![]()
1
‘Practice without theory’: a neuroanthropological perspective on embodied learning
Greg Downey
Macquarie University
Apprentices of the Afro-Brazilian danced martial art capoeira – an art said also to develop practitioners’ cunning and savvy – learn primarily through imitation, along with bodily exercises and physical experimentation. They copy the movements of veteran players, haltingly at first, but with increasing animation and integrity. Teaching is primarily mimetic rather than analytic or explicit. If a novice asks too many questions, more than an instructor believes helpful (the threshold is usually quite low), a teacher will remind the student to be silent, watch closely, and imitate. During my field research in Brazil, if we interrupted Mestre (‘Teacher’) Moraes with too much questioning, he shouted, Embora! (‘Get on with it!’); or, if feeling generous, he might stop us: Olhe (‘Look here’). He demonstrated more slowly for those who had failed to catch a technique, punctuating his motions for emphasis at crucial moments with meaningless syllables, Au … au … au …
With its acrobatic kicks, sly headbutts, low-to-the-ground dodges, and flamboyant ornamental moves, or floreios, capoeira stands out as an especially demanding form of embodied knowledge, apprenticeship necessitating not simply the acquiring of techniques or skills but a whole body transformation in strength, flexibility, mobility, perhaps even personality. Pursued intentionally through specialized training in adolescence or adulthood, the art contrasts in many ways with the (to the practitioner, at least) unremarkable daily habits and gestures that make up the habitus, as discussed by Pierre Bourdieu. Nevertheless, the shared mimetic forms of learning in both capoeira and more mundane corporeal techniques, and the influence of bodily training on capoeiristas’ perceptions, suggest that the confrontation between the style of movement taught in capoeira and the everyday habitus might highlight how embodied knowledge shapes the subject. Practitioners repeatedly asserted that learning capoeira movements affected a person’s kinaesthetic style, social interactions, and perceptions outside of the game (see Downey 2005b).
This chapter specifically explores how imitative learning occurs in capoeira, and sports, dance, and bodily practice more generally, and the psychological, neurological, and physical consequences of acquiring bodily knowledge. Although capoeira may be an extreme example, the art illustrates how enculturation entails biological development, and demonstrates the neurological complexity of imitative learning. Recent research in psychology and neurosciences allows us to attempt a neuroanthropological account of the cultural tuning of imitative learning. This biocultural study of corporeal mimesis helps to place anthropological accounts of enculturation on a more certain footing, but it also demands that we modify our portrayal of habitus or embodied knowledge (or whatever we call the product of bodily enculturation), allowing that the habitus might not be as consistent, simple, or transferable as some accounts, including Bourdieu’s own, might suggest. A neuroanthropological account of mimesis, however, opens up an opportunity to converse across boundaries between anthropology and such disciplines as psychology, cognitive science, and neurology, both to integrate new findings and to assert our interest in cultural particularity and diversity.
Bourdieu argued that practical, bodily action instilled, and was guided by, a socially generated habitus, a ‘structuring structure’ internalized through interaction with people and the physical environment. In The logic of practice, Bourdieu writes: ‘The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce the habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations’ (1990a: 53; see also 1977). The habitus, in Bourdieu’s model, is history made flesh, a corporeal enculturation that assures social and symbolic continuity while underwriting an individual’s sense of autonomy.1
With the habitus, Bourdieu attempts to overcome the dichotomy between objectivism and subjectivism in social theory, ‘the scholastic dilemma of determinism and freedom’ (2000: 131). For anthropologists struggling to reconcile a tradition of conceptualizing both society and culture as structure with a growing disciplinary interest in individual agency, the habitus has offered an attractive way to operationalize structure, to suggest that everyday action is both strategic and yet imprinted with the actor’s past, and thus society’s history (see Ortner 1984). The habitus offers an alternative to concepts like ‘culture’, ‘ideology’, ‘hegemony’, or ‘cognitive structure’, an alternative grounded more in corporeality and quotidian activity.
Yet, when we look more closely, the habitus concept as articulated by Bourdieu leaves certain key questions about embodied knowledge unexplored. Whereas Bourdieu was primarily concerned with bridging problems of scale – between the individual and social structures, history, or culture – the close analysis of bodily enculturation requires that we also consider the gap between biology and culture, to explore links between experience and our organic nature. Joseph Margolis (1999: 69), for example, criticizes Bourdieu for failing to identify the ‘microstructure’ of habitus. Margolis warns that there is ‘a certain slackness’ in Bourdieu’s discussion (1999: 68): ‘But if we ask what the habitus is, what the telling features of its functioning structures are, what we get from Bourdieu is a kind of holist characterization that never comes to terms with its operative substructures’ (1999: 69, original emphasis). A vague psychology at the centre of the subject may unnecessarily undermine a practice-based account of socialization; as Anthony King describes, ‘[T]he overwhelming bulk of Bourdieu’s work is informed directly by the habitus’ (2000: 418).
On closer examination, everyday practices, dispositions, skills, and perceptual systems do not behave precisely like some of the more simplistic models of the habitus, specifically those that assume bodily activities arise from a set of structural oppositions or are coherent across a range of activities. Ironically, one obstacle to the study of embodied knowledge can be an overarching concept like the habitus, if it leads researchers to consider corporeality only as a theoretical solution to other social and political questions rather than as a site for close examination. The advantage to close biocultural study, however, is that it also tends to buttress the concept of the habitus against the criticism that it is overly deterministic, fails to explain change, or cannot account for variation.
