Embodied Knowledge

Historical Perspectives on Belief and Technology

Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781782971238
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

Fourteen papers explore the relationship between knowledge and the body through a series of historical and archaeological case studies. More specifically, it considers the concept of embodied knowledge by exploring some of the apparent diverse and yet shared forms of what may be called embodied knowledge. Using specific case studies of knowledgeable actions, the book explores embodied knowledge through a focus on practice.

1. Embodied knowledge. Reflections on belief and technology

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury

This book explores the relationship between knowledge and the body through a series of historical and archaeological case studies. More specifically, it considers the concept of embodied knowledge by exploring some of the apparent diverse and yet shared forms of what may be called embodied knowledge. The papers share a focus on knowledge as it is implicit and expressed through the human body and bodily action, and as it formed through intentional practices. But what is this kind of knowledge? Using specific case studies of knowledgeable actions, the book explores embodied knowledge through a focus on practice. It does so through two different, yet interconnected aspects of how such knowledge expresses itself: belief and technology.

Challenging dichotomies

The deconstruction of the common juxtaposition of these two forms of knowledge is an essential aspect of our approach to embodied knowledge. Rather than seeing them as distinct categories, and thus reproducing an unhelpful polarisation, the chapters each in their own ways help to underline essential connections between these two forms of knowledge. In some ways, this is part of the social science and humanities challenge to the mind/body dualism, which has been so prevalent in our disciplines and so subjected to theoretical criticism over recent decades (e.g. Turner 2008). At the same time, irrespective of whether the disconnection between beliefs and technologies is part of this fundamental dualism in our epistemologies, it has certainly been furthered by the ways in which academia produces specialists with non-overlapping knowledge. This means that we usually become specialists in one of these major areas, but not in both; we develop and work within different specialist languages and networks. We are rarely pushed to acknowledge how fields such as technology and beliefs overlap and may affect each other. Therefore, rather than pursuing abstract arguments about embodied knowledge, we have selected to use an essentially empirical, one may say an ethnographic, approach to demonstrate the overlapping meanings and at times even dependencies between these two forms of knowledge.

This is why the body must be brought into focus, providing the reason for the title of the volume: ‘Embodied knowledge’. We call attention to the shared epistemological and ontological aspects of the knowledge required to make pots and perform rituals, to similarities and convergences that are acknowledged in our routine interpretative languages and expectations. In daily life, we recognise, depend on, and use the connection between these different areas of practice. The body is the main forum for learning about how to do, think and believe, and practices as apparently diverse as belief and technologies are accordingly enacted and performed through the body in similar manners. Moreover, as these practices become embodied knowledge, they come to inhabit and affect the body as motor skills and practiced ways of doing things (Sofaer 2006). The body is thus the forum for the learning and performance of belief just as it is for the learning of metallurgy and how to produce metal objects. This does not mean that the two are the same; rather they are both rooted in the body and may be involved in the constitution and performance of each other. It is these interrelations that are of interest and in need of further scrutiny through case-study based reflections.

Together, the papers collected here emphasise and explore the characteristics that are common to belief and technology: for instance, their organisation around repeated ‘ritualised’ practices, their transmission through observation and imitation, their involvement in the construction of socio-cultural norms and the differentiation of individuals in terms of knowledge based roles. In the accounts provided in the chapters, belief and technologies are often intertwined and they show how through this relationship epistemological and ontological reasoning is constructed. Moreover, the chapters demonstrate how notions of right and wrong, or good and bad, are extended into practical actions and performed in terms that emphasise how to act in the right manner – this applies to practices as diverse as baptism and spinning. The case studies show how belief needs technologies in order to become expressed and gain forms appropriate for them being practiced and appreciated, and, likewise, how technologies are enmeshed with ideas about right and wrong procedures, and good and bad associations.

