The Nuer are an extreme example of a people who do not merely accept the natural advantage of the right hand, but elaborate it and raise it to an art. Nuer youth paralyse their left arm by pressing metal rings hard into its flesh and inflict pain upon it with the right hand for show (Evans-Pritchard, 1973: 96). This is their way of subordinating their bodies to the spiritual order, in which right symbolises the sacred and left symbolises the profane.
Societies have developed diverse methods of subordinating the body to the collective moral order. The Kayapo regulate the intrusion of the internal, ‘natural’, ‘libidinal’ energies of the body into social space by plucking facial hair and painting the most ‘animalistic’ parts of the body black, a colour that signifies repression. Society symbolically appropriates the sexual drive of its members for collective ends by containing the male genitals in penis sheathes (Turner, 1980).
In Northern Sudan, infibulation rites symbolically appropriate the sexual potential of adolescent girls (Boddy, 1992). The operation makes intercourse so painful that the female’s desire is curbed. Only circumcised girls are deemed marriageable, so circumcision provides the conditions in which a woman’s fertility can be exploited for the reproduction of the society. As with left and right hands, the physical differences between men and women are emphasised by society rather than merely accepted. In fact, women are often associated with the left side, and their subordination is therefore naturalised.
Another social hierarchy that the body reflects is the caste system in India. Physical contact with an ‘Untouchable’ is traditionally thought to be polluting for members of higher castes, and the sense that the spiritual inferiority of the lower castes is physically manifest is justification for caste segregation. Parry also suggests that the Hindu notion of the instability of bodily margins creates an anxiety about disintegration and chaos which reinforces caste boundaries.
We have seen how the body can act as a mirror of society, reflecting the tension between the collective and the individual, and revealing social distinctions. However, it would be a mistake to see the body as a mere blank slate for society. In some respects, society itself is a mirror of the body. The physical structure we are born with and the processes of growth, decay and death provide all humans with metaphors for thinking about society. Many cultures conceptualise the social system using the idiom of the body (Lakoff and Johnson). To return to the caste system, in Hindu cosmogony the four varnas originated from the anatomy of the god Prajpati. Priestly Brahmins were born out of his head and toiling Shudras out of his feet. Just as the head rules the body, so the head of state rules the country. It is because the body provides a shared reality for all people that physical metaphors are so effective and widespread.
In many societies, physical orifices are seen as mediators between the inner, ‘natural’ world of the individual and outer social world. Menstruation is often thought to be dangerous because it represents an uncontrolled flow from inner to outer. Menstruating women are excluded from rituals such as taking puja in Hindu temples. This is not to say that bodily realities (such as the head’s control over the body, or the orifice as mediator) predict the social order. Society can select from the range of physical experiences which to ascribe importance to and use as metaphors for society. But we must be wary of swinging to the sociological extreme of seeing the body as merely the passive instrument of society.
Groups such as the Tshidi Zionists attempt to change society by first reforming their bodily practice. They identify physical symptoms such as ‘thirst’ or ‘depression’ with the social problem of ‘oppression’ (Comaroffs, 1992). The Zionists mark their opposition to ‘sekgoa’ or ‘white ways’ by subverting neo-colonial fashions by mixing them with ‘traditional’ Tshidi styles.
The Zionist healing rituals merge the individual persons into a community of participants by coordinating their dress, the cries that they emit, and the clockwise dancing of their bodies. Body techniques and adornments can homogenise social groups and distinguish them from others. The case of the Zionists serves to remind us that the social authority that governs peoples’ use of their bodies is not immutable, and nor are the seemingly ‘natural’ techniques we have learnt.
We may therefore conclude that although the body does act as a mirror of society, social control over the body is not fixed, and dissident groups can contest authority by reclaiming control over their own bodies. Paradoxically, it is because the body appears to be the sovereign domain of the individual that it can be such a powerful marker of membership and position in society. When society imprints itself on the body, its members identify strongly with their social selves.
Bibliography
Boddy, J. 1982, Womb as Oasis: the symbolic context of Pharaonic circumcision in rural Northern Sudan, in American Ethnologist, pp. 682-98
Comaroff, J. and J. 1992, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder: Westview Press
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1973, Nuer Spear Symbolism, in Needham, R. Right and Left, University of Chicago Press
Hertz, R. 1973, The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand, in Needham, R. Right and Left, University of Chicago Press
Mauss, M.1979, Sociology and Psychology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Turner, T. 1980, The Social Skin, in Cherfas, J. and Lewin, R. Not Work Alone, London: Temple Smith
