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The Body in History: constructing a deep-time cultural history

Oliver J.T. Harris and John Robb1

This article (published only on www.academia.edu) summarises some key arguments from: The Body in History: Europe from the Palaeolithic to the Future, by John Robb and Oliver Harris, with Dušan Borić, Jessica Hughes, Maryon McDonald, Preston Miracle, Robin Osborne, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Simon Stoddart, Marilyn Strathern, and Sarah Tarlow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2013).

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The book is Winner of the 2013 American Academy of Publishers PROSE award for Excellence in the Social Sciences, and Winner of the 2013 American Academy of Publishers PROSE award for Excellence in Archaeology and Anthropology.

This article may be cited as: Harris, O.J.T and Robb, J. (2015). The Body in History: constructing a deep-time cultural history. Article posted on academia.edu 25 April 2015.

As this article is a brief summary, we give only a few key references; for full bibliography, see the published volume.

Introduction: Body Worlds and history

Body Worlds

The body is the medium of society and of history. Imagine any moment, built of small gestures. You’re consulting a doctor; she greets you informally but adopts a more formal tone when asking you to reveal private areas of your body for medical examination. You’re standing in a queue, and the man next to you shifts his body slightly in response to the distance between you. Watching someone walk or sit, you judge without thinking their gender, their class, their psychological state. You’re choosing what to eat; your internal dialogue juggles desires, calories, body image, and psychological state to come up with a verdict about what you “deserve” to have. And so on, ad infinitum. Where do the reflexes and moralities of the body come from? Every moment of embodiment could be the subject of a realm of exegesis. And the exegeses of a thousand moments would not remain fragmentary, but would overlap and converge to reveal something substantial if never quite stable, individually enacted but shared and binding us to others, an intersubjective world coherent even when riven with contradictions.

Bodies do not exist alone; they are never cut off and sealed from the world around them. They have buried reflexes, structures, meanings, experiences. Rather than think just about bodies, then, we need to think about body worlds. A “body world” is the whole ensemble of experiences, habits, practices, fields of action and modes of representation through which bodies come into being. They encompass ways of moving, of eating, of dying. They encompass how gender difference can be produced through performance, and how personhood is created relationally. They encompass power relations, how bodies are produced through a particular nexus of

1 Harris: School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, ojth1@le.ac.uk; Robb: Department

of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, jer39@cam.ac.uk. 2 This book emerged from a Leverhulme Trust funded research programme at Cambridge and Leicester

universities (2005-2010). The research involved five sub-projects: Palaeolithic and Mesolithic bodies (Dušan Borić and Preston Miracle); Bronze Age bodies (Katharina Rebay-Salisbury and Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen); Classical Bodies (Jessica Hughes, Robin Osborne and Simon Stoddart), early modern bodies (Sarah Tarlow) and modern medical bodies (Maryon McDonald); the book’s epilogue is by Marilyn Strathern. John Robb was the project PI and he and Oliver Harris collaborated in the overall theoretical framework and synthesis. Each chapter was written by Robb and Harris, with guidance, help and support from the specialists who are recognised as chapter co-authors. The book as a whole thus reflects the extraordinary support and intellectual generosity of our colleagues.

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actions that can be controlled or enforced by others. The very fleshy embodied experiences of moving, eating, being well or ill, and touching others, are part of body worlds. Representations of bodies both distort and orient them. Body worlds are continually produced and reproduced by the actions of the very bodies they in turn help to shape, an ongoing assemblage of people, things, representations, beliefs and more.

