjects dynamically. The book is based on the French Matière à Penser (MaP) school of thought, which draws upon the ideas of Mauss, Schilder, Foucault and Bourdieu, among others, to enhance the anthropological study of embodiment, practices, techniques, materiality and power.

Through theoretical sophistication and empirical field research, case studies from Europe, Africa and Asia bring MaP’s ideas into dialogue with other strands of material culture studies in the English-speaking world. These studies mediate different scales of engagement through a sensori-motor, affective and cognitive focus on practices of making and doing. Examples range from the precarity of professional divers in French public works to the gendered subjectivity of female carpet weavers in Morocco, from the ways Swiss watchmakers transmit craft knowledge to how Hindu devotees in India make efficacious use of altars, and from the enskilment of Paiwan indigenous people in Taiwan to the prestige of women’s wild silk wrappers in Burkina Faso. The chapters are organised according to domains of practice, defined as “matter of” work and technology, heritage, politics, religion and knowledge.

Scholars and students with an interest in material culture will gain valuable access to global research, rooted in a specific intellectual tradition.

As a broad set of body cultures, the ‘martial arts’ are a group of fighting systems from around the world that are composed of individual sets of movement that include kicking, jumping, rolling, stamping and punching expressed through a great variety of stylisations and developments. Such techniques, although originally devised for combat and military situations, might be adapted for health research and clinical applications. These ‘techniques of the body’, to follow Marcel Mauss’s well-known anthropological concept, are both biomechanical and sociocultural, and may form the basis of a new wave of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research into martial arts and health. The steps, leaps, stances, strikes and blocks, as individual components of fighting systems, can form the building blocks of creative research that adopts a cautious and pragmatic approach. The ways in which punches might be beneficial for arm strength and shoulder stability, for dealing with work-related stress and for forging social bonds with others, to offer one example of a specific form of movement, provide new questions and topics for specialists, teams of researchers and practitioners, as well as the new generation of multidisciplinary sport science students emerging from colleges and universities. This will require the coupling of scientific rigour with artistic creativity – something part of the heritage of the martial arts, physical culture and the YMCA Movement more generally.

Keywords: Health research; human movement; interdisciplinarity; physical culture; techniques of the body.

Como un rango amplio de culturas del cuerpo, las ‘artes marciales’ son un grupo de sistemas de combate de diferentes partes del mundo compuestos de conjuntos de movimientos individuales que incluyen patear, brincar, rodar, estampar y golpear expresando una gran variedad de estilisaciones y desarrollos. Estas técnicas, aunque fueron creadas originalmente por combate interpersonal y situaciones militares, pueden ser adaptadas para investigación sobre la salud y aplicaciones clínicas. Estas ‘técnicas del cuerpo’, para seguir el concepto bien conocido de Marcel Mauss, son ambos biomecánicos y socioculturales, y pueden formar la base de una nueva ola de investigación interdisciplinaria y transdisciplinaria sobre las artes marciales y la salud. Los pasos, brincos, posturas de pie, golpes y bloqueos como componentes individuales de esos sistemas de combate, podrían formar el fundamento de investigación creativa que adopta un camino cauteloso y pragmático. Las formas en que los golpes podrían ser de beneficio para la fortaleza de los brazos y estabilidad de los hombros, para manejar el estrés laboral y para formar conexiones sociales con los demás – para ofrecer tan sólo un ejemplo de untipode movimiento específico – ofrecen nuevas preguntas y temas para los especialistas, equipos de investigadores y practicantes, y nuevas generaciones de egresados en ciencias del deporte emergiendo desde colegios y universidades. Esto exige la combinación del rigor científico con la creatividad artística – algo que forma parte del patrimonio de las artes marciales, la cultura física y el movimiento YMCA en lo general.

Palabras clave: Investigación sobre la salud; movimiento humano; interdisciplinaridad; cultura física; técnicas del cuerpo.

Anthropology Today, August 2017, Volume 33, Issue 4, pp. 13-17

Foucault’s conception of ethics as the self’s relation to itself and as the practices by which the individual attempts to constitute itself as a particular kind of ethical subject is briefly sketched, along with three corollaries that follow from this. It is then suggested that ethics so conceived provides a useful framework within which to describe the activities at a yoga school in southern India.

