The Body of Nature and Culture

The Body of Nature and Culture

Also by Rod Giblett FORRESTDALE: PEOPLE AND PLACE HEALTH RECOVERY: THE TAOIST TAI CHI TM WAY LIVING WITH THE EARTH: MASTERY TO MUTUALITY POSTMODERN WETLANDS: CULTURE, HISTORY, ECOLOGY SUBLIME COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

The Body of Nature and Culture Rod Giblett Edith Cowan University, Australia

Rodney James Giblett 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-22273-1 Taoist Tai Chi and Taoist Tai Chi Society are trademarks used under license by the International Society and its member organisations, in association with the instruction of various internal arts of health transmitted by Moy Lin-shin. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-30834-7 ISBN 978-0-230-59517-0 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230595170 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Giblett, Rodney James. The body of nature and culture / Rod Giblett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Body, Human Social aspects. 2. Culture. 3. Human ecology. 4. Culture. I. Title. GN298.G53 2008 306.4 dc22 2008024818 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

To Zoe and Blake

The Body Judith Wright I am the depth below. You would do well to look down, sometimes. I can be your tree, solid in the gale if you consent to be flower, seed and fruit. But you don t believe in me except as crass and suffering and to be suffered, or instrument of your uncertain love. I am your notion of hell and your tool for discovering heaven. But perched on me you lean out with your arrogant polished eye trying to be God. Look down; remember where you are. I am the strata that reach from earth to star and the great cliff down which your father Adam fell. You would do well to look down. More was built into me than quickset night. God walked through all my ages. He set in me the key that fits the keyhole; use it right and eternity s lightning splits the rock of time. And there I was begun and so begotten in that unspeakable heart of flame. From that light where flesh on flesh was welded the world itself unfolded. Look down through me on the light you have forgotten. I am your blundering kind companion. I am your home that keeps out bitter weather. I am the perilous slow deposit of time s wisdom. You are my threat, my murder. And yet remember, I am yourself. Come let us live together.

Contents List of Table and Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements ix x xv 1 Where Land and Body Meet: Body Culture and Nature 1 The body: The starting point 2 Stigmata 7 Body techniques 13 2 Machine Body of Modern Western Medicine 19 The body as machine 20 Body machinery 23 Medical mechanics 27 Mapping the machine of the body 31 3 Battlefield Body of Illness Narratives 37 Illness narratives 37 The body as battlefield 41 The military metaphor in hypermodern medicine 47 The earth as body/body as earth 49 4 Grotesque Body of the Lower Strata 56 The popular body of the marketplace 56 The bourgeois body 60 The s(ub)lime and beautiful body and landscape 63 The body without organs 69 5 Monstrous Body of the Slimy Depths 74 Grotesque, gargantuan, generous, grateful 76 The monstrous-maternal 80 Orally sadistic alien 82 Sky gods, earth goddesses 86 6 Fascist Body of the War-Machine 90 Maculinist, monumental, machinic, metallic, muscular 91 Bachelor machines for a bachelor birth 95 The militarisation of civilian life 99 The war against nature 102 vii

viii Contents 7 Writing on the Surface of the Textual Body 108 Is the soul the prison of the body? 109 The body writes back 113 Body-writing machines 118 8 Sporting Body Imprisoned in the Time-Machine 125 A body built on pain 125 Speed, suffering and sublimation in sport 131 The sporting body of Australia 136 9 Cyborg: The Body-Machine of the Civilian-Soldier 140 Cybernetics and cyborgs 140 Symbiosis and symbionts 148 10 Taoist Body of the Earth 157 Taoism 158 Picture of internals 161 Taijiquan 164 Health recovery stories 167 11 Healthy Land, Healthy Body: State of the Environment, 173 State of Health Soil conservation 174 Taoist ecology 178 The body of the earth with organs and the body of 185 Australia References 191 Index 203

List of Table and Illustrations Table 11.1 Chinese elements, organs, emotions, etc. 184 Illustrations 11.1 François-Antoine Boniface Heirisson Rivière des Cygnes 187 (Swan River) 1801 State Library of WA 11.2 The Digestive Tract 188 11.3 Swan River as Digestive Tract 189 11.4 David Mowaljarlai, Bandaiyan: The Body of Australia, 190 Corpus Australis in his Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive: Spirit of the Kimberley ix