I begin by discussing virtuoso imitation in my field research on capoeira. The example suggests that to ground the habitus psychologically and biologically, we must not just describe what the embodied knowledge does but seek to understand how it comes to be through an apprenticeship in bodily practices. Because the ethnographic case is an intercultural setting – capoeira in New York City – it highlights that imitation is a ‘significant bottleneck’ in cultural transmission, as Oliver Goodenough (2002: 573) argues. Imitative learning can race ahead of other forms of understanding, so we need better to understand its role in shaping perception and cognition, as the body’s ability to imitate limits the type of learning that occurs in mimesis. The observed developmental trajectories of capoeira expertise clash with any deterministic concept of habitus by undermining the assumption that practice progresses uniformly, as if generated by a single structure. Capoeira apprenticeship, instead, chips away at areas of bodily movement style or hexis, sometimes without changing overall attitudes, but other times as part of a gradual, but ultimately profound transformation. Taken as a whole, this neuroanthropological consideration of skill-learning compellingly demonstrates that the area can be a departure point for integrative research on the consequences of enculturation.
Virtuoso imitation in New York
When I moved to New York City, I looked forward to practising capoeira in the academy of Mestre João Grande, a legendary teacher, the mestre of my mestre in Brazil. Since the 1970s, capoeira has spread from Salvador throughout Brazil and internationally, with teachers now working in nearly every major North American and European city, and in places as far flung as Finland, Israel, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Mozambique, South Korea, and Singapore. Ironically, owing to the art’s globalization, moving from Salvador, my primary field site and the symbolic cradle of capoeira, to Manhattan actually brought me closer to the living embodiment of Afro-Brazilian tradition, climbing the genealogy of master-disciple transmission.
João Grande spoke little English; Brazilians reported that, on occasion, his terse, deeply accented rural dialect of Portuguese was difficult even for native speakers to understand. The taciturn mestre taught primarily through demonstration, gesturing and physically manipulating his students’ bodies directly with delicate tugs on their trouser cuffs or wrists. Students watched closely and did their best to copy his intricate combinations, some of which he communicated only with idiosyncratic hand gestures.
Deep cultural divides complicated the transmission of embodied knowledge. João Grande had Brazilian students, but he also taught African Americans, white Americans, Europeans, recent immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, and even a contingent of devoted Japanese practitioners, some of whom spoke virtually no English or Portuguese. Mimetic channels in João Grande’s classes were often isolated from other modes of learning; players simply dived into the practice, following the examples offered by more experienced players, at times barely grasping even the names of movements let alone any more detailed explanation.
One young American, however, posed the paradox of mimesis most sharply. James2 had become astonishingly proficient in a few short years, developing a subtle ‘old school’ style, something other practitioners labour unsuccessfully for much longer to acquire, even in Brazil. James spoke only a handful of Portuguese words, although he spent many hours with the mestre. In spite of the obstacles, James had not merely learned capoeira; he had adopted João Grande’s odd head bobs, distinctive straight-legged steps, sudden jerky movements and shoulder wobbles, a hoarse, tight-throated singing style, even elements of the mestre’s dress, such as wearing leather work shoes and a fisherman’s cap when he played. Whether intentionally or not, James had acquired the kinaesthetic quirks and signature gestures of his teacher.3 All the idiosyncratic traits made James’s discipleship instantly legible to a knowledgeable observer; he was a kind of motor reincarnation of his teacher. Through virtuoso mimesis, James had incorporated forms of moving, gestures, and habits across all practical, linguistic, and cultural obstacles.
Mimetic learning and imitation
Bourdieu clearly posts that the acquisition of embodied knowledge – skills, habits, and a ‘sense of the game’ (1977) – is a central issue in his agenda for the sociology of sports:
The problems raised by the teaching of a bodily practice seem to me to involve a set of theoretical questions of the greatest importance, in so far as the social sciences endeavour to theorize the behaviour that occurs, in the greatest degree, outside the field of conscious awareness, that is learnt by a silent and practical communication, from body to body one might say (1990b: 166).
Bourdieu repeatedly argues that behaviour in activities like sports is learned through mimesis, that this learning is ‘silent and practical’, unconscious and purely mimetic, without awareness or other channels of communication.4 He often seems to focus predominantly on the question of consciousness. In a convoluted section of The logic of practice, Bourdieu elaborates a distinction between ‘imitation’ and ‘mimesis’ on the basis of conscious intention:
[T]he process of acquisition [of habitus] – a practical mimesis (or mimeticism) which implies an overall relation of identification and has nothing in common with an imitation that would presuppose a conscious effort to reproduce a gesture, an utterance or an object explicitly constituted as a model – and the process of reproduction – a practical reactivation which is opposed to both memory and knowledge – tend to take place below the level of consciousness, expression and the reflexive distance which these presuppose. The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life. What is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is (Bourdieu 1990a: 73, original emphasis).
In this passage, Bourdieu alludes to the profound transformation of bodily learning, that what is ‘learned by the body’ is ‘something that one is’. Although he does not use biological language, this chapter argues that, in fact, embodied knowledge can involve forms of material change to the body, an avenue in which past training becomes corporeal condition. Bourdieu even rehearses non-dualistic forms of thinking about embodiment when he rejects bodily ‘representation’ and describes the transformative power of training, a way in which we might explore the biocultural mangle of development. But in trying to characterize the distinctiveness of corporeal learning, contrasting conscious and non-conscious forms of imitation, Bourdieu insists upon a pernicious hard division between propositional and embodied learning, one that, ironically, paints practice theorists into a corner when observing skill education.
Bourdieu repeatedly insists that habitus is necessarily non-conscious and inarticulable, in marked contrast to declarative memory, and that bodily knowledge is acquired without intention or awareness. I have elsewhere argued that many forms of physical education, like capoeira, are neither so quiet nor closed to reflection; in fact, capo...