Knowledge/embodied knowledge

The question of what knowledge is has a long intellectual history. Knowledge and belief have often been linked or, quite the opposite, seen to be in opposition. Technology, on the other hand, has commonly been associated with practice in a manner that emphasises it as non-discursive and tacit, as ‘understood by the body’, or as the application of technical knowledge.

Over recent decades, the concept of embodiment and embodied knowledge has challenged this dichotomy arguing that: ‘Embodiment is the ensemble of corporeal practices which produce and give “a body” its place in everyday life. Embodiment locates or places particular bodies within a social habitus […] embodiment is the lived experience of the sensual or subjected body’ (Turner 2000: 496). Apart from providing embodiment in the sense of this quote, the body itself affects discourse and the performance and understanding of what knowledge is, and through this it also affects how beliefs and technologies are perceived. The body as a point of reference, of housing and sheltering experiences, is a very common and strong metaphor; it is a starting point for the granting and forming of many forms of meaning. In the world we create around us, our bodies are the measure of all things. Architecture, tools and objects are adjusted to match our body proportions and sizes. Through such body-sized paraphernalia we overcome our bodily limitations and enlarge the potential spheres of action. Belief similarly extensively explores references to the body.

Another strong tendency is that practices and their outcomes become imagined and perceived in terms of body references, adding a different meaning to the concept of embodiment, as things are literately made into bodies. This is often seen in archaeological and ethnographic studies, but it can also be observed in modern society, as many of our contemporary technological developments are ascribed human traits. In colloquial language these technological products are not merely humanised, they are made understandable by linguistically morphing into bodies: computers go to sleep and catch viruses. This ability to anthropomorphise technology affects many aspects of how we comprehend and respond to our material environment, showing how removed the oftenargued distinction between abstract and practical knowledge, between beliefs and technologies, is from observations of the world around us. We routinely use abstractions and metaphors to comprehend the inventions we have made.

To make the exploration of the two dimensions of embodied knowledge explicit, the volume is divided into two parts. The first focuses on beliefs about the body as they are embedded in various societies and preserved in or expressed through material culture and particular practices. The case studies range widely in time, from prehistory to today, and spatially from Western Europe to China. There are beliefs about many things, such as the universe, animals, and consequences. The interrelations between such diverse forms of beliefs would in themselves be fascinating to study, but due to our interest in embodied knowledge, we elected to focus on beliefs which in various ways are about the body. The chapters therefore analyse case studies about birth, death, transformation, sickness and religious beliefs. The second part focuses on technology, on what might be classified as practical or tacit knowledge. Here our concern was to bring into focus the technologies themselves, and the chapters therefore aim to introduce reflections on different material practices, such as carpentry and weaving. This part mainly uses archaeological case studies to benefit from the expertise in technology and material culture traditionally offered by the discipline.

Belief

People understand belief in many ways, and the practising of beliefs use a variety of devices for establishing orthodoxies, or, on the contrary, to absorb change. Belief is often an interesting mix between abstract thinking and mundane matters. It may be perceived as a deeply personal phenomenon or in terms of official doctrines, and it is commonly framed within social norms and systems of sanctions. The chapters show that beliefs are rooted in inherited traditions and practices and at the same time subjected to reinventions and transformations. Beliefs are therefore deeply dependant on processes of learning and the ability to emulate and communicate. A major part of belief is about learning how to perform one’s belief, including doing prescribed rituals in the correct manner. Belief is usually ritualistic, these papers show, and this means an emphasis on things being done in the right ways, the appropriate objects being used, and the appointed persons being involved, repeatedly. Beliefs themselves are indeed often not only abstract, but also ill-defined, referring to a feeling more than knowledge. However, through performance, beliefs become physical: the body is used as an instrument of ritualised behaviour and things are used both practically and as symbols. The chapters focus on two areas where the interconnection between the material and beliefs are particularly pronounced: the dead body and its status, and the ideological concerns about the immaterial aspects of a human, such as the soul and the mind.

