These reading notes are based on essays in Feher, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, and other sources read and discussed in HSS 414. Those in Feher (including some not discussed in class) appear first, followed by the other readings. We will start with notes on a few important essays in vol. 1, which do not arise from discussion, but are added for reference. Notes on other readings, based on the discussion each week, will be added after each session.

The table of contents below is arranged alphabetically by author. Click on the item to go to it. If it doesn't work, that is because that item is not yet included.

Alliez & Feher, Reflections of a Soul
Bahnson, Psychosomatic Issues in Cancer
Beckwith, Geerewol: The Art of Seduction
Bynum, The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages
de Heusch, The Sacrificial Body of the King
Duden, A Repertory of Body History
Duverger, The Meaning of Sacrifice
Dupont, The Emperor-God's Other Body
Elvin, Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years
Gallagher, The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend
Héritier-Augé, Older Women, Stout-Hearted Women, Women of Substance
Héritier-Augé, Semen and Blood: Some Ancient Theories Concerning Their Genesis and Relationship
Jones, Fighting Fit? 1914-1918
Kidel & Rowe-Leete, Mapping the Body
Knauft, Bodily Images in Melanesia: Cultural Substances and Natural Metaphors
Kristeva, Holbein's Dead Christ
Kunzle, The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Lafleur, Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People: Somaticity and Rationality in Medieval Japan
Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur"
Laqueur, The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice and Pouring Tea
Le Goff, Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages
Lloyd, The Politics of the Body
Loraux, Therefore, Socrates is Immortal
Magli, The Face and the Soul
Mann, The Body-of-Power and Incarnation at Port Royal and in Pascal
Nelli, Love's Rewards
Parry, The End of the Body
Perniola, Between Clothing and Nudity
Picone, The Ghost in the Machine: Religious Healing and Representations of the Body in Japan
Rosenberg, Disease and Social Order in America
Rousselle, Personal Status and Sexual Practice in the Roman Empire
Schmitt, The Ethics of Gesture
Schwartz, The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World
Sissa, Subtle Bodies
Sivin, State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries B.C.
Slymovics, The Body in Water
Starobinski, The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation
Tazi, Celestial Bodies: A Few Stops on the Way to Heaven
Upanisad of the Embryo
Vigarello, The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility
Zelizer, From the Body as Evidence
to the Body of Evidence

Issue: Why was the somatic religious experience of women important in the history of the body?

The role of the body in medieval piety (1200-1500) is "profoundly alien to modern sensibilities." Authors linked the body less to sexuality than to "fertility and decay." Asceticism aimed less to reject physicality than by elevating it to gain access to the divine. Female spirituality was "essentially somatic," a turning point in the history of the body. People accepted bodily spirituality because they associated not only female & flesh, but body & soul.

The cult of relics implies that the body is a means of religious access. People at bodily secretions etc. of the saintly. Ascetics tortured their bodies not only to scourge sins but to resemble Christ. The resultant union had "ecstatic, even erotic," overtones. The Eucharist became "symbolic cannibalism" as the pious "incorporated the power of the tortured god." There was even "a cult of the holy foreskin" {164}.

Manipulation of one's own body became more frequent in 12C. Manipulation from within (psychosomatic) was almost exclusively female. Such "conversion phenomena" include bodily rigidity, enlargement of body parts, swellings of sweet mucus in the throat, nosebleeds {165}. ÿ20The pious sought "physical or mental anguish" to suffer "for sins of the world," although saints willingly cured the ills of others.

Women more than men tended to see illness as "to be endured" {167}. They described their experience more immediately--as "my experience" rather than "the religious experience." Books of women's revelations, new ca. 1400, record piety centered on "spiritual-somatic experiences." When individuals directly encounter "the other," men tend toward "profound stillness," women (and a few men who learned practices from them, e.g. Francis of Assisi) to a sensuality that goes beyond senses and words. Christ becomes body, "received and perceived by body" {169}. From their mixed pain and delight "sweet melodies and aromas" rise to heaven.

Why did bodies thus behave in new ways from 12C on? From Gregorian Reform of late 11C, clerics were more sharply separated in status and life from laymen, and from all women. Fleshly manifestations gave the latter a warrant to speak. Men supervised women's spiritual experiences, learned from them about the will of God, used them to fight dualistic heresies {171}. Less educated, women tended to dictate or to write in vernacular, the literature of which was largely love poetry and romances. Women took their caregiving into religious experience.

Despite the body-soul split and misogyny of Middle Ages, people associated women with body and humanity of Christ. He was depicted as feminine partly because ecclesia, his body, was feminine, and because he nourished believers {176}. Men symbolized Christ's divinity, women his humanity. His body came from his mother alone. Painters depict Mary as a priest who offers "mortals the saving flesh of God" {182}.

Philosophers believed that the mother's blood in the womb and milk outside it were basic sustenance. Christ's blood nurtured too. The medieval unisex body (Laqueur) discouraged sharp gender boundaries {188}. Theologians and natural philosophers treated all bodies as both male and female {185}. Medical authors called male bleeding "menstruation," etc. {187}.

Theologians of 13-14C saw body & soul as more integral than before. ÿ20They modified the old Platonic notion that person is soul using body. Notion of unity underlay discussions of bodily resurrection, immaculate conception, etc., widely discussed in quodlibeta {189}. They attacked matter and body as heretical. Major theologians wrote on both resurrection and embryology, which they connected in questions of nature and identity of person. Debates, esp. on issues introduced by Avicenna, obscured body/soul boundary. Both Avicenna and his conservative opponents gave positive value to the body. Union of body and soul is essential to happiness. By 1330's, some theologians held that "the gifts of the glorified body" were a consequence of the soul's vision of God, and prefigured resurrection. People are rewarded as well as punished in their bodies, as they are in heaven and purgatory.

Conclusion. Despite low status of women, their "bodily experience was understood to be union with God" {196}. Because the sexes embodied so many complementary oppositions, theologians understood that "God's creation was more perfect in two sexes than in one"{198}.

Issue: What in Holbein's personal situation and social circumstances accounts for this innovative and untypical painting?

Holbein depicts a tortured, forsaken Christ, without promise of resurrection (1521-1522; 241). He is alone, unlike in Italian paintings that ennoble his face and surround him with figures grieving but sure of resurrection. The painting is "inaccessible, distant, and without a beyond." Its "new morality" is one of endurance {243}. Does Holbein mean to leave the viewer forsaken, or invite his participation in death "to include it in our own life"?

Ca. 1500 there were many paintings of dead Christ in W. Europe, inspired by Byzantine iconography. But Holbein, a humanist and friend of Erasmus, uses this image to obliterate glory of Passion {245}. In Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece (1512-1515), Christ has died of real suffering. He is surrounded by people--not isolated, but calm. Mantegna's Christ (Milan, ca. 1480), an obvious predecessor of Holbein's, is "brutally" foreshortened (90° rotation), but mourners introduce sentiment.

Holbein as Renaissance man embraces death as the "essence of his desacralized reality, . . . foundation of a new unity" {249}. Reformation theologians warred against all non-verbal images, with much destruction of art in Basel. Holbein fled from there to England ca. 1526, became Protestant after return in 1530, later went back to paint Henry VIII. His new faith, deeply skeptical, informs later paintings with a new view of human dignity. His various danses macabres show an obsession with death. He is "not committed"; his art is exact and unenthusiastic, "on the verge of indifference," showing "the coldness and emotional paralysis of the melancholist" [cheap psychobio!]. His "technician's amoralism" makes him a "disenchanted verist" capable of "powerful, expressive seriousness" {?; 256-257}. Death lurks always in the background of his portraits. His art overcomes his melancholy and detachment, encompassing the "hiatus" or "severance" of forsakenness that is the subject of the Basel Christ {259}. [The Hegelian-Freudian argument near the end is remarkably foggy.]

Issue: What accounts for these invisible spirits with real bodies, why did their depiction change ca. 1200, and what were the consequences? "Ghosts and ghouls may be odd in any age; historical inquiry is interested in why they are less odd in one era than in another" {272}. "Hungry ghosts [gaki], as beings with bodies, were . . . an important reed that was woven into many places in a cognitive basket that was used to try to hold a lot of things together." They were demonstrable, "what passed for 'science' in its day." [Argues positivistically that what mattered was "better and fuller information" that eventually moved them into the narrow new 19C domain of "religion"; 273]. "Bodily interaction between humans and ghosts" was crucial. The gaki had an enormous stomach and a narrow neck, was always hungry, never satisfied. It was not in hell; its body was its hell.

Main evidence: two 12C gaki-zoshi scrolls. They show a form of existence into which a human could be born "with terrifying ease." Gaki eat human detritus, including feces; they "commingle invisibly with humans," who are unaware of being surrounded by them. They account for the rapid disappearance of feces etc. discarded in public, and even fire and water that people see dying out and evaporating {286}. They even eat the ultimate human biodegradable ejecta, dead bodies {283}. By accounting for these disappearances gaki are 'conceptually tidy' {278}.

They belonged in a cosmic hierarchy that mirrored the social order {291}. The paintings, in giving a view of gaki, made them part of the natural order, supporting the high status of patrons who paid for the pictures. "Things began to come undone" because the painters, eager for realism, moved away from Chinese prototypes into the streets to find living models. In the 12C capital, after "the military class" grabbed power, they were glad to stress the starvation that their predecessors had caused. The artists "closely observed the bodily signs of advanced starvation" (pallor, hair reddened by kwashiorkor, etc.). Their realism disclosed "an awesome disparity between the theory of things and the way they really were" {297}. When gaki became recognizable as starving humans, "the taxonomy was in trouble" {298}.

The Buddhist, esp. Zen, clergy occasionally challenged religious convention, but, aside from a few eccentrics, failed to speak for restructuring society. Ikkyû (1394-1481), went further than others in trying "to tear off . . . [a] fabric of social lies." In the famine of 1461 he wrote "The hungry ghosts I see are real people" {302}.

· 16. Therefore, Socrates is Immortal [Nicole Loraux 2

Phaedo makes immortality of the soul a philosophical issue and makes philosophy a literary genre. Before classical period, man had a body and a psuche known only when leaving the body on death. The epic hero attained glory as his psuche joined shades in Hades. For the soldier-citizen what mattered was the immortal glory his city gave him in return for his life. For Socrates body and soul are "already irrevocably separated"; rejecting pleasures of body makes him like one dead. Life is only in the soul; the philosopher's life is a battle with the body {16}. Socrates subverts the conventional funeral ritual, e.g., by bathing before death. He declares no interest in it. His disciples take over such functions as closing his eyes.

Plato substitutes philosopher for warrior as model of the virile man who, unlike the ordinary one, chooses the way of death {24}. He confronts danger in depending on and teaching immortality of soul. Socrates manipulates the language of the civic funeral oration to remove all prestige from the body. He retains only thought, which feeds the soul. All except philosopher are brave out of fear; only he is truly brave {27}.