Preface The body is always with us, and we are always with, or in, our bodies. We are embodied beings, but whether we are (our) body, is another question. The way in which we live with our own body operates along a continuum from mastery to mutuality. A similar continuum from mastery to mutuality applies to living with the earth (as I have argued in a previous book; see Giblett, 2004). The present book is concerned with the relationship of human bodies with our natural and cultural environments. It suggests that these categories are linked and intertwined. It argues for an environmentally sustainable and healthy relationship between the body and the earth. Humans affect their natural and cultural environments and those environments affect humans. The mutual construction of culture and nature, and of the organic interdependence between humans and nature, is expressed in the concepts of body culture and eco-health communication. Body culture can be defined as the ways in which we understand, perform and make meanings through, with and on our bodies. It is concerned with the ways in which we shape, respond to and modify our biological, physical and psychological capacities and aptitudes. Modifying and performing the body through fashion, clothing, tattooing, piercing, shaping, dancing, playing sport or games, taijiquan, yoga, martial arts, fighting, exercising, dieting, sitting, eating, sleeping, walking, being healthy, becoming ill, being sick, having sex, being born, giving birth and dying are some of the areas in the broad field of body culture. The culture of the body is always related to the nature of the body and to the nature of the environment in which bodies are positioned, on which they depend, which they affect and which affects them. Ecohealth communication addresses these inter-relationship and aims to make ecologically sustainable the relationship and interaction between human beings/bodies and ecosystems/ecology. It is a new trans-disciplinary field of study and practice that looks at the impacts of each on the other and develop sustainable relationships between the body and the earth. The ways in which the body has been modelled, and the ways in which the body, disease and illness have been figured primarily in metaphors, are a central concern of this book. These include: the body as machine; the body as landscape; the body as land, and land x

Preface xi as body; the body as cyborg (or cybernetic organism); and disease and illness as an invading army to be fought and defeated on the battlefield of the body. All of these bodies are considered in this book, often on a chapter-by-chapter basis. There is thus no single body, but a number of different bodies. These bodies have an environmental politics that are healthy or unhealthy for the body and the earth. Some of these bodies are represented in a discourse, an institutional practice of meaning-making. Just as there is no single discourse of nature (as I have argued elsewhere; see Giblett, 2004, chapter 1), so a number of discourses compete over the body. These include the body as machine in modern western medicine and the body as battlefield in hypermodern western medicine and in some illness narratives. This book critiques these discursive bodies for both their bodily and earthly politics. It also promotes ways of living and being in the body that defy or resist discourse, such as play, movement, performance and story-telling. These ways are exemplified in the body as earth or land, the grotesque body, the monstrous body and the Taoist body of taijiquan. These bodies are expressed in carnivalesque tales, eco-friendly illness narratives and health recovery stories. Both discursive and counter-discursive bodies are considered chapterby-chapter. Chapter 1 considers the body as the starting point for any philosophical or cultural enquiry into human life. It also looks at the ways in which the body is made to make meanings, including through various models or figures for the body. The body is both an inscribed surface of events and an inscriber itself on its own and other surfaces. It is also a performer of actions and the receiver of actions done to it. This chapter considers the body as both active and passive, as performing actions, engaging in events, being engaged in events and having actions performed upon it. The second chapter considers the body in western culture at the crucial turning point from pre-modern to modern medicine. In premodern western (and non-western) medicine the body is figured as earth and the earth as body. In modern western medicine the body is figured as machine. The work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 1519) is on the cusp of this transition as in his writings on the body he figured the land as body, land as body and the body as machine. In the work of Rene Descartes (1596 1650) the body as machine has won out completely over the earth as body/body as earth. This transition has had profound effects on how we see, live with, and relate to, the body. The modern western body as machine is a body of surface, both exterior

xii Preface and interior, whereas the pre-modern and non-western body as land/ land as body is a body of depth. The machine is dead whereas the land is living, dying, dead, or being reborn. The third chapter considers a more contemporary view of the body as battlefield in a number of illness narratives. In this scenario, the disease is figured as the enemy, the patient as foot soldier, the doctor as the general, the nurse as officer and modern western medicine as a weapon. This battlefield is a place of a life and death struggle. By contrast, Terry Tempest Williams illness narrative, Refuge, figures the body as wetland with the rising and falling of its waters and the comings and goings of its waterbirds linked to the health of her mother s body. Other illness narratives figure the body as field, the disease as a weed and the patient as a gardener who tends the garden and pulls out the weeds wherever possible. These are much more environmentally- and bodily-friendly figures than the body as battlefield. The following two chapters consider two more ways of thinking and figuring the body counter to the dominant discourses of the body as machine and the body as battlefield. Chapter 4 considers the grotesque body of the lower strata. The body (and the earth) have been subject to a spatial poetics that values the high over the low and in which the upper represses the lower. The grotesque body is associated with the low and is devalued and repressed accordingly. The grotesque body is a repressed body (or aspect of the body) that returns from the depths in the form of the carnivalesque body to threaten, and even undermine, the upper body. It inverts the lower strata over the higher strata and subverts the hierarchy and revalues the whole body, upper and lower, inner and outer. The lower strata of the grotesque body are also the slimy depths of the body, associated with the slimy depths of the earth and its horrific and uncanny monsters. The monstrous body of the slimy depths is linked with the body of the mother that defies the law of the father. Chapter 6 considers how the repressed grotesque and monstrous body produces the horror of the abject and the uncanny. The monstrousmaternal refuses, undermines and threatens to swamp the monumental-masculine, especially as embodied and encapsulated in the body as machine. In the contention between land as body/land as body and body as machine/machine as body, an underlying gender politics is played out with the former assigned to the female/feminine/ist and the latter to the male/masculine/ist. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of the monumental-masculine and returns to the body-as-machine to consider specifically the body as