The body’s sociality has been explored by some of social science’s most incisive thinkers, in traditions stretching back to Mauss’s (1973 [1935]) techniques du corps. One thinks of Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu, 1977) discussion of habitus as the embodied principles through which people improvise their way through life, and of Foucault’s (1977) reading of cultural power as a diffuse discourse instilled in bodily habits and reflexes. Sociologists have seen the body as a locus of social capital (Shilling, 2003), and as the medium of encounter, interaction and self-recognition (Goffman, 1974, Turner, 1969). We cannot theorise the body without concepts drawn from feminist analyses, for instance Butler’s (1993) compelling analysis of gender as a regulatory ideal enacted through performative regimes and Haraway’s (1991) questioning of categories of “nature” and “culture” through the concept of cyborg bodies. Anthropologists have problematized the ontological status of the body, for instance showing how the human body is not a self-evident object in animist societies (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). The body’s fundamental characteristics such as boundedness and gender are locally defined and relational rather than obvious and absolute (Strathern, 1988).

Understood thus, the body is never “nature” or “culture”. Stereotypically, many Western people have an almost irresistible compulsion to categorise it as one or the other, usually seeing the biological body as a universal, pre-existing material substrate upon which the culturally particular social body is written. The biological body thus becomes determining (as in most “naturalist” analyses) or trivial (as in most “constructivist” analyses) (Shilling, 2003). But although this traditional dichotomy exerts all the fatal suction of a black hole, it doesn’t actually help us understand the body. Yes, the body has non-trivial material structures and processes – procreation, growth, metabolism, illness, death; yes, it is culturally contingent and experienced in all the ways suggested above. But its material processes form central themes of any body world – what is a body world without the dramas of work, food, shelter, illness, sex, and the biographical narrative of birth, growth and death? Conversely, the body’s material processes are social, not pre-social. As social and economic patterns in genetics, health, nutrition, and demography make clear, social relations assort the genes recombining in new bodies, they feed, shelter, work, afflict, heal, and kill the body (Sofaer, 2006). Even medical phenomena, while undoubtedly biological, come into being through “local biologies” (Lock and Kaufert, 2001). If we pre-emptively excise the biological body from its social context, we remove it from whatever makes it the particular biological organism it is, and from its history and evolution.

Body worlds have a history

We’ve use above moments of our own experience – potentially your own experience – to evoke the experiential density of body worlds. But this is simply a tactic to enlist the immediacy of familiarity and inner knowledge; with enough knowledge, one could do the same through any historical moment of human experience. Moreover, body worlds do not merely extend back through history; they have histories. These dense nexuses of experience, meaning and structure are embedded in time, and they have historical momentum. People can innovate and improvise, they can change how they understand and experience their bodies; but they never do so from an instant of ahistorical freedom, from a blank slate. History channels the body. To take just one example (though a critically important one): as noted above, we are taught to see the body inescapably as either material or social, as either “nature” or “culture”, or as a composite of these essentially separable abstract essences. We are generally taught that “nature” is material, universal and prior, with “culture” as a superstrate laid upon it. This dichotomy underlies both popular discourses such as “nature vs. nurture” and intellectual tools such as the opposition between “sex” and “gender”; it channelled the 18

th-

20th

century growth of medicine with all of its huge social effects, it provided a context for influential social philosophies from Darwinism to Marxism, and it continues to shape how we understand ourselves and interact with technology – for instance, in the current fashion for expecting DNA to provide a simple bottom-line truth about illness, genealogy, lifespan and everything else. Yet it is neither intellectually defensible nor philiosopically inevitable. It results from a particular moment in 17

th century invention of nature, and it is in

itself an evolution of a medieval debate about spirit and matter. As a historical ontology, it has a centuries-long momentum, and we remain locked into it in many ways.

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Now imagine historical moments analogous to our own experience. On his deathbed, a medieval man confesses the inevitable sins of the flesh, hoping to shorten the time he will spend in the torments of Purgatory expiating them. A Bronze Age woman dresses herself with a rich array of ornamentation; how does this act change her body and her self? A person walking the streets of Classical Athens encounters lifelike, nude male statues; what is the logic which makes this the natural encounter of bodies there? Twenty thousand years ago, people drew and sculpted the bodies they thought surrounded them; why did it make sense for them to see not humans or animals but paradoxical beings which were both or neither? History is the accumulation of an infinity of such moments; human history is a history of body worlds and how they changed.