Before introducing the soul as topic, Socrates remarks that the soul is imprisoned (or in garrison service); only the philosopher can free himself by separating soul from body. Socrates acts as a "war leader" to his disciples--as always, for courage is essential to dialectical discussions (a battle, 29). By detaching immortality from civil glory he attaches it to soul.

At the end the body takes center stage, for the executioner must trace on it the progress of the hemlock. The poison liberates a soul in effect already liberated by philosophy. What other Greek authors say about hemlock affecting the mind first suggests that the account in Phaedo is a "pure and simple philosophical construction" {37}. When Socrates dies the body remains as a "memorial sculpture." Throughout, Plato has manipulated the body to banish it from philosophy. He outlaws poetic mimesis in writing that depends on mimesis, uses cunning (metis) to condemn cunning, and argues the annihilation of the body in a language where the body dominates {39}. Plato's argument is not merely philosophical; it depends on the verisimilitude of the serenity that it uses art to depict {32}.

· 17. Reflections of a Soul [Eric Alliez & Michel Feher 46

[Plotinus (204-270): Roman born in Alexandria]. Plotinus saw body as degeneration of soul. Neoplatonism rejected both the classical exaltation of the body and the Christian-Gnostic horror of the flesh. It changed "the athlete of classical sculpture into the ascetic of the Byzantine icons" {48}.

Soul & body in Platonism. For Plato soul and body have 2 relations. Body imprisons soul and makes it irrational; but soul is also responsible for movement of body, able to provide discipline needed for public virtue. The two types of virtue, the conventional civic and the mystic of the philosopher, are complementary. The former depends on classical virtues, domination of passive body by active soul not in thrall to it, the golden mean, and a grace that combines moral temperance and physical elegance patterned on cosmic equilibrium. But Plato steers this in direction of "radical dualism": (1) a visible cosmos inspires the soul to perfect itself as it seeks direct access to an intelligible world; (2) the soul seeks freedom from the body whose senses keep it ignorant, and whose passions overwhelm it {52}; (3) the search for physical grace is a distraction from true intelligible beauty. He dislikes art that esteems appearances. His emphasis on intelligible leads his successors to "mystic way" {54}.

In middle Platonism (-1C to +2C) the soul's task was not molding a graceful, charismatic body but maintaining a fragile one that threatened the soul. The aim was no longer self-control to enable public activity but tranquillity of soul {55}. Public life was still desirable, but ataraxy had to be maintained throughout.

In +3C Plato's mystic way finally took shape, combining a "original and rigorous cosmogony" with "mystic impulse," tying worlds of essence and appearance together with a "psychological model" of soul and its "speculative capacities." Contemplation becomes the only productive activity. Plotinus' One, unlike Plato's Good, contemplates itself and thus produces all that exists. It radiates light that is darkened as it passes down the hierarchy.

The human soul may tire of this contemplation and turn to its own reflection in the body--a "fatal decline" into narcissism. Gnostics dramatized this fall, for their world is a trap made by an evil artisan, unlike Plato's natural reflection of contemplation by souls. For Plotinus, souls not isolated by their own volition are tied to all others. The isolated one can regain union by directing its "narcissism" toward Soul {64}.

Plotinus' esthetics. Can art based on human body inspire this ardor toward soul? The artist strives to celebrate the traces of intellect in the light cast on things by the World Soul. In prescribing "true" colors and sizes, Plotinus objects mainly to perspective, which shows the dimension of matter. The depth he desires is in "the mind as internal light that reveals itself once the darkness produced by material depth is neutralized" {65}. Flattened figures, free of depth, become emanations of spiritual light. This prompts "internal vision" in the viewer. Byzantine art takes up this esthetics. Portrait painter replaces sculptor; ascetic replaces athlete as subject; internal light of face replaces harmony of bodily form; reflections of the mind replace ideal natural features {75}.

· 18. The Face and the Soul [Patrizia Magli 86

Physiognomy sought norms to find what is permanent, essential, universal in the ever-changing, elusive face. Aristotle: Soul is figure and form; the body is matter. The soul is the cause and beginning of the living body.

Everyone does physiognomy, which "appears to waver" between conjectures (if X, then Y will happen) and arbitrary equivalences (if X, Y is sensual) {89}. It is based on "neutral state of passions," since motion cannot reveal fixed essence. The "science" tries rigorously and abstractly to get beyond "look of things" to their "immanent nature," with a precision that may distort. It is not an empirical summation, but "a face's air." It may be structured by binary division (up/down, etc.). It tends to evaluate, as in judging meaning of face & hair color {95-97}.

Animal likenesses furnished a "rigorous" comparative method. Given an animal with certain characteristics, a man who resembles it has the same ones (della Porta, 16C). E.g., birds have small heads; a small-headed man will be vain, loquacious, etc., like birds. Explained by humours {97-104}.

In Magiae naturalis, della Porta's philosophic synthesis of esoteric arts, elements are always transforming into each other, evolving from the One back to the One. In magic, "similar forms involve similar behaviors," generating sympathies within microcosm. The magician "reads the face of the world" {109}. Some adduced astral signs to draw microcosmic conclusions.

In 19C animal physiognomy was restored for "reasons of state" (i.e., social control), as an exercise in the prevalent taxonomy. The early 18C artist le Brun tried to provide an axiomatic basis derived from eye-chin angle {119}. Man's image, superimposed on animals, reveals his "character," determined by physical form that conforms to psyche. In early 19C such theories (incorporating Gall's phrenology) became politically trendy, led to "discovery" of atavism in society, and to a role for phrenology in nascent psychiatry.

· 19. The Ethics of Gesture [Jean-Claude Schmitt 128

Gesture, atitude and comportment are social acquisitions, seemingly natural because they change slowly. Topic: values that inspired "ideal gestural models" from Stoics to dawn of scholasticism, studying constancy and change as part of more general change {129}. Characteristics: (1) ethical, based on universal values; (2) outward expression of soul; (3) gesture more rarely influences soul toward norms. Romans often discussed gestus, body movements and attitudes. With loss of classical culture, emphasis shifts to modestia, moderation in behavior.

Cicero's scheme of prudence, justice, courage and moderation becomes standard, even in Christianity, where the target is not aristocrats but future bishops (St. Ambrose, ca. 390). From his disciple St. Augustine on, gesture drops out of sight. The body is mentioned with respect to vices, not virtues. Only the early "mirror for princes" books emphasize the Ciceronian virtues of comportment {135}.

In reformed monasteries and urban schools of 11-12C, discussion of gesture revives, influenced by resurgence of city, growing differences between status and behavior, more novices recruited from secular world, idea of body as locus and means of salvation {142}. It ends, recast, with rediscovery of Aristotle's Ethics after 1250.

· 20. The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility [Georges Vigarello 148

From Middle Ages to 16C, "failures of physical uprightness" were attributed to deformity or bad deportment. Good comportment meant esteem, but no one dwelt on details. In courtesy literature, again little detail on comportment; emphasis is on self-control.

In 16C new literature on civility, meant for new class of courtiers, paid great attention to deportment {151}. Appearance reflects moral attitudes. Bad body attitudes gradually cause deformities. Clothing became more rigid, to impose a standard form {155}. Texts on deportment characterize the best as natural, without details. They stress "grace," defined as the opposite of affectation, i.e., they do not admit that aristocrats must learn gracefulness. Teaching uses noble exercises: fencing, riding, dancing. "Deliberate muscular activity and its balancing function" are still unknown, as is "an anatomical analysis of movement and posture" {166}. Fencing movements were circular for efficiency, but this was a "Pythagorean" geometry without regard for bone or muscle structure. The body is merely "the outline of a surface" {159}. Movement is not a way to correct posture.

Books prefer manipulating the body in early childhood in order to straighten it. In 16C childhood becomes a distinct topic; children cease to be small adults. Physicians manipulate even well-formed children to prevent deformity, by hand or with swaddling clothes {170}. Adult corsets appear in mid 16C, with whalebone stays for esthetics or metal stays for therapeutics {175}.

In 17C a new morality based on civility and propriety demands that one "cut a fine figure," with the public as judge, and emphasis on posture grows {177}. Manners become theatrical. Aim of exercise (dance, etc.) was control of movement, not benefit from it. Since the body was no longer a microcosm, it no longer had to follow ideal proportions. Now the motive (often disguised with religious rationales) was to avoid ridicule {189}.

In Jesuit schools, bulwarks against secular education, public speaking becomes important to teach the code of performance. Jesuits in 17C schools encouraged plays (avoided in 16C) to teach control and memory, elegance (with ballet) and decorum.

· 21. Geerewol: The Art of Seduction [Carol Beckwith 200

Photo essay describing dance ritual of Woodabe nomads of Saheel, in which men elaborately made up to bring out their beauty perform elaborate and strenuous dances judged by young women--a beauty contest in reverse, but with much magical preparation in addition to makeup.

· 22. Love's Rewards [René Nelli 218

[Chivalric: feudal, war-oriented, based on "external regulation" (behavior rather than feeling); courtly: based on court culture, values that emphasized feeling.]

From early 12C through 13C, Provencal aristocrats idealized romantic love but married for political reasons. They maintained two "intimate ceremonies": gazing on a partly or fully undressed lady, and the asag, in which the two went to bed but the lover had to prove the depth of his love by avoiding intercourse. Troubadors spiritually idealized the female body. Love resided in "the imagined image of the lady's body and the lover's memory of her beauty" {220}. Only in Provence did assignations with married women become "a rite of pure love," meant to give joy to the lover and reward his fidelity {221}. The lady's kiss was not necessarily erotic, and he was expected to leave when dismissed.

The woman imposed the asag, the "test of love," to reward loyalty and determine whether she was loved "from the heart" or "as a carnal object." Women responded to "a certain physical coolness . . . accompanied by protestations of great feeling" {223}.

This ritual is not found elsewhere. It developed from "an ensemble of conventional delaying tactics" meant as a woman's face-saving prelude to forced surrender, in late 11C, when the social rules were chivalric. Female troubadors make it clear that in their time the trial was courtly, a matter of emotional control. Girls learned the rules when young {228}. The lover had to obey, to eschew mastery, in return for a "communion of pure feeling." By no means all men took this courtly view. Some characters in Provencal writing treat love, in the chivalric fashion, as war {233}.

· 23. Between Clothing and Nudity [Mario Perniola 237

"In the figurative arts, eroticism appears as a relationship between clothing and nudity . . . conditional on the possibility of movement--transit--from one state to the other" {237}. A figure that is "essentially dressed," when clothing distinguishes humans from animals and being denuded is shameful, is not erotic. For Hebrews the glory of the priestly robe reflected the glory that "clothed" God. The Greeks uniquely celebrated nudity "with an athletic perspective." Neither the Hebrew nor Greek notion was erotic, since there was no idea of transition. Plato made knowledge a matter of "unveiling" the intelligible, so that the body becomes an obstacle to clear vision of the soul. Gnostics saw souls, ideas, etc., arrayed in spiritual garments, but left no room for transition between the damned body and the clothed spirit destined for salvation {241}.