Please visit the journal website to read:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-8322

Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) from biblical to early rabbinic sources and demonstrates how it oriented people to the affective, physical, and spatial dimensions of prayer. Rejecting a binary that would treat such language as either mental/subjective (and thus metaphorically) or soley physical/objective , Neis argues that we must unpack the fraught meaning of such corporeal spatial terminology to understand “rabbinic concepts of body-mind, ritual technology, and sacred geography." Neis highlights the guidelines for the body in prayer mode found in the rulings of Mishnah and Tosefta Berakhot, which provide a geography and choreography of bodily and affective orientation that calls into question the notion of a fixed,  mandate to turn toward the site of the Jerusalem Temple.  Although later directions found in the Babylonian Talmud on the praying toward the holy of holies have come to be viewed as normative, Neis warns against reading these into the earlier sources on prayer, finding multiple focal points in her anatomy of the tannaitic evidence. Analyzing kavvanat halev in Mishnah Rosh Hoshana 3 and its parallel in the Tosefta, Neis shows how the sages turned hearing into ritual listening and ordinary gazing into observing, directions grounded in the body, space, and affect. Neis closes with a section on the broader implications of this analysis for scholarly discussions of mind/body dualisms and metaphorical and embodied language.

The aim of this essay is to analyze from a historical-anthropological point of view the relationships between women’s mystical vision, the use of the “inner visualization” devotional practice (through the use of mental images) and artistic production. Such aim is pursued through the analysis of a “micro” case, that is the relationship between the mystical experience of and the artworks commissioned by Sister Battista da Varano (1458-1524), one of the greatest female Franciscan writers of Italian Renaissance. Illegitimate daughter of Giulio Cesare da Varano, lord of Camerino (in the Marche Region) and animator of the great Renaissance of the city, she receives at her father’s court a relevant humanistic education. Attracted by the moving sermons of Franciscans from the Osservanza order, Camilla decides to become a nun in 1481, changing her name in Sister Battista. In the monastery which her father had restored for her in Camerino, the nun most of all devotes herself  to writing works aimed mainly at the spiritual growth of her sisters. In these literary works Sister Battista often recounts her visions, in which are shown her visual heritage and her familiarity with the devotional images present in her city and the surrounding territory (Vesperbild, Christ in white robe, Magdalene brought to heaven by angels, Noli me tangere). Going beyond this codified iconography, Sister Battista, also during the mystical experience, shapes symbols in her mind, which are presented in her texts as instruments left by Christ in her body after the mystical experience (lilies, fire and heart). In doing so the nun builds original mental images that work as "imagines agentes", effective mnemonic tools which help touching the reader’s heart, causing a moral transformation. The exceptionality of this “micro” case though, it is in the fact that Sister Battista, thanks to the wealth of her family, is one of the few women mystic of the Renaissance who can afford artistic patronage. On the choir stalls of her monastery, made by Domenico Indivini in 1489, Sister Battista asks the artist to turn into real images the symbols received during her mystical experience.
Not adequately explainable as the result of social female discomfort, Sister Battista’s visions can be interpreted as the outcome of a mind educated in the use of images in private meditation, skilled in the “inner visualization” technique and in creating imagines agentes. Through these “techniques of the body” (Marcel Mauss), learned in the monastery and shared by the society in which she lives, Sister Battista pushes herself to the point of actually achieving her most desired goal: to see Christ and to communicate with him.

As computer interfaces, electronic screens monopolize architects' interaction with computational media. However, despite their instrumental role in architectural practice, hardly anyone would think of screens as instruments, although they originated from a scientific instrument: the oscilloscope. The oscilloscope was the first device for the graphic display of electrical signals. It soon surpassed its initial scientific visualization purposes to evolve into early computer graphics screens up until the 1970s. This paper looks at the oscilloscope's transition from an electrical instrument to an electronic display to explore how the instrumentality of displays was altered, and why it became less obvious. Two historical uses of oscilloscopes are examined. The first is the work of American artist Ben F. Laposky, who employed early oscilloscopes to perform "light drawings" in the 1950s. The second is a 1964 proposal by computer scientists Ivan and Bert Sutherland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an oscilloscope display that would "perform drawings." The two cases are analyzed using the interpretive concept of body techniques, borrowed from sociology. Body techniques allow for an empirical analysis of screen's instrumentality that does not distinguish between representations and operations, but rather includes representations to an irreducible series of embodied actions. This paper argues that examining the embodiment of graphic techniques can lead to an innovative understanding of design-computing techniques as co-shaped by both the affordances of novel technologies and the visual culture of existing design practices.