Constructing a longue durée cultural history, or, How this project relates to conventional histories of the body

Reconstructing a history of body worlds requires us to develop some new concepts about the structure of history itself. A history of moments of experience will be infinitely variegated, a history of immediate, evanescent differences. A history of major cultural systems will follow a different rhythm, slower, simpler, moving in centuries or millennia, grand rather than intricate. Somewhere in between lies a history of social institutions and practices, moderately local, a century or two long. Here we must recognise how dependent histories – and the disciplines they are written within – are upon unspoken comfort zones of scale. We are familiar with the idea of deep time histories from “natural” causes such as climate change. But cultural histories tend to cluster on the level of a few years, decades or at most a century or two. Beyond this, most academics get uncomfortable; we see big-scale histories as either consisting of generalisations which steamroll over local discrepancies and obliterate the real truth of the evidence, or as deterministic structures which write human action and choice out of history.

This usefully helps us consider how this project relates to extant literatures on the history of the body. For all of the historic periods we discuss, scholars have written extensively on body history; indeed, for most periods, the body figures in several more or less disjunct literatures (e.g. histories of gender and sexuality, religion, medicine and science, art and literature, popular culture, etc.). We have learned much from all of these valuable literatures. But each also has its zone of applicability, its disciplinary comfort zone: how it defines the problem to solve, the potential evidence base, the tools to be used, and the space of possible answers. These create an intellectual room within which scholars can work productively. But here we work at a larger scale, asking what lies outside such rooms and how they connect to each other. For example, many medieval body scholars argue creatively about how the medieval body related to theological concepts such as the soul. But this discussion often floats apart from discussions of medieval medicine and science, magic and folklore, sexuality, everyday practices, and so on. We’re interested in how these varied medieval discourses related to each other within a body world. More importantly, medieval body history takes for granted a world conditioned by the existence of a monotheistic, doctrinal religion which had an inherent interest in regulating the body. How did the very existence of such a religion shape the body world? We can only answer this by comparing medieval body worlds with ones which lack one – the Classical or prehistoric periods, for instance.

Working at novel scales requires different intellectual tools. Scale is the critical issue. With a few high-profile but rarely imitated exceptions (e.g. Laqueur, 1991), archaeologists, historians, and Classicists have tended to operate exclusively at the small scale of a few decades up to a century or two, much like the scale of ethnographic studies in anthropology. Large-scale studies have been suspect on political grounds (are we simply providing meta-narratives which prioritise some aspects of humanity’s history, exclude others, and legitimate our contemporary politics?) and on empirical grounds (the larger the generalisation, the easier it is to find exceptions which apparently contradict it). Underlying such critiques is the assumption that large scale analyses essentially have the same structure and goals as close-to-the-ground analyses; the difference is just how much ground they cover. This is coupled with the assumption that, since we are telling the history of humanity, the only real bottom line for ground-truthing statements is close-to-the-ground human experience.

What is not appreciated is that, when we work at different scales, we pose qualitatively different kinds of questions and get qualitatively different kinds of answers. Let’s illustrate this by example. The figure below shows different ways of depicting the body in Europe between 4500 and 500 BC. What question does each group of objects pose? At the smallest scale (the bottom row of images), the question we ask is why people chose to represent the body in different ways in different valleys of the Alps some five millennia ago. The differences are interesting, and inform us about the way in which particular valleys had their own local

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traditions of representing elements of the human body. The explanatory concepts needed here deal mostly with local cultural politics. When we broaden the scale of analysis to across Europe in the fourth millennium BC (the middle layer), we can see how these Alpine traditions have far more in common with one another in how they represent gender, for example, than they do with the Portuguese plaquette on the right of the image. The question thus becomes one about broad regional cultures and their coherence and boundedness, emphasising a constrast between the Alpine area and the Atlantic area. Finally at the top level, the act of comparing third-millennium BC human representations with Neolithic ones from two millennia earlier and Classical ones from two millennia later reveals fundamental differences in the ontology of the body.