Von Balthasar argues for a Hebrew "transit" (i.e., tension) "between clothing and what it covers" {242}. Heidegger argues that the Greek notion of nudity is "unhiddenness," a similar tension. But this is still a gaze that sees in art only the ideal and eternal.

Christian undressing. Christianity introduced a new metaphor of taking off old clothes and putting on new {243}. Georges Bataille identified undressing with erotic desire, overcoming discontinuous existence, perdition, fear, death, etc., all of which the crucifix symbolizes. Sexuality and death are iconoclastic (? unclear); they strip the self past the flesh.

At end of Middle Ages, a new female nude image spread in North--naked rather than ideally nude, its rhythm set by curve of belly. Painters limited "iconoclasm" by establishing tension between body and veil or drapery {247}. The veil "makes vision possible." Cranach's Venus is "closed and veiled" by comparison with the tree she touches.

Christian clothing. Pierre Klossowski argues that clothing stands for the body clothing spirit; in the modern world, because spirit can no longer be incarnated, art and eroticism overcome this break only when "they confer form and they redeem what in itself is only nonbeing, negation and contradiction," providing a semblance of the lost "demonic" {251}. In the Baroque this appears in the Mannerist "organic" or dynamic drapery or attire {253}, and in anatomical "depiction of the body as a living garment" {258}.

Modern "porno" rarely establishes such tensions, but computer art goes beyond Mannerist undressing to create nudes unrelated to an original body; Afro-American trance radicalizes Baroque dressing when a possessed body "no longer signifies itself" but clothes an alien spirit--a "corporeal liturgy" {261}.

[The author never tests the initial hypothesis, which is not at all intuitive. Many points in the argument seem to be avant-garde clichés, not self-evident results of analysis.]

· 24. Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years [Mark Elvin 266

Chinese depicted human body schematically, as "a peg-doll whose role is to be a carrier of corporeal and/or sartorial attributes." The former may be merely superficial, or express the "heart/mind" (xin), "the psychological field of force that is attempting to control the body," revealing itself in physical structure or posture. Clothing etc. expresses social or moral status, or signifies emotion.

Before 20C encounter with West, Chinese had nothing corresponding to fashions [nonsense]. This was due to the gulf between the morally proper and improper. "'Virtue' remained uncompromising, moralistic, and sterile, and 'vice' remained human and vital but irredeemable," with no interaction [wrong; see fiction through Ming]. In 20C, Western values, esp. high moral value placed on romantic love, threatened to bridge this gulf and thus were threatening to most Chinese. Communists, with "savagely puritanical morality" [no more so than Ming-Qing conventional values, or those of KMT], have tried to restore the barriers. Chinese elsewhere have not resolved this dissonance {268}. Essay studies 3 novels at length.

The satirical Jing hua yuan (1828?) is a guide to areas in which social attitudes were problematic. Moral qualities of xin have physical correlates, hard to counterfeit. Dress was expected to label status. The body-person (shen) was precious and had to be preserved by proper food and exercise and by avoiding excessive mental effort. Reversed-sex scenes insist that sex roles are merely conventional {285}. Beauty does not depend on sexual characteristics, but on superficial (e.g., makeup), artificial (bound feet), and dress. Scatological humor is often concerned with digestion [as everywhere else] {287}.

Shanghai huo diyu (1929), a "social novel," reveals the tensions introduced by Western notions of [social and] sexual freedom. It is "a form of soft pornography masked as aversion therapy," with the usual Buddhist moralistic apologetics {289-290}. Physical images express emotion: misery tastes bad, anger steams upward [not new]. Book argues that people are driven by urges, which are destructive if they overpower the xin. Traditional morals are also destructive when they restrain fulfillment. The novel explores this "knife's edge" {294}. The individual can only maneuver ingeniously in uncontrollable circumstances into which desires lead, manipulating or deceiving others. He or she is doomed if inexpert at "handling" tension between convention and bodily needs {303}. Author [or characters?] see sex as delicious and dirty, the female body unattractive if unadorned {311}.

Xisha ernü (1974) reflects Cultural Revolution's idealization of body "as the transfer mechanism between generations and the source from which the brighter future will flow," raising the "symbolic value of women." An "umbilical patriotism" has emerged in notion of "ancestral land" (zuguo), to which individuals owe filial obligation, and with which they re-merge after death {315}. The heroic revolutionary body, male or female, is "driven by a xin that is now a will immune to physical weaknesses." Women preserve purity by struggle, not suicide {317}. The human drama is a war between good and evil, with Nature as only an "expressive background" {320}. In such propaganda novels, physical attributes directly reflect moral state.

· 25. The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation [Jean Starobinski 350

On "the internal perception of our own bodies--cenesthesia" esp. in contemporary sensibility, among philosophers, writers, and psychotherapists {353}.

"Disciples of Aristippus" held that the only sensations we perceive are those due to "internal contact," e.g., pleasure & pain. Greeks distinguished these "bodily passions" from the "internal sense," conscious activities based on sense data. In Galenic medicine, interaction between body and soul depended on humours. Descartes' Traité des passions de l'_me distinguished 3 categories: perception of external objects, of body, and of soul. Some 18C physicians followed Stahl's notion of "relative autonomy and independent sensibility" of viscera, expressed in instinct.

Joh. Chr. Reil (1794) coined the word cenesthesia (Lat. coenaesthesis) for "the means by which the soul is informed of the state of its body," via nerves {355}. Ca. 1900 Carl Wernicke similarly made "psychic life" a combination of allopsyche (external), somatopsyche, and autopsyche. Both were bases of pathogenic classifications. For Reil, in addition to lesion-based disorders, some were idiopathic, sending false messages that led to delusions from hypochondria to bulimia {356}. Evolutionists such as Ribot (1884?) argued that cenesthesia was primary, other mental activities differentating from it in the fetus. Since the ego is thus "superadded," it is "intermittent."

Changes in cenesthesia open the way for depersonalization, etc. In psychiatry it was a "theoretical fiction" based on metaphors, mostly social, a product of "radical biologism {358}. Others such as Janet refuted the cenesthesia hypotheses, never experimentally tested; disorder of motor functions was more regularly visible in patients than sensory disturbance. Belief can break down while the body reacts normally to sensory stimuli. Charles Blondel (1914), psychologist and pupil of Durkheim, argued that in the normal person cenesthesia was controlled by "the impersonal system of socialized discourse," mediated via language. Society, not body, was cause of ego {360}.

Freud, in Interpretation of Dreams, refuted the widespread notion of dreams as caused by "visceral sensory stimuli." These were merely part of the material from which the psyche chooses when shaping dreams {362}. The "spirit" uses dreams "to protect sleep and to fulfill a wish," so it must neutralize or transform somatic sensations. Freud reinterpreted the unconscious, moving it from "the life of the body" to a psychic "custodian of a language"--no longer purely medical, approachable through hermeneutics. Social norms entered only via "censorship and interdictions" {364}. Suffering in dreams expressed censored wishes, merely translating them into the language of the body. Although instincts may arise from and act on the body, the mechanism is also psychic {366}. Instinct was no longer "a simple short shuttling between 'action' and 'reaction,'" but a complex circuit {368}.

How do we draw a line between cenesthesia and body awareness, "the hypochondriacal or perverse consequence of a narcissistic or autoerotic investment"? In a world fixated on technology, narcissism (the desire to . . . feel onself) may be a necessary compensation.

Appendix: Some Simple Reflections on the Body [Paul Valéry 394

· 26. The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World [Hillel Schwartz 406

The idea that "imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out" (Cyril Connolly) traces back to George Orwell, Coming up for Air (1938). He depicts a 40-year-old bourgeois, looking for his inner self and dreading an imminent cataclysm, with "three bodies": "the substantial body of middle age: fat and present . . . the sweet body of youth: thin and past . . . the phantom body of death: streamlined and futuristic." They are anxiety, nostalgia, nightmare; consciousness, memory, fantasy; a threatened world around him, a vanished past world, a new post-apocalyptic world that holds no interest {411}.

Kleptomania. The name originated 1816 for a monomania, "a partial lesion of the intelligence, affections or will." It was already being used as a defense for repeated petty theft, a "kind of moral insanity" in which perpetrators claimed unawareness of the crime, no will--"a dramatic if temporary change of character." Some observers saw this mainly women's problem "as an unconscious protest against the tyrannies of a male, industrial thrift." By early 20C it was so prevalent that fakery became an issue. Real kleptomaniacs were shocked and penitent, unlike the criminal, "brazen, vehement, hard to crack" {419}. The theft was the doing of the respectable woman's second self, "dexterous, emotionally labile, needy and not to be denied," willing to risk ruin.

Multiple personalities. This disorder emerged 1860-1912. The second self was always "demanding, outgoing, irresponsible, juvenile, sensual," etc. {420}--the same self that kleptomaniac confessions revealed. The second self was the "sweet body of youth." In late 19C m.p. was associated with "fasting girls," who fasted at great length not for thinness but for clairvoyance. The European vogue of "multiple personality" bolstered the notion of one body inside another.

Kleptomania fit well with the McNaughton rule (1843), in which oblivion of right and wrong justified leniency. From ca. 1880 psychiatrists argued for a sexual etiology; the second self in Freud was not a co-consciousness but a subconscious. No longer a free spirit, now it was fixated, expressing its desire by "tortuous symbolic acts." The second self of the anorexic was hungry but stubborn, "a political prisoner on a hunger strike, absent the manifesto" {435}. Psychiatrists often associated all of these second selves.

Schizophrenia (etym: split + mind). After Bleuler identified this disorder (1911), claims of multiple personality receded. The notions were not similar; schizophrenia implied not a split but disintegration, "fragments of personality flying out like shrapnel in the first heat of explosion, then lodging helter-skelter in the shell-shocked body," disorder of association, coded language, hallucination & delusion {438}. The schizophrenic self was not only childish but infantile, not only past but primitive, with anorexia and bulimia frequent traits. The patient became "an inaccessible prisoner in a collapsing cell" {443} of Weltuntergangserlebnis (experience of world ending). His "ersatz, mechanical" future was adapted to new techologies, often directed by rays, radio waves, etc.

In early 20C, the newly popular detective offered a model for psychiatric and other research {448}. With invention of calorie-counting (1914), "the middle-aging body," previously dignified, became fat, heavy, threatening to long life {449}. At the same time all these shifts in psychiatric concepts accompanied a change of focus from women to men. The thin man inside the fat man meant hope for physical and spiritual regeneration, unlike the doom of the middle-aged woman, who was merely shapeless. Slimming for men was liberation, for women a figure "taking shape." Diets promise to rejuvenate the second self, and destroy the threat of the third {451}. As one diet fails, there is always another to try. Slimming reduces the Three-Body problem to "an obsessive, delusive search . . . It is not about becoming ourselves but becoming Other" {452; not inconsistency}.