Katharina Rebay-Salisbury’s ‘How burial practices are linked to beliefs’ (Chapter 3), for instance, looks at the burial practices of cremation and inhumation diachronically to understand how beliefs are associated with the dead body and how the body was understood. In a survey of three case studies ranging from early 20th century Vienna, through the Greek and Roman world to Bronze Age Europe, she asks whether the mode of disposal and treatment of a dead body is a crucial clue to beliefs or if the divergent practices are merely embedded in every-day routines and traditions. While contemporary sources give some explanations for why inhumation or cremation was favoured at times, these are by no means consistent. There is no one and simple explanation of the meaning of cremation or inhumation as a distinct practice. It is clear, however, that associated practices and customs draw on the experience of everyday life, using its metaphors and images, and this in turn may inform us about basic tenets of the underlying beliefs. Furthermore, superficial explanations gloss over much more deeply seated social concerns, in which the discourse over inhumation and cremations is merely used as a stand-in battleground to communicate and deal with other topics, such as politics and power struggles. This gives us an insight into how layered beliefs can be, that they are not straightforward simple, but may be contradictory, vague, and hard to summarise. Burial practices perhaps do not follow beliefs as a result, but customary ways of disposing the body are accompanied by beliefs, explained and justified through them.

Tim Flohr Sørensen’s ‘Delusion and disclosure: human disposal and the aesthetics of vagueness’ (Chapter 4) continues the theme of beliefs about death. He observes, with changing contemporary burial practices in Denmark as a case study, how knowledge of death is worked through on various levels, including the psychological and communal. Dealing with death is so problematic for the living because knowledge of it is fundamentally un-knowable. Before our own death, we can only experience death through the loss of others. Sørensen’s case study contrasts the ‘traditional’ way of dying in Denmark, deeply rooted in Christian belief and with a focus on the integrity of the body as central to the belief in bodily resurrection, with the now much more common practice of cremation in an increasingly secular society. Although beliefs about death and religious beliefs are not the same, they intersect; religious belief provided not only specific ideas and universally accepted explanations of death, but also physical places for farewell rituals and resting places. As cremation became more popular, the time between death and burial became longer and cremation, as well as the interment of the ashes, became further and further removed from even the closest kin, who are often not present at these stages of burial. Furthermore, unmarked resting places instead of family plots are becoming increasingly popular. The ever decreasing material expression of death may be linked to a less fixed idea about death, and an embracing of deliberate vagueness. In terms of knowledge, Sørensen differentiates between ‘finding meaning’ and ‘making sense’: the former taken to signify the projection of cognised knowledge, the latter denoting the ways in which sensory stimuli and emotions correlate and create balance in the psyche. For death to make sense, one must come to terms with the loss as well as preserve the memory of loved one, and rituals and aesthetics provide the necessary scaffolding for this task. And yet, contra Freudian psychology, traumatic experiences may be better veiled than disclosed – in coping with death, this means a protecting layer of vagueness and as little material contact with the dead body as possible.

Mads Dengsø Jessen takes a closer look at ‘Material culture and the construction of religious knowledge’ (Chapter 5), situating religious knowledge as it is embodied both in human beings and the material world. By looking at how theological concepts were transmitted in early Christian (late Iron Age and early Medieval) Scandinavia, he zooms in on two particular interesting case studies: the portable altar as a miniature, condensed version of a church, and the role of the Eucharist. Missionaries used portable altars in locations without a church infrastructure – the altars combined the functions of shrine for relics and table and had the power to transform any place into a sacred space. Through this, religious concepts were externalised into the material world, but the altars were also integral to the religious message. The Eucharist, also a material object, did not only embody Christ in the eyes of the believer after having been transformed through sacred power evoked by the priest, but could also be taken into one’s own body and work through it, creating a community of believers through partaking in the ritual. In both of these examples, the materiality of human life and its familiarity is cleverly integrated with new religious knowledge. We can think about them in terms of embodied knowledge, extended into the material world and distributed amongst a number of people. Dengsø Jessen argues for a better recognition of the extra-somatic dimensions of religious knowledge, as they are situated in and influenced by context and environment; in turn, they play an important part to be manipulated and integrated in religious concepts.

