The Life of the Senses

Introduction to a Modal Anthropology

François Laplantine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000189681
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Both a vital theoretical work and a fine illustration of the principles and practice of sensory ethnography, this much anticipated translation is destined to figure as a major catalyst in the expanding field of sensory studies.Drawing on his own fieldwork in Brazil and Japan and a wide range of philosophical, literary and cinematic sources, the author outlines his vision for a 'modal anthropology'. François Laplantine challenges the primacy accorded to 'sign' and 'structure' in conventional social science research, and redirects attention to the tonalities and rhythmic intensities of different ways of living. Arguing that meaning, sensation and sociality cannot be considered separately, he calls for a 'politics of the sensible' and a complete reorientation of our habitual ways of understanding reality.The book also features an introduction to the sensory and social thought of François Laplantine by the editor of the Sensory Studies series, David Howes.

1

The Brazilian Art of the Ginga: Walking, Dancing, Singing

It is in the continuity of rhythm and not the discontinuity of sign that it is possible to understand the characteristic way in which so many Brazilians walk. This is called ginga or also gingado, and it inspires many forms of conduct that I have observed over more than twenty years in Brazil.

The ginga (originally the name of an African tribe from the Congo) is a movement of the body. It is a way of moving around while making all the parts of the body undulate, in particular the legs, hips, shoulders, and head. People speak of the gingado of young girls or young women, paying particular attention to the balança (swaying) movement of their hips, or of the gingado of homosexual men. It is also possible to refer to the gait of people from Rio de Janeiro as ginga carioca, distinguishing it from the ginga of people from Salvador- da-Bahia.

Gingar and Dansar

This undulating way of walking is above all a way of dancing. We encounter it in a long- standing style of dance, the umbigada (literally “navel- to-navel”), which very oddly contributed to the birth of the Portuguese fado, itself not a dance but a form of singing, and one that is extremely prudish. In the umbigada, which is one of the very first forms of samba, as in the forro of the Nordeste or the Amazonian lambada, the hips curve and the thighs touch. It is a highly sexualized ginga that is an unambiguous invitation to love- making.

While the art of samba dancing (which is the rhythm of the Rio Carnival) displays a less ostensibly erotic meaning, it is no less animated by the same gingado movement. Sambar (to dance the samba) is a manner of gingar, a walk- dance of extreme sensuality that is learned from early childhood in the morros that overlook the city of Rio.

Another form of ginga (which can be closely linked to the preceding one in the samba de roda) is the choreography of Candomblé. The gods evoked in these forms of worship arrive dancing. They cross the Atlantic. They return from Africa by “possessing” their followers through dance steps that are those of the rhythm of the tide. And to speak of the different manners of “dancing the orixa”, of “incorporating the orixa”, that is to say of entering into trance, one says of the body that it is transfigurado (transfigured), vir ado (turned), gingado (animated by a swaying movement).

The same term is therefore used to designate a way of walking and way of dancing. Since in both cases (dancing while walking, moving laterally while dancing), we are in the presence of a sort of “dancing walk”, as Noh theater actors say. It is nevertheless necessary to distinguish what Eugenio Barba (2004) calls “pre- expressive behaviour” and “behaviour in an organized performance situation”.

Ginga as a form of undulating walk is a “pre- expressive behavior”, that is, part of everyday life, which of course was acquired, learned, repeated, and has become a reflex. But in this individual bodily memory there is, formally speaking, no rituality. Ginga as a way of dancing with others belongs to what Eugenio Barba describes as “extra- daily techniques”, and Jean-Marie Pradier (1996) as “spectacularly¹ organized human behaviours”. They are, as in the Candomblé religions and Umbanda, as in Carnival or capoeira, which will be discussed subsequently, ritually codified “on- stage” and performative behaviors, in which the stage may be the space of the casa (in Candomblé and Umbanda dances) or of the rua (in Carnival and capoeira). We can of course consider, with Goffman, that in all these situations of daily life we are always actors playing roles on a stage. That being said, samba dancing, be it in the setting of the casa (in the nightclubs called gafeiras in Rio) or the rua (Carnival), and a fortiori the choreography of Candomblé, entail a much more explicit scripting.