· 27. The Ghost in the Machine: Religious Healing and Representations of the Body in Japan [Mary Picone 466

Japanese ideas about the body are mainly based on Mahayana Buddhism and Chinese medicine [Ignores indigenous ideas as "Shinto"]. Contrasts Western holism with that of Japan, in which all aspects of body are inter-related and part of universe. [Def. of Western holism, "a search for the causes of bodily states in external factors," has nothing in common with the standard: "the determining factors in biology are its irreducible wholes"]. Chinese medicine cured by relating spatial and temporal orientation to physical states, but today only popular religious healers do so [nonsense; 469-471].

Kanpō healers elicit states of mind, but relate them "to familial and social environment" rather than to psychological problems (somatization, 472). They use concept of ki, but with no consensus about its nature & functions. Popular healers generally refuse to treat those they consider mental (kichigai). One "modern healer" claims to cure by transferring own "life ki to patients." Other healers combine questions and curative suggestions to discover reason underlying consultation. A few of the cured become disciples, hoping for "superhuman powers," but most patients seek only practical help {477}.

Buddhism's four sacred truths correspond to "diagnosis, aetiology, healing and therapeutics." By teaching that illness is illusory they may be able to heal, even though few Japanese are fervent Buddhists. Karma (even that of a spouse) often becomes a cause of suffering to be added to other explanations. It implies that "the mind has potentially absolute power over the body" {why so? 483}.

Many new sects and therapists impose a traditional ethos, but this is being "widened," e.g. to make women guilty of abortions. At the same time laymen and practitioners are fitting new diseases (e.g., AIDS) into the "old" framework {482}.

Notion of "ghost in the machine" does not work in Japan without a soul-body dichotomy [but author concocts forced justification based on sci-fi "leitmotiv" of computer replacing brain; 482]. [This essay is poorly informed about trad Chinese & Japanese medicine, and is additionally confused because it ignores popular religion as anything more than individual healers, and pays no attention to laymen; fails to cite Ohnuki-Tierney].

· 28. The End of the Body [Jonathan Parry 490

[Based on field work in Benares]

"How can an almost narcissistic cultivation of the body [i.e., yogic bodybuilding] apparently cohabit so cosily with a set of ascetic practices which unflinchingly contemplates its inevitable end, and with a set of mortuary practices devoted to its radical--even violent--destruction?

Dumont emphasizes that "the regime of castes" is based on bodily purity constantly threatened by biological processes and contact with "those of inferior substance." The high castes rely on the low to remove their accumulating pollution. "Hindu society is organized on a war footing against the body and its natural processes." But Marriott & other Chicago Indianists argue that the person is "volatile" and "constantly changing." How can anyone tell how to interact with whom "in the matrix of food transactions" etc.? Actually "the protean representation of the person sustains and reinforces the static ideology of caste" {494}.

Cosmogony. The world progressively differentiated itself out of Brahma, a "unitary primeval protoplasm." This is a movement away from "the original ineffable wholeness" toward cosmic dissolution. Medicine and the householder's disciplines try to arrest this flow. Brahmins expect reincarnation in a station determined by karma; the ascetic reverses this flow to "realize his identity with Brahma" {497}.

Pollution.When the fetus is physically complete (5th month) the soul (as vital breath, prana) enters it and, "suspended in filth and pollution . . . serves its time contemplating the sins of its previous life" until it is born and forgets them. The body is made of "a polluting substance" {499}. All are shudras at birth; Brahmans are made by life-cycle rituals {498}. Despite lack of taboos about body functions, Brahmans are preoccupied with food rotting in the stomach, and want to evacuate residues quickly. The body is also the "cause and agent" of lust, greed, & other damning emotions. Food disciplines are elaborate because both bodily substance and moral disposition "are created out of food." Pollution is "life-threatening" {501}.

Because the body is a microcosm, refining and perfecting it can bring the yogin salvation (of soul and body). The heat generated by austerity burns up bodily sins. An intact body is a sign of good moral state, prerequisite for sacrifices to gods and ancestors. The blind or deformed cannot perform them.

Disciplines. One must be pure to work at bodybuilding; it is a householder's ascesis. Death itself, when voluntary and controlled, and esp. cremation, are symbolically an offering of the self to the gods. A good death must follow a complete life. Imperfect bodies may not be cremated; they are immersed in the Ganges and "perfect" effigies cremated in their stead. Nothing is totally lost at death; elements return to the common pool, soul is immortal, and familial body substance survives in kinsmen. The person is not new when born {505}. The son cracks the skull open on the burning pyre to release prana to be reincarnated instead of remaining as ghost (preta) {509}. Symbolism of eating and digesting the deceased eliminates his sins and refines his pure essence. The ascetic takes a "shortcut" by burning up desire and mastering the body in order to "end" it {511}.

The underlying world view is largely monistic; "bio-moral substance" is formed by one's food, body reflects soul, etc. But this is not the whole picture. Informants contrast a unique soul and a body that shares "particles" with others; a spirit may inhabit the body of another. The mind/body dualism of the West is equally partial; God had to be made flesh to redeem mankind, etc. Main point is that Hindus see themselves battling endless cosmic chaos and degeneration of their own persons. Constant vigilance is required, and above all "strict obedience to the rigid order of caste" {513}. The "protean construct of the person" is in one aspect an ideology.

· 29. Celestial Bodies: A Few Stops on the Way to Heaven [Nadia Tazi 518

[On the body in early theology]

"Heaven is the reward of a life of exile," in which good, lacking in the world, "comes only from above." Heaven joins absolute transcendence to immanent spiritual progress. Belief always involves an exchange, giving something up for a future advantage {520}. Heaven offers the latter; that is why Augustine, who refused to vulgarize, spoke instead of God as the abode of our souls, exhorted building the City of God by living supernaturally. Pagan dualism offered heaven for the soul, but Christianity resurrected "man in his entirety" (a notion of Jewish origin, 522, 524). But if body and soul are not absolutely divided, how could theologians absolutely distinguish earthly and heavenly? What can the body do in heaven? The body remained totally subordinate to spirit, in agreement with soul, in affinity with milieu. As one rises spiritually, the body gets closer to its soul. Resurrection is guaranteed by that of Christ; it is anchored in a mystery. "Virginity and corporeal asceticism (based on Hellenistic ideas) anticipate the future life by sketching it out on earth." Immortality is not, as for the Greeks, an attribute of the soul, but rather a gift from God {526}.

How can the redeemed body be compatible with the Hellenistic one "devoid of any reality"? This was the mystery; it forced early Christians to claim methods decisively different from those of pagans--magic rites, aristocratic asceticism, etc. Original sin means man cannot avoid death, but there is a worse death when man turns away from God. Origen emphasizes a time when the body was a "pure medium," not carnal {530}. The source of sin is not body but soul, the Stoics' source of free will. At Resurrection the pure corporeal form (ethereal body) abandons matter and clings to the soul {532}. Augustine, further from Greek philosophy, finds that the soul, although more real than other substances, is not divine without God's grace, which makes it the habitation of Spirit {535}. For Tertullian the soul "is an immortal body within an immortal body, an intimate double." What is barred from heaven is not the body but its damning works.

Doctrine of Resurrection upsets Hellenistic cosmology; God's descent disturbs order of earth and heaven (Celsus); terrestrial bodies do not belong in heaven. [In this way it claims to be above the debates of mystery cults.] But it does so in order to replace paganism with mystery, to assuage the fear of "losing an identity that one feels is connected to the body" {540}. Church must justify an asceticism that resurrection in the perfected body makes otiose, in a heaven where bodies do not seem needed. The body could be justified by the presence in heaven of other celestial bodies, although these had to be explained by design of creation rather than as pagans did {542}. The celestial body was expressed in light as pure power and act, identical to the Spirit. Martyrdom formed "beautiful" corpses, earnests of resurrection {545}. The saint ranks near the top of the intermediaries that lead to God. It is the ascesis of the body that makes future life possible for the soul when the body becomes the soul's duplicate. "The paradox of resurrection stems from the fact that it renders immortality at once more sensible or perceptible and more mysterious" {548}.

· 30. Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages [Jacques Le Goff 12

ISSUE: In what political circumstances and in connection with what interests do body metaphors appear that diverge from classical models? [A consciously "exploratory," not tightly worked-out, essay by leading medievalist.]

"Organicist conceptions of society based on bodily metaphors," referring to the functioning of the body as a whole and of its parts, goes back to Antiquity, with its head/intestines/limbs system. A fable of Aesop reminds the people that as the "limbs" they must cooperate with the Senate, their head. For Romans the head, containing the soul, directs the body. The innards (esp. liver) were the seat of the passions or coordinated metabolism, as they process the food that nourishes the whole body.

Religions. Medieval Christians modified classical beliefs. Their metaphors are based mainly on head/body and head/heart systems. The Church is the body, with believers as "multiple limbs" of which Christ is the head; the "mystic body of Christ" was also central. In Carolingian era the empire, counterpart of the Church, was the body, but now Christ as head had two intermediaries, pope and king. The heart becomes not only seat of vital forces but of "affective life and interiority . . . of encounters with God." The liver lost its importance as the innards became the "seat of lewdness" {16}. St. Bernard's 12C Sacred Heart of Jesus developed into a major theme by 17C {20}. Theme of heart devoured for revenge in 13-15C French secular literature also fed this usage {16,20}.

Political Body metaphors are frequent in texts that debate the status of clergy and nobility. One that favors the clergy in 11C calls it the eyes, and secular power the limbs. John of Salisbury (12C) makes the prince the head, and his officials the eyes etc., with peasants as the feet, indispensable but requiring support from above [!]. Wealth-producing activities have an ambiguous place in the intestines {17}.

Ca. 1300 the "violent conflict" between Philip the Fair of France and Boniface VIII, both sides used head/heart metaphors. In a secular text, Christ and the Pope are the head, from which emanate the ecclesiastical hierarchy as nerves. From the prince as heart emanate ordinances, the veins, which nourish all and are thus more important. What matters is not unity of the body but separation of spiritual and temporal. Henry de Mondeville, Philip's surgeon, made the heart central in his surgical treatise, reflecting political centralization (Pouchelle). By ca. 1419, a jurist makes the future king the head, whom all must obey, and the pope merely a "secondary head" {23}.

· 31. The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Public Martyrdom to Private Nightmare and Political Struggle [David Kunzle 28

ISSUE: What social and political issues are depicted or implied by 17C Dutch pictures and 19C British and French cartoons?

For most healthy people, "the tooth is the only part of the sentient body we fear and consider it normal to lose. . . . the dentist retains the aura of torturer."

Tooth-pulling is a moral as well as a physical act. In "all peoples and all times" teeth have stood for power, and their loss for its loss. In 14C Petrarch writes of welcoming toothache and loss as reminders of death and thus a means to eternal life; toothlessness discourages sin, etc. Even in 19C cartoons the extractor expiates sin. 17C tracts associate toothache with sin, esp. original sin. In 17C art only teeth of poor are being pulled; in 19C, those of lower middle class--the silencing of the voiceless {31}. This is true although rich suffered as much as poor; Queen Elizabeth I has a perennial toothache. In the class struggle the "well-armed dentist" represents "power and wealth," vs. patient who has neither.