Figure 1. Different frames of comparison pose different historical questions about the body.

As this example shows, changing scales does not mean merely generalising about more things. It means telling stories which have different units of analysis and causal factors. Thinking in a multiscalar fashion lets us link our concepts of body worlds to other ideas. We can think about how on-the-ground moments - people cooking, eating or burying a loved one - link to broader fields of action, in these cases traditions of cuisine, consumption and death. We can link the momentary not just to understandings of these things, but to the very potentials of the body, to its ontological capacities, to the things it can do and the ways in which it can be deployed in certain contexts. Moreover, many of these units and factors are emergent: they only become apparent or effective at a given scale of analysis.

Yet simply examining a series of contextual body worlds one after the other, even at multiple scales, does not help us understand how change takes place, how some understandings of the body begin to fade to be replaced by others. Change itself is multiscalar: a period which straddled vastly different ways of life transitionally on the scale of millennia may have afforded generations of apparently unchanging human existence, lived on the ground. People act on the ground in ways that both sustains and alters the fields of action that exist (as in traditional models of practice). But simultaneously, there are also ways in which whole new fields can come into being. Examples of this include the new kinds of human animal relations that affect the body in farming, the role of metal in decorating the body or how medicine allows bodies to operate in new spheres and in new ways. People can also reconfigure and restructure the role and relationship between fields of action, as took place in the complex relationship between science and religion through the Early Modern period. At one scale change is happening constantly, ebbing and flowing as body worlds shift and realign

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themselves. This means that body worlds are never homogenous or universal, they are themselves contingent, full of multiple views, contradictions and exceptions; we do not claim that every case will conform to generalisations. Critically though as we will see multiplicity in this manner is not a product simply of large-scale analysis: the small-scale is multiple too.

Our project here – understanding European bodies in deep time -- requires us to work between anthropological time and archaeological time, to offer a truly multiscalar history. The small-scale has to be understood not just as the predetermined outcome of regular larger-scale processes playing out, but as a drama of variation, contingency and local experience. Conversely, and perhaps more controversially, the large-scale cannot be seen simply as the cumulative outcome of all the small-scale events taking place on-the-ground being tacked together. Our project here, thus, does not replicate, ignore or efface period-specific body histories; it provides a context for them. Each period’s body history unfolds within, and to some extent takes for granted, the conceptual space of its own body world; in The Body in History we explore where these conceptual spaces come from.

The long history of the human body in Europe

So what does the long history of the human body look like? We here summarise some of the major outlines of the body’s history – in Europe; we make no claim that this is a universal history.

The Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic: fluid bodies

From about 40,000 years ago, when “anatomically modern humans” appeared in Europe, to the spread of farming between 6500 and 4000 BC, Europe was a continent of hunter gatherers. Even across this expanse of some 30,000 years and its enormous environmental and cultural variation, there are commonalities in how the body was understood. In the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, we find relatively few images of human beings compared to animals. There are exceptions – most notably the famous (and wildly mis-named) “Venus” figurines – which show that in some contexts it was appropriate to think in terms of definitively human bodies. But generally people seemed less concerned with defining a specifically human body, at least one that existed in a way opposed to animality. In contrast, mixtures of humans and animals in art, such as the famous Upper Palaeolithic “lion-man” statue of Hohlenstein Stadel, Germany, the “anthropomorphs” on engraved bones and stones from the French Palaeolithic, or the Mesolithic fish/human hybrids of Lepenski Vir (Serbia), indicate that transformation, permeability and fluidity were critical themes (Borić, 2005a, 2007).