Finally, in these different cases, the mise en scène of the social (as minimal as it may be), takes place through sensation [le sensible]. All of the senses are mobilized in the bodily behaviors of Candomblé, which are ceremonies with simultaneously visual (chromatic, in particular), auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactive dimensions. As for ginga as a way of moving in the street, it only invokes sight (looking and being looked at) and touch (in particular of the ground). But it is a sinuous way of walking of extreme sensuality.

In ginga, the walk appears as though it is slowed by a movement of horizontal oscillation of the body. It is this movement (in particular of the hips and the shoulders) that from the beginning of the Conquest the Portuguese restrained among their black household servants. Still today, in the eyes of part of the middle class, and even more so to bourgeoisie, it does not fail to appear to be a somewhat suspect, even immoral, way of behaving with one’s body. It is perceived as a loosening, as much physically as psychologically, and provokes a reaction of simultaneous hypercorrectness in dress and bodily rectitude on the part of followers of Brazil’s increasingly numerous evangelical movements.

Gingado and Jeitinho

It is here that we realize that the gingado is liable to encounter the jeito and even more the jeitinho (literally, a “little trick”, not exactly the French “système D”²), that art of getting by and scheming that is characteristic of behaviors described as malandros.

A character of murky etymology and personality, whom we can equally consider a creation of literary fiction and urban popular culture, in particular of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the malandro escapes definition. He is not outrightly dishonest, but he is not honest either. He does not radically reject the established order but, rather, constantly ridicules it.

What in Brazil is called the malandragem, which is not without echoes of Ulysses’ mètis, is the art of getting by, of scheming and of improvising in novel situations. It is the skill of the jeitinho, which consists of turning the world to one’s advantage. It is not easy to understand and therefore to translate in the framework of a categorizing and classificatory thought process that the malandro himself couldn’t care less about. Three notions may nevertheless assist us: cordialidade (cordiality), theorized by the historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda, the casa, and the rua, both analyzed by the anthropologist Roberto Da Matta.

Cordialidade is that capacity to react through sentiment, the heart, and perhaps more still through the body, rather than the head and the intellectual elaboration of emotions. It implies extremely personalized relations. The casa is one of the preeminent settings for this cordiality and warmth. As for the rua, it is practically the opposite of the casa. It is the anonymous and rigid world of the decree, or more exactly of conformity to the abstract impersonality of the law that must be obeyed. The rua is most often experienced in Brazil—and to a certain extent in the Latin societies of Europe and the Americas—as a negative principle. Or to put it differently, Brazil, through its malandro component, pushes to its extreme one of the tendencies of societies in which obedience to the State, payment of taxes or respect for the traffic code are regarded by many as veritable calamities. These are societies in which one always gladly prefers the firefighters to the police and in which part of the population is constantly searching for tricks for getting around the law.

The malandro, it will have been understood, cannot stand formal rules, regulations, uniforms, punctuality, hierarchy. He never arrives on time, misses appointments (or at least those from which he has nothing to gain) and is absolutely refractory to the very idea of work. But, in spite of ridiculing the values of the rua, he is not a man (sometimes a woman) of the casa either. He is a nomad, a vagabond who goes from one house (for him, a love-story) to another. He cannot establish or stabilize himself in marriage any more than he can in language. The spaces he most often only passes through in an oscillating movement of the hips and shoulders tend to be shady spots where one meets barflies, cheats, and prostitutes. He also happily hangs out in the places where macumba is practiced (called, it should be noted, casas), where he recognizes himself in the fantastical divinities called Exus, ambivalent and resolutely urban entities that Christianity has rushed to demonize. The Exus are mediators that are invoked, like Hermes, to “open difficult paths”, surmount delicate situations, figure out a scheme (the Brazilian jeitinho ), win the lottery, do business, or conquer the heart and body of the woman or man one covets. Without the Exus, who maintain themselves as far as possible from bourgeois respectability, nothing is possible for the malandro.