Before 19C teeth of all exc. wealthy were pulled outdoors in public, although extraction began to move indoors among 17C Dutch. Itinerant extractors displayed banners and other emblems of power. People associated purging tooth-worms with purging sin. Extractors were cheap, but theft by accomplices is a frequent theme {35}, implying extractor is a charlatan. The pictures were meant for middle-class people, who would laugh at deceiver and deceived {37}.

17C. Warfare of 17C encouraged realism in art. Extraction as a theme illustrates easy access of populace to "more or less specialized medical treatment," ranging downward from physician willing to pull teeth to itinerant dentatores. The Dutch infatuation with sweets no doubt led to much suffering and popular association between "sweet (tooth) and sin" {39}. Importance of 17C Dutch doctors in history of dentistry, and ubiquity of diverse surgery in art, suggest Dutch had easier access to "specialist" extractors than other Europeans (who still depended on barbers and blacksmiths). Guilds tried to repress "free-lance competitors," but patrons of art acknowledged the power of the extractor in village settings. Artists carefully distinguished honest dentists (diplomas usually visible) from quacks (while still mostly depicting latter, 41). In Calvinist Holland the pain of the poor patient may refer to the lot that the poor must bear {48}. The composition of close-up pictures often resembles that of Pietà.

18C was the "first age of great individual practitioners and manuals which laid foundations of modern dentistry." Iconography is still theatrical, but "fairground historionics" replaces compassion. In revolutionary late 18C, popular artists used dentists as scapegoats for resentment of authority figures, as when Rowlandson shows dentist buying teeth of poor to transplant into mouths of rich {56}

In 19C optimism flowed from successes of science, but dentistry, trailing behind, struggled for respectability {58}. In 1819 dentists were mere artisans. Anesthetics and fillings appeared for the rich ca. 1850, as did dental schools and licensing. Art ignored these changes. Now, unlike 17C, dentist became a sadist, working on his private turf. Charlatans grasped at the aura of science. Some dentists in cartoons symbolically punished political and social evil {60}, or represented tyrants extracting opponents. In the more peaceful 1860's, the dentist is a benign technician, restoring "(social) health" {63}.

In a comic strip of Wilhelm Busch (1862), the power relations of peasant patient and middle-class doctor were "those of the declining and rising classes" in industrialization, as bourgeois are "extracting" patients from the land for their own good {76}. In another, toothache drives "the would-be poet out of a world where he does not belong." The poet pays "with pain, tooth and money, and remains subject to bourgeois science and power" {79}. [Adds misc. vague jottings on sexual symbolism of teeth.] "The symbolic or substitute revenge of art served to release otherwise dangerous frustration, fear and anger, which . . . were social and political as well as personal" {83}.

· 32. "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur" ("which ought to be called Venus's love, or rather its sweetness") [Thomas W. Laqueur 90

History of clitoris, mainly from medical literature. Points: (1) Freud "invented" vaginal orgasm in 1905; no one earlier considered any type but clitoral. There is no natural or inherent understanding of clitoris. (2) It is a matter "as much about sociability as sex" {92}.

Freud asserted that as girls reach puberty, sexuality is repressed and excitability is transferred from clitoris to vagina, the "supposed opposite" of the penis. This repression excites male libido, encouraging monogamy and stability of family. There is no analytical or physical evidence for this putative transfer {94}. Textbooks of the time specify that the clitoris is richly enervated and the vaginal wall is not, and describe the vagina as merely an "elastic passage from the uterus to the external parts." A source of 1612 is already clear that the problem with clitoris is domesticating it for reproductive intercourse {101}. In explaining how "polymorphously perverse" babies are finally gendered, Freud used biological language to represent a process he would not admit was merely social, even though he acknowledged a role for society in Civilization and its Discontents. Elsewhere he rhetorically appropriates "the authority of nature . . . to legitimize the creations of culture" {103}.

Columbus and other 17C authors do not choose between clitoris andvagina. Both are counterpoints of male genitals, and form a unified system for propagating desire. Because there is only one human body, with that of male normative and female simply an inverted, "colder" version, each male part had a counterpart. In the many discussions of clitoris from Antiquity on, each author vaguely uses different terms, taken from male or metaphoric (e.g., vagina, lit. "sheath"){109}. No one before Columbus describes its "erotogenic power." The problem in 17C remained "understanding heterosexual desire in the world of one sex" {113}.

From 6C on Europeans are aware of clitoridectomy elsewhere, and justify it as a way of cooling feminine lust which is likely to become homosexual. This operation was very rare in Europe. By 19C the problem had become masturbation, which also led "not just to self-destruction but to homosexuality as well." In the hands of "forensic anthropologists" (e.g., Lombroso), masturbation becomes a sign of "excessive heterosexuality," the mark of the prostitute {119}.

For Freudians, what "primitives" accomplished by clitoridectomy, civilized societies performed with "psychical intimidation" in order to attain the Viennese bourgeois ideal. In strict Freudian terms, this amounts to a lifelong "normal hysteria" {122}.

· 33. Subtle Bodies [Giulia Sissa 132

Two loosely connected studies using Greek literature, with some attention to later understandings. ISSUES: (1) What role do father and mother play in conception, and how is the physical character of semen defined to support that division of responsibility; (2) Was the hymen a physical seal, or a metaphorical one?

Semen. In most societies, mother & child are linked by blood and body, but the father is attached to offspring "on the basis of an assumption," e.g. based on social fact of marriage. Semen is not necessarily an essential link, e.g. use of a sperm donor does not threaten the husband's claim to fatherhood, although a surrogate mother threatens the mother's status. [But note DNA and other paternity tests.]

Hippocratics saw conception as mingling of "male and female spermatic humors" {140}, but Aristotle rejected this symmetry. For him the mother supplies all the matter, the father only "soul, form and movement" [but Greek soul is not quite immaterial]. The material sperm does not become a constituent of the fetus. Not all creatures emit sperm. It is a sign of hot blood, a very rarefied compound of water and hot pneuma {138}. Its hot quintessence acts as a moving force on woman's blood.

Galen sees the watery part as protection for the pneuma, and thus as a "material agent." Everyone down to Lamarck emphasizes the semen's light, frothy character; like air, it cannot freeze.

Hymen. The form of Greek wedding ritual was noise about the defloration, meant to cover its noise. The surest evidence of defloration is pregnancy, but popular thought (not doctors) often envisioned a (presumably metaphorical) hymen or seal that intercourse opens. Medical authors from Soranus (early +2C) to end of 18C debated existence & location of a blockage. Paré denies that a tissue regularly seals the vagina in young girls {151}. Buffon agrees that the tissues, protuberances, narrowing, etc., vary greatly {153}. The Encyclopédie denies existence of the seal, and sees virginity not as physical but as a metaphorical "purity of heart" {152}.

· 34. Semen and Blood: Some Ancient Theories Concerning Their Genesis and Relationship [Françoise Héritier-Augé 158

ISSUE: Why do a many peoples reach the same conclusion about the origin of blood and semen?

Blood is essential to life; both embody heat. The substance responsible for birth, conveyed from male to female body, is seed (semen). Where do blood & semen come from? How are they related? What determines descent? etc. Each people produces a rational and empirical theory of the person to answer such questions. Only a few explanatory models can account for the objective data. That is why peoples in diverse places & epochs form similar "sophisticated" theories that "sometimes tally" with modern knowledge {160-161}.

The Samo of Burkina Faso believe that both sexes produce "sex-water" from "gluey water" in the marrow of bones, joints, & spinal column, & store it there [account not v. clear]. When a mass of blood in womb is in a certain orientation, it sucks in the male "sex-water" and a powerful discharge of male "energy and heat." Once in the women's body this semen turns into blood, and joins her blood in forming child's body. Without the special orientation of the clot, the semen merely replaces the woman's blood lost in menstruation. After childbirth, the woman's "sex-water" and heat (inferior to male) become milk. Intercourse afterward is taboo to prevent heat of semen from "burning up the milk."

In this patrilineal, patrilocal society, the woman does not transmit anything. Her blood is inherited from her male ancestors. She is merely the passive agent of heredity. Marriage rules also outlaw unions between people with a common female ancestor less than 4 generations earlier {163}. The dominant strain in the male line is also compound, derived from mother's blood, affected by the clan's communal eating. Samo say that marriage & descent rules depend on speech, not just blood--on the common will of the group.

This schema "encompasses in a single proposition a definition of the individual and a conception of man in society that embraces both [sic] the social links among human beings and the natural world." It is not explicit, but justifies daily rites and practices {164}. Such notions sometimes converge with scientific knowledge because they are rooted in sound observation (hematopoietic function of marrow, recessivity; 166). Thus different peoples concur; even borrowing may succeed best when "cast in a mold to some degree foreordained by certain physiological features built into the structure of the species {167}.

Other examples of the food/marrow/seed+blood linkage:

(a) In Aristotle's Generation of Animals blood, and from it milk & sperm, are residues of digestion, with woman's heat inferior;

(b) In the Hindu world [actually 1 early Upanishad], food directly makes semen, stored in bones. But this is part of a cosmic, not physiological cycle, in which human bodies must in turn be cremated to fertilize earth {169};

(c) Sumerians held similar idea of semen to explain need to preserve ancestors' bones (themselves made from blood);

(d) a Ptolemaic [i.e. Hellenistic] Egyptian text writes of semen coagulating in bones; a much older religious text links phallus and spine as marrow collector. Plutarch talks of blood and marrow from paternal semen, fat & flesh from maternal in Egypt. Debate on Egyptian vs. Sumerian origin was resolved by First-dynasty "linguistic and iconographic evidence," deriving the bone/marrow/semen linkage from veterinary dissection {172};

(e) in China "the spinal marrow and the kidney" were connected, with "the marrow duct opening into the genitourinary region" [from lousy source, and wrong; semen is formed directly in Gate of Life, related to kidneys but not bones, from essences of all organ systems];

(f) the idea of bones producing and storing "the life-power of the semen" shows up in many other societies.

The hollows of long bones and the similarity of color between marrow and semen lead to these widespread "rational interpretations."

(1) A series of correspondences of body with elements and other aspects of cosmos; (2) stages in development of embryo; (3) results of balance and imbalance on formation (e.g., hermaphrodite is conceived when male & female semen are equal in amount); (4) development of consciousness; the fetus "has everything he needs," incl., in 9th month, knowledge of good & evil & of previous births. Despite his resolve to perfect himself, at the moment of birth all of this consciousness is lost; (5) body as locus of fires (responsible for somatic functions & consciousness) that make it correspond to sacrificial altars; (6) dimensions & numeric correspondences of head & organs; (7) assertion that "this is a treatise on deliverance."

Text written roughly -6C. "Upanishad" implies an originally oral teaching that provides "psychological and symbolic interpretations of the sacrificial cult" that equates the self (atman) and Brahman {183}. The point is not so much the physical body but the formation of this self. The language of the text on formation of the fetus corresponds generally to that of classical Ayurveda. Its more or less naturalistic explanation of deformities conflicts with the medical explanation that they are due to bad karman, and the conflict is not resolved{187}. Sec. 4 relates "embryology & soteriology," in which the fetus grasps the law of karman but loses this grasp at birth. "To be born is to be freed from the womb, but deliverance is to be freed from all wombs." Sec. 5 treats the body "as the setting of a transposed sacrifice." Sec. 6 represents the body "as nothing but a composed entity ready to decompose." One who sees it that way "aspires to free himself from it and qualifies for deliverance" {188}.

