Paste your essay in hIt is from the 1980s onwards that body as a major site of investigation began to capture the attention of sociologists and thereby found space in the sociological repertoire (Ogden & Wakeman, 2013; Crossley, 2001; Shilling, 2003; Howson 2013). These changes in the priorities of sociology could be seen as a response to the various discussions that happened in different disciplines such as philosophy and anthropology. The question of dualism, for instance, has been addressed by many philosophers, and various alternative projects of thinking and theorizing the social, cultural and political experiences of human beings have been forthcoming, for instance, in phenomenology. In anthropology, the concern over the necessity of a better framework, other than the disembodied approaches, to understand the everyday experiences has been there since the 19thcentury (Turner, 2008). But the case of sociology is different. The question of the body has been overlooked by the sociologists “in order better to get at the meanings, purposes, interests, rules etc. embodied by the individuals” (Crossley, 2007, p. 84), and therefore body has an ‘absent presence’ or a ‘secret history’ in sociological studies. Before moving into exploring the presence of body in the sociological theories, it is important to reflect upon the question why sociology must be hospitable towards an embodied approach.
The question why embodiment must be central to sociology could be answered by pointing out that embodied agency as a paradigm helps us to make sense of the lived experiences of human beings, and it conceives being human as primarily practical, embodied and pre- reflective. Moreover, since it has a focus upon lived experiences, unlike the disembodied
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approaches, it provides the tools to study experiences such as moods, emotions and pain etc., that have been considered not researchable. Also the most important thing is that, the framework of embodiment shows us the ways through which human beings creatively engage with the structure and how they manage to alter its very shape. In that sense, as Thomas J Csroads puts it, “to work on a ‘paradigm of embodiment’… is not to study anything new or different, but to address familiar topics – healing, emotion, gender or power – from a different standpoint (1999, p. 147). While studying caste and embodiment, Gorringe & Rafanell point out that “embodied processes simultaneously constitute both social and personal identity and macro-structural phenomena. (2007, p. 102)” Thus, they argued, in order to makes sense of the everyday experiences of caste, the paradigm of embodiment, especially the theories of Bourdieu and Foucault, is more useful than any other approaches. Meenakshi Thapan, in the introduction to her seminal work Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India (2009), emphatically states that embodiment is imperative perspective for studying the position and struggles of woman in the Indian context. There are many other scholars who have shared the same concern over the question of embodiment that it is an inevitable paradigm if one wants to make sense of the various dynamisms of every human being and her/his everyday existence. Put it in another way, although nobody claims that it is the only approach that could unveil the impact of society upon an individual or vice versa, almost every scholar agrees on the point that it has been the absence of the body from scholarship that makes sociology as a discipline not fully capable of describing the engagements of human beings within societies (Bourdieu 1977,1984, 1990, 1992; Crossley 2001, 2007).
So in this chapter, I aim to discuss the space of the body in the tradition of sociological investigations. I would briefly explain how body has been treated in classical sociology and the
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reason why it did not come to the center of both theoretical engagement and empirical analysis of sociology. Then I would move to describe the emergence of body in sociology by discussing the theory of practice developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Since the broader aim is to understand which paradigm is sufficient when one wants to study the experiences and social life of sportsperson’s, I would, later in this chapter, explain the idea of physical capital which is developed by sociologist Chris Shilling (1991) and its convertibility to other forms of capital. By covering the aforesaid areas, I aim to demonstrate the discourses on embodiment in sociology, which would provide a picture of the scope of the phenomenological descriptions of body in the sociological studies of embodiment.
The Neglect of the Body in Classical Sociology
Bryan S Turner’s seminal text The Body and Society published in the year 1984 succinctly demonstrates the location of body and its significance in the theoretical engagements and empirical explorations of sociology. Till then there were hardly any studies that point out the importance of bringing the body into thinking about the society and its various operations. But Turner’s book was a stimulus to change the very orientation that sociology and social scientists possess regarding the attention that body deserves in scientific enquiry. Although Turner was critical about the neglect of the body in sociology, he didn’t see that sociology totally neglected the human body from its enquiry about the social world:
In writing about sociology’s neglect of the body, it may be more exact to refer to this negligence as submergence rather than absence, since the body in sociological theory has had a furtive, secret history rather than no history at all (2008, p. 36)
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For Turner, therefore, body has a secret history in sociology, whereas sociologist Chris shilling (2003) finds that body has an ‘absent presence’ within the history of sociology. In his book The Body and Social Theory, Shilling discusses the presence of body in the discipline of sociology. He begins the second chapter, which is titled ‘The body in sociology’, of the aforementioned text with a contentious statement that sociology always possessed a disembodied approach towards its subjects. But just after that he reformulates his argument that body is always there in sociology as an absent presence. The way Shilling begins the chapter seems to me interesting because, in order to understand the presence of body in the sociological discourses, one must initiate a keen and systematic search. We can see that the body is there in the studies of human societies – for instance when one studies social hierarchy, one actually looks at the human beings to locate the position of certain bodies – but the approach is disembodied. What does it mean? Shilling, throughout the above-mentioned chapter engages with this broader question in order to shed light on the absent presence of body in classical sociology
First he substantiates what he means by the absent presence of body in sociology. Body is absent in sociology in the sense that sociology does not focus much on the embodied nature of human subjectivity. The dominant divide between the natural and the social somehow sidelined embodiment from the priorities of the sociologist. The natural image of the body was not fit for the sociological concerns and therefore it remains as absent until the division between the natural and the social gets to be questioned. According to Hirst and Wooley,
sociologists have, on the whole, denied the importance of genetic, physical and individual psychological factors in human social life. In so doing, they have reinforced and theorized a traditional western cultural opposition between nature and culture. Social relations can even be conceived as a denial of nature (1982, p. 23).