L’obiettivo di questo intervento è analizzare come nel Rinascimento l’esperienza sonora della lamentazione rituale, compiuta dalle donne sul defunto, e la ritualità dei drammi semiliturgici del Venerdì Santo, bloccata nella produzione di gruppi statuari con figure urlanti, rimangano impresse nella mente dei devoti in forma di immagini e suoni, che riemergono durante la meditazione privata. Tale scopo sarà perseguito attraverso l’analisi dell’esperienza mistica di suor Battista da Varano, una delle più grandi scrittrici francescane del Rinascimento italiano.
Entrata in monastero nel 1481 dopo aver ricevuto a corte una rilevante formazione umanistica, suor Battista si dedica soprattutto alla scrittura di opere di carattere devozionale, nelle quali narra spesso le sue esperienze mistiche. In questi racconti emerge tutto il suo patrimonio visivo e uditivo: la sua consuetudine con immagini sacre, col teatro religioso, con le lamentazioni rituali e con la produzione laudistica. In uno specifico caso è proprio grazie al canto di una lauda, incentrata sulla Passione di Cristo, che suor Battista cade in deliquio. Durante l’estasi la religiosa vede la Vergine che tiene in braccio il figlio morto e sente le voci urlanti delle Marie e di Giovanni. Tale visione trova un riscontro diretto in quella particolare iconografia del Compianto su Cristo morto, nella quale compaiono figure femminili dolenti particolarmente “sonore”, non solo per la raffigurazione dell’urlo in sé, ma anche per la sinestesia visivo-sonora creata dalle onde delle vesti scomposte. Tale fenomeno si verifica in particolare nei famosi gruppi scultorei di Niccolò dell’Arca e di Guido Mazzoni.
Le immagini e i suoni del rituale, archiviati nel corpo di suor Battista, si riattivano dunque nel corso di un’esperienza mistica che è di sicuro originata dal canto, ma che è soprattutto gestita da una mente abile nella pratica devozionale della “visualizzazione interiore”, da intendere come “tecnica del corpo”.

(ปรับปรุงจากบทความที่นำเสนอในปี 2017)

เพศสัมพันธ์ในทรรศนะของแพทย์: ความหมายของการร่วมเพศในฐานะที่เป็นกิจกรรมเชิงสุนทรียะในงานเขียนของแพทย์ไทยช่วงทศวรรษ 1970. ใน เปิดโลกสุนทรีย์ในวิถีมนุษยศาสตร์, บรรณาธิการโดย ถนอม ชาภักดี, ชาติชาย มุกสง, นันทนุช อุดมละมุล, สุรเชษ์ฐ สุขลาภกิจ, 335–65. กรุงเทพฯ: สยามปริทัศน์.

‘Medical doctors’ opinions on sexual relations: The 1970s Thai sexological writings on ‘sexual intercourse’ as an aesthetic practice’. In Exploring Aesthetic Dimensions in the Humanities, edited by Thanom Chapakdee, Chatichai Muksong, Nanthanoot Udomlamun and Surachet Suklarpkit, 335–65. Bangkok: Siam Parithas Publishing, 2020. (in Thai)

*** หมายเหตุ: เป็นร่างเดิมที่เสนอในปี 2017; สำหรับบทความฉบับปรับปรุง ตีพิมพ์ปี 2020/2563 อยู่ในส่วน "chapters" โปรดดู https://tinyurl.com/hu9wn3nm ***

บทความนี้ศึกษางานเขียนและงานแปลของแพทย์ไทยกลุ่มหนึ่งที่ตีพิมพ์ในนิตยสารรายเดือน เพศศึกษาและปรัชญา ซึ่งออกระหว่างปี 1972-1976 โดยเจาะจงไปในประเด็นว่าด้วยการร่วมเพศและความสุขสมทางเพศ บทความนี้มุ่งพิจารณาการสร้างและนำเสนอความหมายของการร่วมเพศผ่านข้อเขียนและการใช้รูปภาพประกอบ โดยเฉพาะรูปภาพแนะนำท่าร่วมเพศ เพื่อทำความเข้าใจความหมายของการร่วมเพศในฐานะที่เป็นกิจกรรมทางวัฒนธรรมของมนุษย์ โดยเฉพาะในแง่ที่เป็นกิจกรรมบริโภคเพื่อความสำราญ หรือกิจกรรมเชิงสุนทรียะ

In this article, I enquire in which ways the corona-induced lockdown in Austria has reshaped intimacy in our household by scrutinising my husband's sourdough bread-making journey. As physical distancing has thrown us back onto ourselves, my fi eld of research is equivalent to that which is immediately available-our everyday life within the confi nes of domestic space, at times expanded via digital technologies. My elaborations are based on my (research) diary in which I usually confl ate personal and research-related aspects of my everyday life. As, during lockdown, (entries on) bread-making and caring for sourdoughs came to play an important role, I became inspired to unfold issues of corporeality, relationality and temporality with regard to newly developing intimacies, interdependencies and modes of knowing.

“Getting rid of the I,” an expression I borrow from Sharath Jois, describes an effect of asana practice in which one’s identity and one’s sense of self temporarily dissipates and, ultimately, perhaps dissolves. Because our attachments (to others, to expectations, to goals and so on) are a function of ego, “getting rid of the I” also brings relief from those forms of suffering that are the product of these attachments. In what follows I consider how asana practice makes this possible. From Pushpam, #3, 2017