- Email: [email protected]
The domain of the sacred
J. Soeial BioL Struct 1980 3, 227-229
The domain of the sacred Thomas
A. Sebeok
Research Centerfor Languageand Semiotic Studies, Indiana University,Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A. (Review of John Blacking, The Anthropology o f the Body, London, Academic Press, 1977, pp. xii + 426. ) 'If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred' Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric (1855). This superior collection - bringing together most of the papers presented at a conference sponsored by the Association of Social Anthropologists, on the Anthropology of the Body, and reported to have been "intended to focus on the human body as the link between the nature and the culture present in all human activities' - fleshes out, as it were, an observation of Taine's, as reported by the eminent historian, H. A. L. Fisher, in an article he published in 1941, 'Paris at High Noon'. Taine, according to Fisher, 'pointed out that history was made by men, that men had bodies, that bodies were now healthy,now disordered, and that the state of the body inevitably affected the action of the mind. The study of the human body was part of the historian's duty.' It is evidently part of the anthropologist's professional c o m m i t m e n t as well, but its scrutiny of the body has traditionally been relegated to that segment of the field which is severally qualified - at least in the United States - as physical anthropology, bioanthropology, and the like. In Blacking's view, the divorcement of physical and cultural/social anthropology is no longer useful, this because of the reciprocal reasons that the human body is shaped, or at least influenced, by culture, while certain apparently cultural phenomena - his prime example is language - are biologically based. Almost all of the 19 papers assembled here - including Blacking's fascinating exploratory introduction, leading the reader 'Towards an Anthropology of the Body' - take it for granted that there exists a tacit consensus about the boundaries circumscribing the body, although Francis Huxley, in his 'The Body and the Play Within the Play', adverts to the problematic character of the commonly postulated relationship between self and nature, such that the embodiment of the 'self' synecdochically 'stands for' nature (inclusive, of course, of culture and society). However, this still leaves open the definition of the 'self', continuously debated from Plato's dramatistic (i.e. dialectic) exposition in the Timaeus, to L6vi-Strauss' structuralist conversion of the Platonic model in his also synecdochically Totemic Operator - a d m i t t e d l y just a program, one that remains 'reserved for the ethnology of a future century... ' 0140-17501801020227+03 $02.00/0
© 1980 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited
228
T. A. Sebeok
Provisionally, we can postulate that every enculturated human being possesses a pair of 'bodies', or selves, one embedded inside the other. The contained infrastructure can best be apprehended in immunological, viz. biochemical terms: invasion of this physical body is initially signified by the immune response that is, a specific reaction by the individual animal aimed at neutralizing or obliterating foreign bodies, or antigens, such as a population of bacteria. The response of the system also features adaptivity, i.e. the upgrowth of a memory, and a crucial characteristic that enables it to react to unexpected stimuli, or, in other words, to manifest amplifying semiotic overtones. The enveloping superstructure, or the semiotic self as such, is necessarily anchored both biologically and socially; invasion o f this outer bubble, or social membrane of irregular and elastic size and shape, triggers what Freud designated 'signala n x i e t y ' - it serves as an early warning system for the former. The arena for the immune reaction is circumscribed by the body's largest organ, the skin, that filters matter-energy flows. The semiotic self is normally contained between the skin and an outer perimeter, or information filtering threshold, discovered by Heini Hediger in 1935. Hediger distinguished between two extreme ways of vertebrate behaviour: contact types and distance types. Man clearly represents the second sort of species, being surrounded by a well-defined individual distance and intolerant of physical propinquity (save in special circumstances, such as when engaged in reproductive activities). The cross-cultural implications of Hediger's model were later explored, in preliminary forays, by Edward T. Hall (1959, 1966), under the rubric of 'proxemics', while the psychological ones were probed by Robert Sommer, in his deplorably neglected book, Personal Space (1969). Blacking assigns proxemics to the microscopic aspects of