If anthropology seeks a mirror for us and all humanity, "in Melanesia the mirror has been smashed into a mosaic" {200}. Melanesian body images and practices are dimensions of symbolic systems, understandable through characteristic "processes of body-constitution," defined by social and spiritual relationships. People recognize that they shape "personal and even physical identity" {203}. Bodily substances are active metaphors that "engender and reflect wide ranges of social action" {222}.

Conception. Beliefs reflect the intergenerational transfer of rights and group identity through the male or female line. But role of father's semen and mother's body is not the simple result of patrilinear or matrilinear structure. Among the patrilineal Enga, semen is not important, but father's ancestral spirits are. The matrilineal N. Mandak claim the fetus is entirely formed by male substance, but the mother nurtures and grows the child {205}. Thus the issue is not procreative substances, but "social relations that shape bodily development."

Gender. Complementarity of sexual substances in conception reflects domestic interdependence of men & women but sexual polarity in public relationships. Most theories of conception reflect common New Guinea belief that men are more socially steadfast, responsible for social ties. Gender boundary is not fixed. In some places men bleed selves to expel "female" blood. In one case a pregnant woman eats male food, and her husband female food, to overcome her pollution. [Implies boundary is fixed!]

Intercourse. Beliefs are linked to those about growth, nurturance, and productive labor {211}. Many Melanesian peoples consider intercourse debilitating and dangerous for men. Need to conceive leads in some places to wife's serial coupling with many of husband's kinsmen. Such couplings used in some societies' fertility rites {208-210}.

Growth. Nurturing relations, esp. of mother, shape understanding of body. Mother's brother equally important, even in some patrilineal peoples, where father's clan must pay mother's brother to "recruit" child {213}. In a matrilineal people the mother's kin must pay for the father's "bone."

Initiation. Usually girls mature "naturally"; transition of boys needs aid of ritual {214}. This is because mother continually socializes girls, but boys must be removed from her sphere. They are often ritually "reconceived," with many taboos against contact with anything feminine. In some societies, humiliating, stressful initiations purge feminine associations and strongly infuse masculine ones, changing "bodily self-perception." Others focus on learning obligations and rituals.

Some peoples, esp. in S. New Guinea, directly transmit semen "as life force from men to initiate novices" {217}. This is not directly related to N. New Guinea avoidance of heterosexual contact. Marind use anal intercourse by uncles to "grow" boys, and also use mingled male and female fluids for "life-enhancing purposes." Serial intercourse, traumatic for young women, make many of them sterile, threatening population {221}.

Food. Food is a gift of self, whether from ancestors who worked family land or friend who shares meal. Cultures prescribe who may share, what kinds, when each is eaten. Food is often male or female, with special characteristics related to rituals. Pollution beliefs can make food dangerous. Status competition through food exchange has, for some, replaced exchange of casualties in warfare. Adult men take on elaborate discipline when growing male crops for exchanges.

Marriage. In several societies marriage is a direct exchange of 2 women between kin groups. Elsewhere families exchange a woman's "productive and reproductive powers" for pigs or other goods, i.e., "wealth and productive embodiments" {227}.

Death. Warfare was sometimes "death-for-death reciprocity." Sometimes material payments ended feuds, and might lead to marriage exchanges {228}. These exchanges were part of "larger social and cosmological relations," as spiritual loss during war involved ancestral spirits {230}. Killers gained spiritual power of slain, esp. among headhunters and cannibals. Novices could be imbued with spiritual identity of decapitated head. Offspring of those decapitated were adopted into territory of Marind slayers, offsetting their low fertility (see above; 233).

Many societies emphasized "keeping ghostly wrath at bay," as well as positive spiritual force of deceased. In some, women ate corpse to "reincorporate" it (endocannibalism; 234). Mourning sometimes involved injury to self, e.g. finger-lopping among young girls {235}. Status emblems were displayed with corpses. Mourners used divination to detect witchcraft--or to confirm deceased was a witch. Diverse methods to dispose of corpse aimed to disperse spirit. Feasts after death of Big Man let new and old leaders "vie in amassing and distributing wealth" to remake deceased's nexus of wealth-exchange ties {239}.

Prime of life. Most spectacular displays of male beauty "reaffirm the social and cosmic rejuvenation of the local group" {240}. Individuals symbolically and artistically transform body for ceremonies, to represent "form and force" of spirits. They reveal themselves as ordinary men only to initiates. Elder adepts show initiates the "master works of an artistic tradition" unknown to others {243}.

On islands to east of New Guinea, lives of the ambitious revolve around purchase and control of "bodily masks at mortuary feasts" for "political and spiritual well-being" {245}. Hierarchic cults using "bodily markers" require wealth to rise high, but status gives access to supernatural powers that can control inferiors' political aspirations. In public, spectacular costumes promulgate health and rejuvenation for all, convey growth, reproduction, etc. {251}.

Costuming is also personal beautification. It can enhance "ability to attract wealth" and status. Body and decoration express health, success, and status, show support by ancestral spirits, but also express "cultural well-being" {254}.

Conclusion. Melanesians believe that "autonomous self" and worlds of society and spirits are integrated in ways Westerners "largely deny" [?]. This reflects lack of "anxieties of ontological doubt" and science-humanities split [shallow!]. We can explain particularity of Melanesian beliefs and practices by facts (e.g. cannibalism as due to shortage of protein) but "they have a cultural life of their own" {256}.

Issue: Is male domination universal? If so, why? Study of many societies suggests that it is. Although affected by prejudices, this cannot be dismissed as a merely sexist view.

Pure matriarchy is unknown; it should not be confused with matrilineality, "where the principal rights belong to men born into filiation groups defined by women" {284}. The closest approach to matriarchy was in the Iriquois. Although their men considered themselves superior and monopolized the Great Council, their "matrons" (elderly?) were represented. Controlling distribution of food to warriors, they could veto wars.

All of the 30 surviving hunter-gatherer peoples show various extents of male domination {285}. Some have myths of a "primitive matriarchy." But these merely justify current order, in this instance basing it on violence against women. "Symbolic narratives" of other cultures are built on systems of binary opposition, e.g., Aristotle's "ideological discourse" of semen & blood.

Systems vary greatly. Among Inuit, cold, raw, nature, belong to men and hot, cooked, culture, to women, but women are still imperfect men {289}. What matters is existence of oppositions, not their content. This is true of recent scientific discussions that assume "where creative women bring disorder, man brings order, the reasonable measure of things" {291}.

What Canadian Piegans call "manly-hearted women" tend to be old, wealthy, married or widowed. They behave like men, and are free of social constraints. In European "high Middle Ages," widows who kept their dowries were also powerful and feared. Among Nuer etc. a sterile woman who returns to her family has prerogatives of a man {294}. Thus the real difference between male and female is not sex, but the "capacity for fertility," and male domination amounts to its control "when she is fertile." The "maternal instinct" is the product of education {295}. The rule of exogamy governs "exchange of women and their fertility."

Men, free of child-rearing, are more mobile, and this partly defines the division of sexual labor {296}. Men, as they restrict women to domestic tasks, create "specialized technical skills" (not necessarily more skilled than woman's work) from which apprenticeship excludes women. Ideologies thus give unequal value to equal skill and work. In a society where women produce 70% of food, hunters have higher status.

How is this inequality maintained? "The raw material of the symbolic is the body." The key difference is that men define their own spheres of action, even bleed voluntarily--will to risk life and take that of others--while women do not control either, 298].

Romans expected that people in different walks of life would mourn in distinct, appropriate ways. The same was true of all social behavior. Issue: the effect of these conceptions of status-based behavior on sexuality, and how they changed in Antiquity--"customary use that male citizens made of the bodies of others."

In -2C Rome, philosophy was an individual quest for the good life; by ~-1C, its purpose, often when studied in exile, was how to become an "honest man" and have a perfect household. There was no "body in general." In order to understand various conceptions, one must consider juridical, social, and family status, freedom, citizenship, membership in orders, degrees of honor {302}.

Roman wives, whose husbands freely slept with concubines and servants, female and male, were expected to be abstinent and, unlike servile women, to keep sexual modesty. This was probably a way of "stabilizing reproduction" and limiting pregnancies, thus also protecting woman's health and even life {303, 309}.

Augustus made his famous speech exhorting citizens to father legitimate sons at a time when they could not marry freed women. Men hesitated to marry financially independent citizens protected from control by their dowries. Augustus feared that a stable population would come to depend on freed slaves and adoptions (mostly from slave mothers). He liberalized marriage rules, but ruled that only married men with children could inherit--a potent motivation (9 BC - AD 18). Once they had done so, "they could turn elsewhere for pleasure." The reproduction of non-citizens, foreigners, or slaves was not regulated, except individuals could choose abortion {309}.

Homosexuality, unlike in Greece, was not meant to limit number of illegitimate births, which Romans tolerated. The law limited by status who could have sex with whom. In public, female dress and the male citizen's ring showed at a glance whom one could not freely proposition {211}. Even the rape of male or female citizens did not compromise their status, but penalties were severe {308-309}.

Control of others. A free man could free a slave girl he owned, and bring her up to be his concubine; she would ultimately become a citizen, but her offspring would not. Such women therefore had few children, depending on abortion or exposing babies. Since men could not force sex on citizens, male or female, they could debauch only their dependents. Slave boys were sexually used only from onset of puberty to adulthood, and afterward were often prostituted. Masters castrated some, or used other methods to delay sexual maturation {313}. They could freely abuse wives of their slaves.

"Infamy," the status of those connected with prostitution, theater or the games, implied defilement, lack of access to rights of citizen. Augustus applied infamy to citizens who indulged in prohibited marriage, adultery, "fleeting" affairs, etc., that "defiled" the city. Loss of citizenship was a lesser penalty. Male citizens who took the "passive position" in homosexual acts could also lose public rights. Existence of actual laws governing such matters is debated, but there is some evidence, esp. in Jewish discussions of their law that made death the penalty for homosexual relations {319}.

"One simply did not feel the same emotions and desires for individuals of different status. As soon as Roman society, which included Jews and Christians, came to realize that it was possible to have just the same feelings for wives [as in] intellectual friendships between men," and the same for dependents as for "legitimate wives, the whole edifice crumbled" {322}.

Issue: Sexuality is not just "an innate human quality" nor even a construct "woven into the sinews of power" (Nietsche, Foucault). The sexual and social bodies form each other, with "deep and conflicting cultural ambitions and anxieties."

In 19C the specters of prostitution and masturbation haunted society, newly called the "social evil" and the "solitary vice." The concern was less about "excess or wicked" desire than about "the nature of human solidarity." The political and sexual radical Richard Carlile's Every Woman's Book (1828) is a plea for free love, society regulating only its fruits. But he railed against masturbation, which interferes with a "natural and healthy commerce between the sexes."

