The Body and Agency

Chris Shilling, in recounting conceptions of the body throughout history, remarks, “the body, it soon became clear, could be all things to all people” (Shilling 2005, 8). When coupled with the expressed aims of sociology in Shilling and Turner, this statement presents an interesting dilemma. From a sociological perspective, Shilling and Turner promote a groundedness of the body in theory, through Corporeal Realism and social reciprocity, respectively. While there are differences between their particular approaches, they both reject the idea that the body is passively shaped/acted upon by society. Some degree of personal bodily experience is involved in social action. Nevertheless, the historical examples show that notions of the body are culturally and historically dependent. For example, Medieval notions of the body accounted for a single sex (Turner 2000, 486), and viewed the body as a window onto the soul, which leads to a conservative visual appearance that relates to what was thought about the physical nature of the body in religious terms (Shilling 2005, 2). Conversely, interpretations of shamanism and rock art emphasize the physicality of the body in the medicine dance, the gong rocks, and the physical laying of hands on engraved or painted images in order to transfer the non-physical attributes from the rock (allowing for the image on the rock to be considered the thing represented) to the person. Still culturally, and perhaps historically, dependent, but with different emphases on the relationship between body and society.

In these cases it can be argued that the body is an active part of the social experience. But are bodily experiences and social conceptions of the body necessarily mutually supportive? This seems to run the risk of formulating experience along Cartesian lines, but it seems plausible that socially constructed messages can differ significantly from the way an individual body experiences the world. You may experience sights, sounds, and tactile feelings that affect your outlook, but promote your society’s notion of a body even if your experiences do not reinforce that notion.

This could be seen as the very thing that causes, or is the agent of social change, but it is still difficult to reconcile. It seems entirely possible that, for example, a body that is actively changing socio-cultural constructs is at the same time perpetuating the socio-cultural constructs that it is in the process of changing, at least in a reflective manner. What I am suggesting is that while the individual is recognizable in archaeology, sociology and anthropology, the processes of social change and social construction based on the individual are frequently difficult to see or define. Looking forward to this weeks readings, the individual is often isolated in terms of the intimately biological, through which certain life experiences can be addressed (nutrition, illness, manual labor, etc.). Agency in cultural change, however, still seems to be unexplored in favour of descriptive moments.

Perhaps the solution is to do what Shilling suggests that we should not do: consolidate various theories. The significance of the physical body cannot be overlooked, but neither can outside influence (social constructs) because both act upon the other. An alternative is that social constructs are nothing more than interpretations in the mind of how to behave or not to behave, and that avoiding a Cartesian dichotomy would put social constructs squarely within the realm of physical bodily experiences.

Bibliography

Shilling, Chris; 2005. “Introduction” ad “Contemporary bodies” in Body in culture, technology and society. London: Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 1-23 and 47-72.

Turner, Bryan S.; 2000. “An outline of a general sociology of the body,” in The Blackwell companion to social theory. Bryan S. Turner (ed.). Second edition. Malden MA: Blackwell, 481-502.