human movement, and holds that an anthropology of the body constitutes a crossroads where "the micro and macro' meet. Another author, J. B. Loudon, returns to this point in the context o f his consideration of the biological basis of social relationships through the medium of 'body products', a phrase which he limits (too restrictively, I think) to excretion. A pivotal notion, scarcely touched upon in this book, was articulated and beautifully illustrated by Jonathan Miller, in his The Body in Question (1978): that the possession of a body 'may be the necessary condition of being a person but it is not a sufficient one'. Each neonate must learn to personate, to distinguish, that is, between ego and alter. Here, again, a double agent is at work: the body comes to be perceived as one object in a world abounding with other objects; but the body is also felt as a medium of experience and the arena of action. It is this second conformation that enables us to demarcate our perception of the 'outside' world from the universe of embodied sensations. The implications of this dual configuration were brilliantly blocked out by Jakob yon Uexkiill, beginning in the first decade of this century, in his delineation of the Funktionskreis concept, which connotes a vast program of as yet hardly begun research, based on a cybernetic cycle between what he called the Innenwelt (or the organism's inwardly staged model of the world) and its Umwelt (or, roughly, the organism's cognitive map). Before the advent of modern, i.e. post-Peircean, semiotics, and especially its contemporary formalization by Ren6 Thom, yon Uexkiill's theoretical contributions were not only, so to speak, floating in limbo, but were largely misunderstood and disparaged by ethologists, especially Konrad Lorenz.
The domain o f the sacred
229
In maturation, then, the two images seemingly blend with each other: the body we perceive through our sensorium becomes a palpable outward manifestation of the one we immediately feel. That this interfusion is only a mirage can easily be demonstrated, as Miller dramatically shows from pathological states, concluding: "the felt image of the physical self is in the nature of a fiction, an imaginary space which is usually occupied by the body of which it is supposed to be an i m i t a t i o n . . . ' The fabrication is, of course, conjured up by the CNS, and matters that Miller calls 'ffmdings, feelings and failings', as well as other anomalous semiotic experiences, are all of vital clinical as well as anthropological concern. One such phenomenon, that of phosphenes (luminous subjective patterns beheld when, for instance, the eyeball is pressed), is fascinatingly dealt with by Lorna McDougall, in her chapter on 'Symbols and Somatic Structures', wherein she rightfully draws attention to 'mentalistic quality', or imagistic constructs often associated in primitive art, as among the Dogon, with numinous principles of order, in a word, sacredness. Ivan Polunin's discourse on 'The Body as an Indicator of Health and Disease' introduces further fundamental oppositions.: morbid vs. wholesome, symptom vs. sign, non-verbal vs. verbal information transfer, individual vs. environment, static vs. dynamic state, high stature vs. low status, and so forth, which could, in itself, be elaborated into an enlightening book about the editing and conveying of our incoherent patchwork I n n e n w e l t to others in an ostensibly integrated and often picturesque manner. The limitations of space will not permit me to comment on the many other superb articles in this book, but I cannot, in conclusion, refrain from singling out Gilbert Lewis' 'Fear of Sorcery and the Problem of Death by Suggestion', because this essay comes face-to-face with tl~e ultimate enigma Marcel Mauss (1926) marked as cases 'oh la nature sociale rejoint tr~s directement la nature biologique de l'homme'. The problem can be restated thus: how does the body transmute (verbal and non-verbal) semiotic strings into physiological action as wonderful as getting rid of warts (Lewis Thomas), or inducing both subjective improvement and objective changes in angina pectoris (Herbert Benson), or causing sudden death in animals and man in all parts of the globe (Walter Cannon and his many followers, especially Curt P. Richter)? At present, we can only surmise that such strings may activate, given the right conditions, the secretion of powerful substances such as endorphins, dynorphins, interferons or steroids, by coupling with action-sites, or receptors, on nerve cells in the manner of a lock-and-key arrangement and also perhaps spreading their influence throughout the body as hormones. It is worth recollecting in this connection Darwin's antithetical proposition (1872) that the transmission of messages by vocal means may well be rooted in the agony of pain.