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But at the same time, the body was present in sociology in the form of its subjects of enquiry such as praxis, behavior or interactions. It is from this point of view that one can argue that sociology has given priority neither to mind nor body, that there is no mind-body dualism in sociology. But Shilling goes on to say that there was no adequate conceptualization of the body in sociology till the recent period. Although body has been there in the core of its enquiry, it remained undertheorized in sociology. The studies such as on race and exploitation or health and mortality, for instance, despite the focus on the subjects, lack a deep understanding of bodily experiences of such structural issues. Shilling (2003) demonstrates this problem with an example. According to him, even after the theories of Bourdieu on education, embodiment and reproduction got a wider recognition, both in the field of sociology and anthropology, some sociologists still work on the theories of schooling focusing on language and mind. They still consider the disembodied subject as the object of theories. Needless to say, it is very clear that the embodied experiences of schooling provide the larger and clearer picture of the ways in which power operates and reproduces social inequalities. So, Shilling argues that it is important to bring embodiment into all the fields of sociological inquiries so as to come up with a clearer picture of social interactions and the roles of both power and individuals in it. Hence, body must be conceptualized and placed at the center of sociological imaginations. This conviction on the necessity of bringing embodiment into sociology comes from the philosophical- phenomenological anthropology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty since his conceptualization of embodied subjectivity clearly shows that both in the social system and in the embodied agency of individuals, bodily experiences are there at the center. Shilling points out that it is indeed the contributions of Merleau-Ponty that acted as the potent stimulus for the work of sociology on
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embodiment. As I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s theory on embodiment in detail in the next chapter, here I move on to discuss the question of the body in classical sociology.
Human agency as represented in classical sociology would be the most helpful question to unveil the manner of presence of the body in the works of classical sociologist such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim or Simmel. They rarely focused on the question of the body; rather they emphasized the role of rational choice in becoming the human agent. By doing so the ontological understanding of human existence eventually reduced to the understanding of human being as the thinking subject. Turner (1991) argues that the Weberian theory of action comes out as a reaction against the influences of evolutionary theory in sociology and it subsequently begins to dominate in sociological works. As a consequence, and because of the distinction between action and behavior, in which the former conceptualized as the meaningful subjective engagement of an individual, whereas the latter perceived as the mechanical bodily reaction to a stimulus without a subjective deliberation, the idea of a ‘lived body’ couldn’t catch the attention of sociologists. Moreover, “body became an external to the actor, who appeared as it were as a decision making agent” (Turner, 1991, p. 9).
Here, we can see the broader framework of dualism, which differentiates and separates mind and body, and attaches supremacy to the mind as the agent of all our actions. That approach, according to later sociologists and philosophers, such as Pierre Bourdieu or Merleau- Ponty, is inadequate to understand the ways through which human beings exist in the world.
As I pointed out above, from the very beginning, sociology as a discipline has been grounded upon the stark division between the natural and the social. As classical social theories were shaped by the opposition between civilization and desire, in this tradition the body was seen
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as the location of desire, or as the symbol of moral corruption (Turner, 2008, p. 42). Thus, this desire or passion had to be subordinated by the reason of the rational subject in order to establish a society with order and control, according to the classical sociologists. Shilling discusses this divide between the natural and the social, and shows how it subsequently ended up avoiding the embodied factors of the human being, for instance emotions. For Durkheim, sociology must be a discipline that is distinct from the natural science such as biology or psychology (Lukes, 1973). So the biological body, according to Durkheim is a subject for the natural sciences, not for sociology. Furthermore, while formulating the principle rules of sociology, Durkheim writes that “when the sociologist undertakes to investigate any order of social facts he must strive to consider them from a viewpoint where they present themselves in isolation from their individual manifestations“ (Durkheim, 1982, p.82) This view influenced the entire sociological project and as a consequence, whatever comes to be seen as natural or biological came to be kept outside the realm of sociological investigation (Ritzer, 2011).