Before ca. 1850, prostitution was only one of many vices "detrimental to the commonweal," much like drinking. From Middle Ages on, prostitutes were "an unproductive commodity," thought, as misused public creatures, to be usually barren {337}. Philosophers gave diverse explanations. William of Conches (12C) argued that women who feel no pleasure cannot contribute the seed required for conception, because the relation is purely monetary. Prostitution, like usury, produces "nothing real." Both vices became metaphors for "signs without referents."

The "asocial market" of prostitution threatened more than marriage. By 19C boundaries "between home and economy, public and private, self and society," seemed sharper and more conflicted in urban class society after industrial and commercial revolutions {339}. Masturbation took sexual pleasure inward, prostitution outward. Their danger was attracting individuals to psychically leave the family "and other supposed shelters" for this threatening new milieu.

John Ruskin in 1862 concluded that wealth is the possession of things that nurture life by those who can use them. A corpse thus cannot possess wealth. If possessions harm life, they become "illth." Our Mutual Friend reflects the same mid-Victorian assumption: "economic value can only be determined in close relationship to bodily well-being" {346}. Dickens' writings on this question began with the dead body, moving toward reanimation. This led to a paradoxical outcome, conditioning value not on flesh and blood but on apparent death. Both Ruskin and Dickens are consciously reacting against political economists' pseudo-Malthusian justification of commercialism and social alienation, which based economic well-being on "the devastation or prevention of life" (e.g., Scrooge).

Malthus in fact deplored Adam Smith's failure to distinguish biological usefulness of commodities. Political economy derived value from flesh (via labor), but gave physical well-being (which makes labor renewable) no role in calculating it. Lace, mere luxury, is more valuable than wheat because it requires more labor to make {350}. Critics imagine commodities "freighted with mortality" in order to demand that they be vital, replenish potential.

In Our Mutual Friend, the Hexams live (gain life) by retrieving corpses from the river and robbing them. Metaphors show them as birds of prey. Money here & always in Dickens "is just a metaphor for human flesh"; "all value is produced at the expense of life." Old Harmon isolates self from life by building a mountain of garbage, all detritus of others' lives converted to inorganic form.

Dickens does not see this transformation of individual lives to inorganic matter and finally to gold as life-destroying. It is "sanitizing" and produces "a pure potential called 'Life.'" To reach this potential, apparent death is necessary, an "organic death" into wealth. The invalid Rogue Riderhood attracts concern only because his "spark of life" is early gone [same issue? 357]. Value-creating consciousness,like economic value and vital force itself, exist in pure form outside bodies.

They remain at the center only as potentially valuable remains. This raises the important mid-Victorian issue of urban sanitation. In heated debates over it, all agreed that "dust" was dualistic, a source of wealth if returned to food-producing earth, otherwise "the seed of death." Rotting in rivers, it became illth; buried in dry ground, wealth. Burial mounds become sites of regeneration. Dickens, as a sanitary reformer during the Thames cleanup, saw the river as "a potentially pestilential open sewer" {360}. Illth and wealth are no longer physiological metaphors. Both arose from decomposition. Although central in Dickens, they are peripheral to the normal humans he idolizes but who are not his subject {362}.

All the "discarded and suspended bodies" in the novel are male. Men rescue women from the abiding threat of commodification by preemptively enacting "the suspended animation . . . of the commodity itself"; it "is thus exclusively masculine . . . because it is so naturally feminine." Men nevertheless survive because as "pure vital potential" only they can hold life "in abeyance" {364}.

Aztecs believed that humans were imbued with tonalli, "global Energy diluted in the cosmos." Its loss meant death; healers recaptured it. Endowment was "profuse," and did not wear down. All death was thus accidental, after which excess energy survived for four years. Soul perished only after post-death ordeals exhausted tonalli, and returned north, the direction of the Tribe's origin.

The post-mortem expenditure of energy drained "potential communal forces." Human sacrifice regulated death rate via "ritual murder" that not only freed energy but redirected it to communal ends {369}. Disrupting natural continuity of life produced "a surge of power." Similarly, energy from warriors slain in battle helped sun to rise; that of women dead in childbirth, to set. Sacrifice was like birth in that a disturbance of equilibrium released life force.

The public killing of captives and slaves was preceded by the victims' games or dances, otherwise prohibited. Offerings of energy, they were intense, fatiguing to the point of trance. They drew on ordinarily untapped energy to intensify it {374}. Victims would be ready to comply with "the honor" when killed. A knife opened the chest; the high priest tore out the heart, cut the veins, and offered it to the sun, after which the body was thrown down to the captor who owned it.

Heart was an offering to the sun, the diurnal and nocturnal aspects of which were equally important, for it transited suberranean hell at night. The copious blood shed in sacrifice was an offering to the Lord of the Earth, complementary to that of heart to sun, "part of a larger work of revitalization" {302-303}.

The body of the Central African king is "an illusory production machine," in which Nature and social order mesh "to assure complete fertility." It often must be unblemished, cannot be allowed to age or lose sexual power. The king is sacred ("august and accursed, worthy of veneration and exciting horror"; 393) but not divine; his power is not founded on religion. He is sacrificed "as a monstrous creature." Enthronement breaks his clan ties, violates great taboos; he becomes "filth and the representative of God on earth"; after death he becomes a nature spirit {388}. The transgression that gives king power of life and death makes him dangerous, indispensable in synapse between Nature and culture, inevitably a sacrificial victim. He is not a scapegoat, but has scapegoats. A bullock may be killed to accept his "filth." Royalty is a symbolic structure that has broken with the familiar order to serve as a conduit for fecundity.

Issue: Did the Roman emperors, like later Christian kings, have two bodies, one private and mortal, one political and divine?

E. Bickermann (1929) argued that in Rome divine immortality applies to the body, not the soul. This "brushed aside . . . the reigning theory" that those who cremate believe in immortality of the soul and celestial afterlife, while those who bury believe that the dead return to earth. Early Romans, who cremated, had no belief in immortal soul in their religion. Apotheosis of emperors, from Augustus on, depended on a second funeral in which "a second body, in wax," an imago, was burnt {399}.

In Rome, whose religion consisted of practices, not theories, no one speculated on the mode of existence of an emperor become god. The term was consecratio, which implies transformation of space as sacred. Romans long consecrated places, natural forces, anything that manifested numen (orig. "nod, command"; divine authority). All became part of a cosmic system. The greatness of an emperor generated numen, so he had to be deified. But he could become a god only after death. A paradox would arise when he was moved from his tomb to a temple, which a corpse would pollute.

Deceased had to be buried (even ashes, symbolically) to purify community {401}. Tombs lay outside city; ceremonies were not performed during time of public worship. The tomb was liminal, so a body in it could not be consecrated. The emperor-god thus had to be divided. The wax imago was a second self, ritually led through sickness and death, after which city mourned (not just family, as in first funeral). Because there was no residue after burning the wax, there was no burial, so the deceased was separated from residues of other bodies and symbolically placed in temple.

The imago was no mere image. It originated as a death mask, seen as a true part of deceased's body--not the wax, but the corpse's form impressed in it {414}. It was descended from death masks that noble families of Republic were allowed to keep (but not display) in their atrium {408} and use in funerals of descendants. The funerary oration, not the mask, exhibited the accomplishments of the deceased.

The apotheosis of Augustus was the first, but at that point the imago disappears from family funerals. Each sovereign became a unique divine category rather than joining a collection of divine predecessors. Each was separated by apotheosis from the failings, even the tyranny, of their living roles {417-418}.

Both Christ and the King of France had double natures, one signifying their real existence and the other representing an essentially false nature. The king was a physical person, a mortal being with "gouty knees", but was represented as the King, who was immortal and the embodiment of secular authority. The representation of the King leads one away form the true nature of the king--that is away from his physical body. The situation was the opposite for Christ. His true nature was immortal and divine, while his representation was mortal. He appears in a body, but his nature is godly. Thus there is a tension in the signifying potential of the body in the case of these two kings. Pascal and the Port-Royalists attempt to navigate this tension using the Calvinist notion of God's distance from an abandoned humanity. The source of all power was "impenetrable to the sight of men." The relationship between presence and representation is elusive, since the subject is beyond the feeble sensibilities of men.

A collection of 27 illustrations from 13-17C Europe and various times in other cultures. Most depict bodies that carry cosmological meanings; a few are anatomical diagrams that suggest esthetic patterns.

Bibliography. Mainly "books and articles written during the last hundred years and dealing more or less directly with the everyday experience of the body in past times."

Issue: Why were closely analogous ideas of state, cosmos, and body part of a single complex in these three centuries B.C.? "History, unlike science, is not the study of physical things, but of how human beings conceive them. From this point of view Nature, state, and body are products of the ordering imagination, and are formed and reshaped by practice." In the last three centuries this process made universe a cosmos. The reason was not scientific breakthroughs but fundamental political changes, i.e., invention of a centralized imperial state (255-221). Intellectuals bound structure of cosmos and of body to that of the state while defining "political authority and its effective use. . . . macrocosms and microcosms became a single manifold, a set of mutually resonant systems of which the emperor was indispensable mediator" {7}. Even before the Han unification of 221, yin-yang became the order driving a hierarchic universe {9}. The celestial order was tied to the state by divining portents that heaven sent to warn the emperor. The macrocosm offered a pattern for every aspect of social organization and personal conduct {11}.

The Chinese body (shen) was, like the prevalent late Greek body, a microcosm. Unlike the Greek, it was primarily an ensemble of functions like those of Nature, not a physical structure of bones, organs, etc. In the absence of a mind-body split the word referred to the whole person, even the juridical person. It was connected with Nature by the universal qi that gave and sustained life. Disease was mainly blockage of the qi circulation, paralleling the failure of the bureaucracy to circulate and carry out imperial commands.

Yin-yang and the Five Phases, the main concepts used to form these ideas, evolved for some time prior to 3C, and continued to evolve even after they became predominant. Even in technical writings about the macrocosm and the body, political themes are important. We can find explicit and detailed correspondences between the three realms in Han writing {18-25}. The thinkers who created all three made them dynamic and hierarchic, full of moral and emotional meaning {25-29}. The body and state became microcosms because the result was a powerful, coherent way of thinking about all aspects of life that kept the will of the ruler central. Writings on all three levels also emphasized the need for the ruler to find good advisors and follow their advice, voluntarily limiting his absolute power.

Comparisons of Greece and China. Such analogies existed in Greece but played very different roles, because political realities and ideals differed, because Greek rulers had no philosophic authority and did not use philosophers, because Greeks did not use medical metaphors in the same way, and especially because Greeks encouraged disagreement and disputation while Chinese valued consensus. Greeks tended to look for one correct answer; Chinese, to "cascade levels of meaning" in elaborate systems of correspondence.