The domain of the sacred Thomas
A. Sebeok
Research Centerfor Languageand Semiotic Studies, Indiana University,Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A. (Review of John Blacking, The Anthropology o f the Body, London, Academic Press, 1977, pp. xii + 426. ) 'If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred' Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric (1855). This superior collection - bringing together most of the papers presented at a conference sponsored by the Association of Social Anthropologists, on the Anthropology of the Body, and reported to have been "intended to focus on the human body as the link between the nature and the culture present in all human activities' - fleshes out, as it were, an observation of Taine's, as reported by the eminent historian, H. A. L. Fisher, in an article he published in 1941, 'Paris at High Noon'. Taine, according to Fisher, 'pointed out that history was made by men, that men had bodies, that bodies were now healthy,now disordered, and that the state of the body inevitably affected the action of the mind. The study of the human body was part of the historian's duty.' It is evidently part of the anthropologist's professional c o m m i t m e n t as well, but its scrutiny of the body has traditionally been relegated to that segment of the field which is severally qualified - at least in the United States - as physical anthropology, bioanthropology, and the like. In Blacking's view, the divorcement of physical and cultural/social anthropology is no longer useful, this because of the reciprocal reasons that the human body is shaped, or at least influenced, by culture, while certain apparently cultural phenomena - his prime example is language - are biologically based. Almost all of the 19 papers assembled here - including Blacking's fascinating exploratory introduction, leading the reader 'Towards an Anthropology of the Body' - take it for granted that there exists a tacit consensus about the boundaries circumscribing the body, although Francis Huxley, in his 'The Body and the Play Within the Play', adverts to the problematic character of the commonly postulated relationship between self and nature, such that the embodiment of the 'self' synecdochically 'stands for' nature (inclusive, of course, of culture and society). However, this still leaves open the definition of the 'self', continuously debated from Plato's dramatistic (i.e. dialectic) exposition in the Timaeus, to L6vi-Strauss' structuralist conversion of the Platonic model in his also synecdochically Totemic Operator - a d m i t t e d l y just a program, one that remains 'reserved for the ethnology of a future century... ' 0140-17501801020227+03 $02.00/0
© 1980 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited
228
T. A. Sebeok
Provisionally, we can postulate that every enculturated human being possesses a pair of 'bodies', or selves, one embedded inside the other. The contained infrastructure can best be apprehended in immunological, viz. biochemical terms: invasion of this physical body is initially signified by the immune response that is, a specific reaction by the individual animal aimed at neutralizing or obliterating foreign bodies, or antigens, such as a population of bacteria. The response of the system also features adaptivity, i.e. the upgrowth of a memory, and a crucial characteristic that enables it to react to unexpected stimuli, or, in other words, to manifest amplifying semiotic overtones. The enveloping superstructure, or the semiotic self as such, is necessarily anchored both biologically and socially; invasion o f this outer bubble, or social membrane of irregular and elastic size and shape, triggers what Freud designated 'signala n x i e t y ' - it serves as an early warning system for the former. The arena for the immune reaction is circumscribed by the body's largest organ, the skin, that filters matter-energy flows. The semiotic self is normally contained between the skin and an outer perimeter, or information filtering threshold, discovered by Heini Hediger in 1935. Hediger distinguished between two extreme ways of vertebrate behaviour: contact types and distance types. Man clearly represents the second sort of species, being surrounded by a well-defined individual distance and intolerant of physical propinquity (save in special circumstances, such as when engaged in reproductive activities). The cross-cultural implications of Hediger's model were later explored, in preliminary forays, by Edward T. Hall (1959, 1966), under the rubric of 'proxemics', while the psychological ones were probed by Robert Sommer, in his deplorably neglected book, Personal Space (1969). Blacking assigns proxemics to the microscopic aspects of human movement, and holds that an anthropology