While we have already glimpsed at classical sociology’s apathy towards embodiment and the nature-culture and civilization-desire binaries that buttressed that apathy, it is profitable to look at a deeper analysis of the rationale behind this phenomenon, which Turner (2008) undertakes. He points out four reasons that influenced the orientation of sociology right from its very inception.
According to Turner, the first reason why body becomes absent in sociology is because of early sociology’s overemphasis on the contrast between traditional and industrial societies. Almost all the classical sociologists have worked on the changing nature of society rather than the historical evolution of human agents. For instance, Marx worked on class struggle and capitalist production and Weber worked on rationalization in bureaucracy. In another words,
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sociologists were more concerned with the issues of political democracy, wage growth, capitalism and industrialization. They concentrated on big changes like secularization that modernity enabled and on how these structural changes impacted social behavior of groups. These relatively broader areas of investigation come to be seen as the societal factors and thereby the embodied experiences of individuals during these massive changes get to be sidelined. The second reason pointed out by Turner is that sociology, during its classical period, focused more on the necessary conditions to bring about order and control in order to have a fruitful change within society. In the theories of Weber and Simmel, we can see that there is a tendency to explain society as a system, which is based on the interrelationship of individuals. But here also body comes to be seen as a biological or pre-social entity. The third is the most important reason given by Turner as far as the durability of its consequences are concerned. It is related to the question of human agency because in classical sociology the mind or consciousness is conceived as the single intelligible core, which regulates the whole of the actions of human beings. Here as well, the body cannot find a space it deserves. In the Weberian notion of social action, it is the rational decision of human agents that leads to the true human engagement with the conditions of their life. The body is seen as the passive receptor of minds, which commands. It is the mind that engages with the cultural and social meanings of various entities existing within the social and cultural milieu. Moreover, this single core makes sense of the ways in which social stratification operates within a particular society. For instance, in Marxist theory we can see the dominating roles of false consciousness and ideology in deciding the very nature of a society and its members. This is the fourth reason according to Turner that leads to the absence of body in the sociological enquiry.
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As an addition to these reasons for the neglect of the body in classical sociology given by Turner, Shilling presents two factors that influenced sociology in its early period with respect to ignoring the body as a subject of research. The first point is that it is due to its methodology itself that sociology had become disembodied in its approach towards its subject matter. Thus, sociology as a cognitive exercise demanded embodied human aspects such as emotions and sense experiences to be distanced from the scientific way of studying the society and its systems and institutions. For instance, for Durkheim, the corporeal experiences confuse us while doing a scientific research, and this confusion in turn affects our ability to create concepts so as to explain the social events. The other point that Shilling makes is that the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology fail to have a sociology of the body also due to the fact that all of them were men. The embodied experiences of women such as pregnancy and related experiences or infant mortality provide a rich store of knowledge about the existing social systems of any period and place, and therefore, if women were in sociology at that time, argues Shilling, sociology would have taken into consideration the corporeal experiences of every individual and the reproductive experiences of women in particular.
Having presented these drawbacks of classical sociology regarding its concern with the body, Shilling turns to his contention that sociology never ignored the body completely. There is a secret concern for body in the works of Marx and Weber, and these ideas were fully developed through the works of Nietzsche and Foucault. He demonstrates various examples of how these scholars had looked at the corporeal conditions of people, exploited by the industrial and capitalist powers. For instance, he argues that in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1846) look at the relationship between material existence of humans and the development of their consciousness. Another example he provides is that of Weber’s works on the protestant ethics.
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He says that it is only through the control of the body that one can work for hours and earn more money and thereby maintains the ethical norms of Calvinistic principles. All these suggest that the body was there in classical sociology, but its presence was based on the dualistic philosophy of modernity, and thereby relegated to a subservient position in comparison to the rational mind. Classical sociology was against locating sociological projects in terms of the embodied human beings. Even in the beginning years of the twentieth century, there was a tendency to reject embodied experiences from sociological projects such as in structuralism and in interpretive sociology. These aforementioned schools of thought focused on ideology, consciousness, meaning or mind rather than bringing corporeality in its entirety into the deliberation.
Structuralism tended to conceptualize structure as equivalent to the cognitive internalization of dominant value systems, and dissolved the causal significances of other features of the body by making individuals the products of forces over which they had no control (Shilling, 2003, p. 26).
Thus, despite the partial attention on the embodied nature of humans, sociology till a recent period had based itself on the principles of dualistic methodology and philosophy, which distinguished mind and body and attached privileges to the mind as the source of human action and agency.