In Chapter 6, ‘Sealed by the cross: protecting the body in Anglo-Saxon England’, Helen Foxhall Forbes takes us into the world of the seemingly familiar, yet strange medieval way of theological thinking. A world which is populated by invisible, but omnipresent angels and demons that may all affect us in good and bad ways seems difficult to imagine today. Body and soul had to be protected from demonic powers and may have had angelic powers as helpers. In medieval times, body, soul and mind were linked in such a way that practices and rituals done through the body as a medium may affect the internal and invisible soul – the fate of which was central in medieval Christian belief. Sacraments such as baptism or the anointment of the sick involved treatment of the body, but this was not the aim per se; in fact, it was the soul that was addressed by these rituals. Specific gestures, body movements and positions were an integral and essential part of prayer and blessings. The body may have been the medium through which the spirit of a person could be reached, but the body also exhibited the state of the person to the external world, for instance in the case of obsession or illness. The plurality of ways in which sickness was conceptualised and explained in theological terms is again a good example of the complex and fragmented way beliefs work. Beliefs about the body overarched life and death – the dead body, although of much less concern than the soul of the deceased, could, similarly to the living body, be a medium of manipulation and an external sign of inner workings.

Mary Laven’s chapter on ‘The role of healing in the Jesuit mission to China, 1582–1610’ (Chapter 7) continues the theme of transmission of religious knowledge and belief. The Jesuits’ missionary efforts to convert the Chinese to Christianity are well documented and give interesting insights into cultural clashes as well as similar understandings between the worlds of Catholicism and Chinese religion (which includes elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism). Although highly educated and prepared for intellectual exchange, the Jesuit missionaries did not celebrate the best success in persuading the Chinese of the truth of Christian knowledge through discourse, and they had far more positive effects through their advice on and involvement with much more immediate, bodily concerns. Miracles of healing, exorcism and bringing about fertility, all actions that work directly on or through the body, could be integrated into existing worldviews and were much better attractors to Christianity than teaching and preaching. These emotional, ‘embodied’ experiences of Christianity responded to profound human needs; the bodies of Christians were seen to be protected by God. The only downside to the successes was that appealing to the popular side of religion did not win over the educated segment of society the Jesuits would have wanted to attract. Another aspect of the deeply embodied nature of Christianity that focussed on Christ’s body, the blood, suffering and crucifixion of Christ as well as the meaning of the Eucharist, did not prove easy to explain and transmit. In Mary Laven’s chapter, we learn important lessons on the multi-layered facets of embodied belief and how they appeal in different ways to different strata of society.

Jacob Copeman’s ‘Protest re-embodied: shifting technologies of moral suasion in India’ (Chapter 8) takes us into a different world of body manipulations. He explores how bodily techniques are used to articulate protest in India. Classically, fasting is a means of expressing discontent, but more recently, blood and organ donation have become more common. Copeman investigates the complex interrelationships between these new technologies, concepts of the body and religious or spiritual beliefs. He argues that donating blood is a way for the donor to reach multiple recipients as well as their dependents and descendents; as blood donation is both anonymous and done in a way that separates blood into several components used in different patients, donors believe that this technology might benefit a large group of people. In turn, the larger the number of recipients, the more spiritual merit the donor receives. Blood giving is not only motivated medically, but also entangled in a wide range of beliefs. It replaces, for instance, other practices such as offering animal blood, whilst at the same time, gives the donor the social venue to express opposition against it. The process of blood transfusion becomes entirely a political method of self-identification in terms of the religious community and of virtue. Furthermore, the substance of bloo...