of the body constitutes a crossroads where "the micro and macro' meet. Another author, J. B. Loudon, returns to this point in the context o f his consideration of the biological basis of social relationships through the medium of 'body products', a phrase which he limits (too restrictively, I think) to excretion. A pivotal notion, scarcely touched upon in this book, was articulated and beautifully illustrated by Jonathan Miller, in his The Body in Question (1978): that the possession of a body 'may be the necessary condition of being a person but it is not a sufficient one'. Each neonate must learn to personate, to distinguish, that is, between ego and alter. Here, again, a double agent is at work: the body comes to be perceived as one object in a world abounding with other objects; but the body is also felt as a medium of experience and the arena of action. It is this second conformation that enables us to demarcate our perception of the 'outside' world from the universe of embodied sensations. The implications of this dual configuration were brilliantly blocked out by Jakob yon Uexkiill, beginning in the first decade of this century, in his delineation of the Funktionskreis concept, which connotes a vast program of as yet hardly begun research, based on a cybernetic cycle between what he called the Innenwelt (or the organism's inwardly staged model of the world) and its Umwelt (or, roughly, the organism's cognitive map). Before the advent of modern, i.e. post-Peircean, semiotics, and especially its contemporary formalization by Ren6 Thom, yon Uexkiill's theoretical contributions were not only, so to speak, floating in limbo, but were largely misunderstood and disparaged by ethologists, especially Konrad Lorenz.
The domain o f the sacred
229
In maturation, then, the two images seemingly blend with each other: the body we perceive through our sensorium becomes a palpable outward manifestation of the one we immediately feel. That this interfusion is only a mirage can easily be demonstrated, as Miller dramatically shows from pathological states, concluding: "the felt image of the physical self is in the nature of a fiction, an imaginary space which is usually occupied by the body of which it is supposed to be an i m i t a t i o n . . . ' The fabrication is, of course, conjured up by the CNS, and matters that Miller calls 'ffmdings, feelings and failings', as well as other anomalous semiotic experiences, are all of vital clinical as well as anthropological concern. One such phenomenon, that of phosphenes (luminous subjective patterns beheld when, for instance, the eyeball is pressed), is fascinatingly dealt with by Lorna McDougall, in her chapter on 'Symbols and Somatic Structures', wherein she rightfully draws attention to 'mentalistic quality', or imagistic constructs often associated in primitive art, as among the Dogon, with numinous principles of order, in a word, sacredness. Ivan Polunin's discourse on 'The Body as an Indicator of Health and Disease' introduces further fundamental oppositions.: morbid vs. wholesome, symptom vs. sign, non-verbal vs. verbal information transfer, individual vs. environment, static vs. dynamic state, high stature vs. low status, and so forth, which could, in itself, be elaborated into an enlightening book about the editing and conveying of our incoherent patchwork I n n e n w e l t to others in an ostensibly integrated and often picturesque manner. The limitations of space will not permit me to comment on the many other superb articles in this book, but I cannot, in conclusion, refrain from singling out Gilbert Lewis' 'Fear of Sorcery and the Problem of Death by Suggestion', because this essay comes face-to-face with tl~e ultimate enigma Marcel Mauss (1926) marked as cases 'oh la nature sociale rejoint tr~s directement la nature biologique de l'homme'. The problem can be restated thus: how does the body transmute (verbal and non-verbal) semiotic strings into physiological action as wonderful as getting rid of warts (Lewis Thomas), or inducing both subjective improvement and objective changes in angina pectoris (Herbert Benson), or causing sudden death in animals and man in all parts of the globe (Walter Cannon and his many followers, especially Curt P. Richter)? At present, we can only surmise that such strings may activate, given the right conditions, the secretion of powerful substances such as endorphins, dynorphins, interferons or steroids, by coupling with action-sites, or receptors, on nerve cells in the manner of a lock-and-key arrangement and also perhaps spreading their influence throughout the body as hormones. It is worth recollecting in this connection Darwin's antithetical proposition (1872) that the transmission of messages by vocal means may well be rooted in the agony of pain.