[Begins by reviewing main points of the Sivin essay.] The passage on the body as microcosm in the Inner Canon is meant for doctors. It expects them to know about order in the state and cosmos as well as in the body. The power of these writings about health "owes a great deal to their being cast in the mode of advice about ruling" {194}.

Greek views about the body reflect "a cacaphony of opinions." They tend to reject popular views, and even to present vague and confusing schemata mainly to score points against others and to suggest their authors "are privy to special, esoteric, learning."

Dissection begins earlier and becomes more extensive in the Greek world. The Greeks looked for "precisely, stable structures," and tried to explain functions by structures. Aristotle claims to care about forms and final causes, not material components, of the body, but turns "the revolting insides of animals . . . into testimony to the beauty and craftsmanship of nature" {197}. Dissection remained controversial, and vivisection of humans, when it was done briefly, even more so. Galen finds dissection desirable as a means of empirical demonstration--to do for medicine what proof does in mathematics. He even took part in competitive public dissections where both sides predicted (and their followers bet on) what they would find. The stakes were thus more than "mere disinterested research or even pedagogy." Medical arguments had little to do with "the axiomatic-deductive style of demonstration that was Galen's expressed ideal" {201}.

Body politic. Because of the many competing models of government, Greeks argued for having the "right elements" in command as in the healthy body, and "curing" the body politic when unhealthy. Plato wants drastic cures for injustice, expunging "incurable" elements. The legislator, like the physician, "knows what has to be done" {203}. Calling those who disagree pathogens "raises the stakes of political debate" dramatically, for there was never a consensus.

Chinese needed advisors to rulers, but Plato's ruler was both philosopher and king. Still, he wanted advisors who were like good doctors. Such advisors could be used to get round wrong lay views of the means and ends of government. But there was no indisputable expertise among Greeks in politics or medicine. Most of the Greek claims to certainty in medicine were bluff.

Medical bodies. Greeks differed from Chinese in complete lack of consensus, in ideals of order (Greeks sought stable, not dynamic, order), and in emphasis on provable certainty. In China appeal to knowledge bolsters the advisor's authority, but that of ruler is never questioned; in Greece fitness to rule was a major topic of debate. For Plato, the philosopher-king's knowledge put him beyond criciticism by "mere opinion." In China, the imperial function was unchallengeable; in Greece political unchallengeability was only an unattainable dream {208}.

Applies a psychoanalytic viewpoint and systems theory to a holistic view of mind and body. The family is the unit, since (1) it is affected by every illness, and (2) individual coping styles depend on early family experience. "Centripetal" families-which pressure members to share and participate-predispose to projection as a defense and psychosis. "Centrifugal" families-with isolation of members and early individuation ("Protestant ethic")-encourage discharge of "unconscious impulses" within the individual’s own somatic channels, predispose to denial and repression.

Other research has related cancer to such "antecedents" as loss, depression, despair, sometimes explosive release of uncontrollable hostile feelings. Tumor patients tend to be low on closeness to parents, with "self-destructive forces and rigid armouring." Early life leads to special pattern of response to stress. E.g., breast cancer patients tend to be negative or ambivalent about sexual behavior, probably due to difficulty with release of emotions (either repression or explosive release), originally due to "lack of a protected and loving childhood." How are these problems "translated" into physiological processes? The "bridge" may be neurological [based on questionable evidence] or endocrinological.

In dying patients, intimate relation with therapist is essential to resolve internal conflicts that become more important as death approaches. The patient needs "participation and protection" to move away from withdrawal and depression.

"American spas subordinate the supposed healing properties of natural water to the benefits of a spiritual and physical discipline" aimed mainly at reducing fat. Gender, tourism, pilgrimage and female self-image "converge on the figure of the female body in water." In the U.S. "spa" is a broad word for facilities that restfully treat parts of body (although in the western US there are many thermal springs, valued as in Europe for healthful properties).

85% of customers in upscale spas are women. Advertising promotes "a woman's narcissistic obsession with her body shape in a solitary activity" {38}. Ads also often try to attract men. They alternate between "reconstructing" the conjugal couple in this stress-free environment and detaching the female to return rejuvenated to the excluded family. Writing on spas tends to be confessional, by women and in women's magazines, a kind of travel writing. Writers distance their bodies, which become tourist sites to explore and conquer--a "lost self" under the fat. The visit is a pilgrimage to "a more sacred domain" where communitas takes place. Major attraction is water, which mythically heals and carries blessings. Visitors mentally detach the sinful parts of their bodies that they hate, in order to sculpt and correct them. In this tourism the "native costume" is the naked body, exposed to ennoble it by making it thinner. This is unlike European spas, which aim at health and accept the body shape. Claims to authenticity of the U.S. spa's site are built on Indian creation myths or European legends of miraculous waters. The souvenir of this tourism is the sculpted body, its flesh dominated in the spa adventure.

American women learn to judge themselves by the standard of an unattainable ideal body image. Body image therapists use methods like those of spas, and even recommend them. Although the French see the waters as amniotic and nurturing, Americans associate them with female pollution and dirt.

"Investigations of the body are intensified in instances where its status is contested." Issue: how critics used Kennedy's body (d. 1963.11.22) and documents about it in reconstructing the assassination and contesting official accounts.

Medieval writers saw the body of a king as twofold, one mortal, the other mystical, reflecting the state of the kingdom. Harm to his body came to mean harm to the state. The body can be used to reshape politics. Proponents of a dizzying variety of conspiracy theories over a generation have studied Kennedy's body; technological change has shifted interpretation as well as accessibility of the record to storytellers. Stories of the body have themselves become a "discursive term" for revisionists {228}. The latter have redefined documentary categories to give themselves more authority. They have transformed the body into evidence for wider concerns about the responsiveness of "official political discourse" to laymen. Kennedy's body became not only the site of the crime but the site of contested interpretations of it.

Stage 1 took off after the Warren Commission's report of 1964. New investigations questioned the locations and natures of the wounds and directions of the bullets in order to cast doubt on the report. They asked whether it had deliberately misread the body.

Stage 2, in the 1970's, was shaped by coverups in SE Asia and Watergate, which eroded trust in public institutions. Many popular responses, suggesting a coverup in the Warren Report, led to a second official investigation (House Select Committee, 1976-1978). Investigators and others cast doubt on the "official documentary process," esp. irregularities in the autopsy and the disappearance of evidence, incl. K's brain. These led to a charge of ill-intent in handling the body, which "became a medical forgery" {236}. As lay revisionists became more expert, and posted more plausible challenges, they also addressed general issues about lay challenges to officialdom.

Stage 3, in the 1980's, emphasized falsification and mishandling of records. This shift resulted from new access to records. Photos and X-rays from the autopsy had been held back from the Warren Commission; medical analyses led to more authoritative challenges to its report. Other documents were set down after the fact or destroyed. In this stage critics reexamined the documents, no longer the body. They legitimated, more than earlier, the broad challenges to officialdom that the revisions implied. The body as evidence
had become the body of evidence.

Revisionists thus used the body of the President to expose ills in his mystic body, the state. They have turned their own stories into a "privileged" documentary category to gain "a footing in the official discourse that contrives to exclude" laymen.

For two decades historians have questioned the appropriate social response to disease. Themes: "the presumed existence of disease" has structured doctor-patient relations; disease is socially negotiated. Trendy Foucauldians deny that disease, aside from sets of practices, exists. Medical knowledge simply reflects "arbitrary social arrangements, social need, and the distribution of power." Relativists see physicians as mere social actors, serving their own "professional, class, or gender interests." They have dismissed diagnosis as labeling of deviance. But this relativist analysis has been challenged as heredity and constitutional factors, somatism in mental illness, and the intractability of mental disorder as shown in the failure of deinstitutionalization have made disease seem less arbitrary. AIDS has created a new consensus that sees interacting biological and social factors as equally important. But the cost of new medical knowledge is now as visible as its benefits, and its character ambiguous.

An older generation (e.g., Sigerist) saw science as by nature enlightened and egalitarian, the enemy of "superstition and social injustice." Disease was objective, and could be a "tool and rationale" for social intervention, as when typhoid signals that water needs to be cleaned up. They did not reject the social order, but called for more equitable distribution of medical care. Explanations of disease as related to its context were "always material and rationalistic."

This view developed gradually as germ theory showed that, even with acute epidemic disorders, each case had its unique history of lesions. At end of 19C, medicine widened its boundaries to take over phobias, alcoholism, and many other previously social problems. Doctors considered this movement progressive. Diagnoses explained in terms of material conditions, rather than as sins. The popular public health movement linked ill health with poverty and deprivation, and called for progressive reform.

But in the past two decades critics question "the ethical and human costs of bureaucratic, episodic, high technology-oriented care" and the cost of medicine generally. Conflict has arisen around the cognitive legitimacy of psychiatry, "the dominance of acute, interventionist models in medical career priorities and institutions" that do not work well for the old and the dying. The prevalent rationalist system of diagnosis has fueled the triumph of cost accounting over medical judgment. The control of acute infection has led to the growing problem of chronic and degenerative ills. The success of technical solutions keeps creating new problems, and distracting attention from needs for education and prevention. Conflict arises as medical rules interfere with personal growth and individual freedom. As the disease model takes over, physicians do not do well with problems (e.g. geriatric) that it does not fit. Laymen are becoming skeptical.

The concern for personal accountability remains; this has given rise to a new emphasis on diet, exercise, etc., and a tendency to blame the vulnerability of others on their faults. AIDS, "both mortal and intractable, . . . reflects both elements--the biological and cultural--in particularly stark form." Sophisticated science has defined it as a clinical entity, and its virulence has brought social issues to the fore, and revealed fissures in social values. The argument is charged by belief that victims are being punished for immoral behavior. "AIDS underlines the inadequacy of an approach to understanding and controlling disease that ends at the laboratory's door. But it emphasizes as well the parallel inadequacy of disregarding the specific biological character of an ailment--and the status of our understanding of that character." New biological knowledge affects "insurance, civil rights and the law, and policy toward drug addiction." The interaction between phenomenon, perception, and policy is not only important to medicine, but to social science generally."

Although the conventional wisdom is that WWI was a disaster for public health, Jay Winter (1986) has argued that better nutrition improved male life expectancy and infant mortality.

"The First World War was a cause of profound dislocation, personal and national; and although mortality rates for non-combatants may have lessened during the war, as a result of rising standards of living and better diet, this does not mean that people's sense of well-being was enhanced. Mortality statistics (on which Winter relies) are not necessarily a good guide to the amount of ill-health in the country. There was widespread anguish first and foremost over the fate of men at the Front, but also over the supposed escalation in women's immorality, deteriorating housing conditions and vastly increased rents, and dangerous working conditions. Industrial unrest was eloquent testimony to serious public dissatisfaction. Good industrial conditions were the most immediate health concern of governments, yet many workers were employed in highly dangerous situations. Nationality or ethnicity, which normally acts as an important but not overwhelming influence on health, came to dominate all other influences on well-being for non-British nationals living in Britain. Gender differences were simultaneously lessened in some areas, such as paid work, and reinforced in other ones, such as attitudes towards sexual morality" {34}.

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