Preface xiii war-machine within fascism. The fascist body is a body of solid mass and rugged surface. It is a screen for the projection of reactionary political and ideological messages. Although fascism is officially dead as a political ideology, it lives on in and with the body insofar as it is produced as solid mass and rugged surface. It cannot be merely assigned to the dustbin of history. Indeed, the body is the vector by which fascism communicates from the past to the present into the future. Fascism is alive in the fascist body. Although we may not have, or be, or aspire to be, a fascist body of solid mass and rugged surface, the body is a surface of inscription. Chapter 7 considers the textual body, or the body as text, and the ways in which the body is written upon by the communication and transportation technologies that it uses. Communication and transport technologies increase the range of human visual and aural perception while limiting human bodily movement, and both enhancing and diminishing human mental and sensual capabilities. Communication technologies, such as photography, cinema and radio, and transportation technologies, such as the railway and the car, are considered in Sublime communication technologies (Giblett, 2008b). The present book complements and develops that book, particularly by considering the impact of communication and transportation technologies on human bodily and mental capacities and aptitudes. A highly visible projection of the body today is in sport in which the body as machine is put on display and in which war and the body as war-machine are sublimated into and in competition. The sporting body is the topic of Chapter 8 where it is considered as a body built on pain and as a body imprisoned in measured time. In settler societies, such as Australia and the US, founded on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, sport functions as a kind of moral masochism inflicted in the sporting arena in crude punishment and recompense for the pain inflicted on indigenes. Cathy Freeman is an Australian indigenous sports person who embodied these contradictions. She became the sporting body of Australia in which these forces were played out. She was assimilated into high-profile institutional sport in the Olympic and Commonwealth games, elevated into sport superstardom by winning medals and becoming a Nike athlete, and she yet resisted settler nationalistic embodiment by proudly carrying the Aboriginal flag and displaying her indigenous embodiment. The machinic sporting body is an object of visual consumption and pleasure. The consuming viewer is a machinic body hooked up to communication devices. This cybernetic organism, or cyborg, is

xiv Preface considered in Chapter 9. The cultural history and form of television, the computer and information technology are considered in Sublime communication technologies. The present book complements and develops that book, particularly by considering the ways in which the body and technology have become intertwined in a hybridised composite and the ways in which the body is a biological being in symbiosis physically and psychologically with the earth. So far a number of western discourses and representations of the body have been considered. Chapter 10 considers a non-western body, the Taoist body, in particular the Taoist body of/as the earth. A famous stele in the White Cloud monastery in Beijing depicts the embryonic human body as land with parts of the body as aspects of the earth, both those made with human hands and those not: the head as mountains; the neck as a pagoda; the kidneys as a waterwheel; cerebro-spinal fluid as a river; and so on. The Taoist body is akin to the pre-modern western figuring of the body as earth. The Taoist body is enacted and performed in taijiquan, a set of graceful, meditative and health-giving movements. Taoist Tai Chi is a particular style or tradition that emphasises health-recovery. Practitioners of Taoist Tai Chi tell what could be called health recovery stories which differ considerably from mainstream illness narratives. The final chapter considers the relationship between the earth and the body. It argues for a healthy relationship between the two drawing on three strands of traditional thought: soil conservation classics of the 1930s and 40s; Taoist ecology and feng shui; and Australian indigenous cosmology and corporeality. For all three strands people and land are one; the body and the earth are a single being. The health of one affects the health of the other. Eco-health communication and earthbody culture are concerned to promote eco-friendly, healthy and health-giving models and metaphors of the human body and the body of the earth. Human health is interconnected with the health of the earth for we are one body, the body of the earth.

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the copyright holder for permission to reproduce Judith Wright, The Body from A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (ETT Imprint, Sydney 1999). Earlier versions of Chapter 10 were presented at the Bodies of Knowledge Conference held at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, in September 1993 and at The Body in Question Symposium held at Alexander Library, Perth, Western Australia, in November 1998. I am grateful to the members of the audience for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to Susan Ash, Heath Greville and Jon Stratton for their comments on written drafts. xv