Turner Terence 1995

The three points he claims to be contributing to are: a) the emphasis in the activity of the body, b) the dividuality and permeability of its unity, c) the social character of the human body. He claims that anthropology can contribute to the debate through the ethno-theories on the body that are not attached to the western philosophical tradition that contemporary theorists are criticizing (such as Foucault). He starts his analysis of the kayapo by a statement on the “direct modification on the surface of the body as a general social practice tends to be found far more frequently in simple societies with relative rudimentary divisions of labor, than do not produce primarily for exchange.” (146). This is because the exchange of good that informs social identity in industrial societies happens as an exchange of social values through other venues such as performance and visual display that include the symbolic modification of the body as part of the production of cultural subjects. ). He then makes a detail description of the bodily habits of the kayapo and offers a series of interpretations of the meaning of the practices and adornment. He describes the roles and codification of such aspects of bodily practice as cleanliness, hair, body painting, apertures (ears, lips), elements as slings and bracelets, ceremonial costume. He makes some interesting analysis in relation to each of such features and the contexts of display. However there are of course some problematic aspects as we do not really know how do we get to those meanings, is it personal induction, the explanation of a kayapo specialist explaining a system of meaning, or is it the participants own interpretations. At the same time the parts in which he organizes the presentation are rather western forms of organizing knowledge: classifying types of practice dividing the body in sectors that deserve particular analysis (hair, ears, etc), giving one meaning to each of the defined fields of practice and each body part. He states for example”. The consecutive sets of bracelets symbolize physical growth” (157) or “symbolically opening holes in the ears, is understandable as an act of socialization, at once mimetic and performative” (154). We can quickly point to the fact that “mimetic” and “performative” are not part of a kayapo conceptual tools, and thus that his claim of manifesting a kayapo theory of the body is very much his appropriation of meanings and his own organization into a classificatory system (this is Bourdieu´s critique in OTP). It is surprising as well how form body parts and body adornment “Necklaces” “Body Paint” he jumps to the subtitles “sexuality and reproduction” or “the body as a recursive process” as if it was an dimension with a parallel entity to the previous ones. In his last subsection he offers a more general interpretation of the position of the body in relation to the world “From the Kayapo point of view, this thoroughgoing parallelism between cosmic and bodily form is neither a metaphorical correspondence between separately natural and social orders, nor a projection of the structure of the body to the structure of the cosmos. Rather body and cosmos participate in a single process of development, the form of all space-time.” (164) So this is an interesting idea to which we can agree even form western philosophical perspectives. At this point in his conclusion he insists that for the kayapo the production of bodiliness is not produced in terms of abstract conceptual attributes but “in terms of schemas of concrete bodily activity” (164), which is other point of criticism, as what is he understanding as concept, and as concrete, and how is not western subjectivity, even for Foucault shaped in technologies of the body of the individual and the population. I think this type of attacks to theory and defence to ethnotheroy do not lead us to useful places, the critique is not engaged with what Foucault is saying and is not giving credit to ideas both conceptual and “in practice” that these others produce. So his final point is a reiteration for the critique to Foucault, as the one who reproduced individual ideas of the body and detach them form political and social dynamics (????) and th Emily Martin as not recognizing that the current interest in the body is not just a self awareness of the lack of study of this problem but as a acritical reification of an ideological retreat to the subjectivity.




la foto mas interesante que encontre, de un sitio de "olimpiadas indigenas amazonicas" http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-photography/article_2056.jsp