He therefore often lives in the rua, but with personalized casa values. He brings two universes into contact and enjoys moving through interstices and border zones. He brings poor and rich into contact, may himself become rich then find himself broke the next day. He is a tightrope walker. Individualistic and even egotistical to the extreme, he is not, however, antisocial: he gladly plays the role of a righter of wrongs who brings help to widows and orphans. Lies do not bother him in the least, he who practices the art of getting the most out of every situation, and yet he is totally sincere. He is a scoundrel if you wish, and sometimes even an outlaw, but a likeable outlaw, an outlaw with a big heart, who rarely goes as far as full- blown criminality or robbery. You can say that he is a marginal, an adversary in any case of policed language and good manners, but he takes it upon himself to correct injustices by ridiculing established authority. Yet he does not aim to change the world, does not get involved in politics, does not believe, or if so very little, in God, especially in the singular. He is forever elevating misconduct into a model, but many consider that this “pattern of misconduct” (Linton 1956) is not, when it comes down to it, all that unacceptable.

Inconstant, inconsistent, short- sighted, without any depth, living in the present for the sake of pleasure, not remaining in one place, never being where people thought they would find him, the malandro, or rather the character of the malandro, profoundly transformed Brazilian literature. Macunaíma, o herói sem nenhum caráter (Macunaima, the hero without any character ) by Mario de Andrade (1979), is the very embodiment of the malandro . In this burlesque, erotic and libertarian anti- epic, which is not without echoes of Pantagruel, but also Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the anti-hero Macunaima, a black Indian with blue eyes, the composite symbol of a “nation without a character”, after a lazy childhood, roams the virgin forest where he meets his mother whom he kills by mistake. He seduces the queen of the Amazons who entrusts him with a talisman, which he loses. It falls by chance into the hands of a resident of São Paulo. Accompanied by his brothers, Macunaima leaves in search of it, finds it again, and transforms himself into a constellation.

Finally, the malandro (who roams undulatingly across the large Bahian frescoes of Jorge Amado before continuing his career on the silver screen, notably with Chico Buarque and Ruy Guerra’s 1988 Opera do malandro) is a Carnival character or, more precisely, there cannot be a successful Carnival without a malandro. The carnivalesque ritualities do not work without ambiguity, incongruity, nonconformity, ruse, farce, tricks. Respectful conduct is substituted, but only temporarily, with transgressive conduct, the dull uniformity of daily life with the creation of multiplicities, played, sung and danced to a point of drunkenness.

Ginga and Rhythmics of Curvature

The malandro’s inseparably physical and psychological conduct, on the borderline of legality, by no means exhaust the ginga’s full range of possibilities. The movement involved in capoeira (which is at once a game, a dance, and a martial art) is also called ginga. It is an alternatively offensive and defensive movement that consists of moving inside a circular space (la roda), swaying and rocking the body back and forth, with the goal of surprising and fooling the adversary.

In the ginga of capoeira, every part of the body is alert and may be moved: the hands, the elbows, the head, the shoulders, but more still the lower body. The feet (necessarily bare, like in Camdomblé rituals, and firmly planted on the ground) are, as Grotowski (2002/1978) puts it, “the centres of expression and communicate their reactions to the rest of the body”. The position of the knees, slightly bent (like in tennis, boxing and fencing), allows for both propelling and relaxing the body which can, depending on the the move of the adversary, jump, squat, or take a step forward, backward, to the side. The hips ensure the coordination of the continual flow of movement, which never slows or rests. Thus, as capoeiristas say, “capoeira parada não da”, literally “capoeira without movement is not possible”.

The ginga of capoeira, which is given its tempo by a musical bow called berimbau, is precisely this constant back- and-forth rocking movement in which one must be ready to react (and thus to move) at every instant in response to the move of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Extended Sensorium: Introduction to the Sensory and Social Thought of François Laplantine
• Translator's Preface
• Prologue
• 1 The Brazilian Art of the Ginga: Walking, Dancing, Singing
• 2 The Choreographic Model
• 3 Pains and Pleasures of the Binary: The Dichotomy of Meaning and the Sensible
• 4 The Semantic Obsession
• 5 The Sensible, the Social, Category and Energy
• 6 Two Precursors to an Anthropology of the Sensible: Roger Bastide and Georges Bataille
• 7 Living Together, Feeling Together: Toward a Politics of the Sensible
• 8 Sensible Thought: Thinking Through the Body-subject in Movement
• Epilogue in the Form of Seven Propositions: Toward a Modal Anthropology
• Supplement: Sensing Tokyo
• Notes
• Bibliographies
• Index