38 chapter
of mind-body dualism (1987: 9). Although they do not directly claim that all
non-Western cultures are holistic or locate experience more fi rmly in the body,
this characterization emerges when they suggest that “[n]on- Western and non-
industrialized people are ‘called upon to think the world with their bodies’,” yet
“[b]y contrast, we [Westerners] live in a world in which the human shape of
things... is in retreat” (23). Likewise, Andrew Strathern’s Body Th oughts (1996)
contains characterizations such as “many peoples around the world... in whose
own cultural concepts emotion and reason are closely linked” (8), wherein emo-
tion and reason represent aspects of the body-mind distinction, and references to
cultures where “this [European] kind of hierarchical ranking of knowledge versus
emotion does not exist” (151). Women and marginalized populations in the West
meanwhile have also been portrayed as somewhat more embodied (for example,
Fishburn 1997, Gilbert 1997, Quashie 2004). Ethnographic work subsequent to
these important forays into our embodied condition has not yet discovered the
variegated, subversively messy reality that is inevitably encountered after some-
one initiates an exciting new paradigm.
Let me clarify that there is a diff erence between Csordas’ work (1990, 1993,
1994) on embodiment and contemporary anthropological studies that focus
on the body. Csordas, and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty that informs
Csordas, sees embodiment as a universal human condition, and he asks us to con-
sider the actual, lived experience of being in the body or “being in the world.” All
people experience the world from the perspective of being in a body, and obvi-
ously this applies to people in Kerala. But considering this existential condition
is distinct from focusing on and scrutinizing the body as an object of knowledge.
Csordas (1999) distinguishes the anthropology of the body, which considers the
body as an external object of analysis, from embodiment, which he says is a meth-
odological standpoint, looking/experiencing from the point of view of being in
a body. Additionally, I argue that the term “embodiment” has been employed by
many researchers, not to identify the existential condition Csordas describes via
Merleau-Ponty, but as a synonym for the body or somatization. When I critique
studies of embodiment, it is this use of the term as a synonym for the body that
I am most concerned with.
Although they do not off er their works explicitly as critiques of the mind-
ful Westerner/embodied non-Westerner dualism, Lawrence Cohen (1998) and
Robert Desjarlais (1997) provide examples of works that engage the body along
with other modes of experience without assuming an embodied Other. Th ose
who focus on social suff ering also off er the potential for an anthropology that
does not overindulge the body and considers a diversity of experiential conditions
(Kleinman and Kleinman 1995, Kleinman, Das and Lock, eds. 1997). Social suf-
fering includes the notion of illness, but is broader, taking into account the men-
tal, bodily and indeterminate other expressions of distress that stem from social
pressure ranging from stress to “nerves” to political violence.- Csordas (1994), Desjarlais (1992) and Weiner (1997).
- Geertz (1986), Bruner (1986), Wikan (1991) and Jackson (1996).
- Th is is similar to Desjarlais’ defi nition of experience, in his ethnography of a
homeless community in Boston, as “a historically and culturally constituted pro-
cess predicated on certain ways of being in the world” (1997: 13). - For example, Kapferer (1983), Roseman (1991), Desjarlais (1992) and Laderman
and Roseman (1996).