Beyond artistic representation there were many other elements to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic body world. In daily life we see occasions when great emphasis was placed on particular forms of embodied skill, in hunting, in the knapping of flint, in the shaping of objects. Burials of whole bodies were rare, and in the case of the famous Gravettian burials of the Upper Palaeolithic often restricted to rather unusual individuals. Where we do get larger cemeteries, such as at the famous Mesolithic examples at Skateholm (Sweden) or Vedbaek (Denmark), we again see mixing of humans and animals together, and the treatment of animal remains in ways that are analogous with human beings. Grave goods across the period speak less of status and achievement than the particular personal and ritual relationships out of which bodies were understood as emerging. These cemeteries should not distract us, however. For most people, death practices accomplished the act of dissolving the body into the surrounding environment – another act of transformation across what we would understand as fixed boundaries of humans, animal and landscape (Mircacle and Borić, 2008).

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Figure 2. Palaeolithic cave art showing hybrid figures (redrawn by Vicki Herring).

Bounding the body: the European Neolithic

With the Neolithic, most Europeans shifted from hunting and gathering to farming. Leaving aside the question of how this complex transformation took place (Robb, 2013), it is clear than in many ways the Neolithic brought with it a new kind of body world. In much of Europe, mobile lifeways gave way to sedentary villages. Alongside these villages, other places in the landscape become increasingly formalized through the construction of cemeteries in some areas and monuments in others. Sedentism and architectural change introduced a greater level of routinized habituation in spatiality. The same is true for other aspects of daily life such as eating, social encounters, and ways of dying. Through these new kinds of materiality and spatiality, the differences between different people and different groups was increasingly subdivided, formalised repetitively and fixed through technologies which acted upon the body. The result was a more highly bounded and structured body world. This sharper emphasis on defining the body within a fixed social geography had a number of extensions, including long-distance trade for ornaments whose significance emerged from their travel across borders and at times increased levels of socially embedded violence. A more bounded body world was also evident in representations such as figurines: human-animal hybrids vanish almost entirely, leaving in many places a clear ontological gulf between humans and animals, and the balance of imagery shifts away from animals and towards the socialized human body as a focus of interest.

Yet despite the greater emphasis on the human body itself, we do not see any attempt to generate a single, homogeneous dominant notion of what a body is, or how gender or prestige should be marked upon it. Figurines, archaeologically the best-known mode of representing the human body in much of Europe, in no way offer a singular mode of presenting the human body itself. Instead, they present marked heterogeneity, with quite different local ways of abstracting a simplified representation from the complex affordances of a living body, emphasizing different qualities and affordances. This is true not only in the figurine heartland of Southern and Eastern Europe; five body representations are known for Neolithic Britain and they all differ in form, material and depiction of gender. Whilst the human body is increasingly emphasised in art, whilst its actions were increasingly guided through a materially structured world, it appears that it was the body’s potential for difference rather than similarity that was critical to the Neolithic body world.

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Figure 3. The body’s capacity for difference: heterogeneity in Italian Neolithic figurines (image, Robb)

Copper Age and Bronze Age bodies and their social relations

This emphasis on the body’s potential for difference changes dramatically between about 3500 and 2400 BC. This period (called the Late Neolithic, the Copper Age or the Early Bronze Age in various parts of Europe) was a major watershed, a sweeping shift from one form of prehistoric tribal world to another. It created a new Bronze and Iron Age world which lasted up to the Classical era. Such a change necessarily involved a great transformation of the body world.

Instead of an emphasis on difference, similarity between bodies becomes increasingly central, and in particular the potential for bodily similarities to be deployed in ways that emphasise specifically gendered forms of political identity. Notably, clearly gendered sets of prestige objects emerge. Weapons and ornaments became increasingly central to gendering men and women respectively. Unlike Neolithic identity symbols, these central icons of gender were replicated across different contexts. In life, these were made with great skill, traded long distances, and carried, worn and used in many contexts of daily life; death we see people buried with gender-specific status kits; in art, men and women are represented in parallel ways on monumental stone statue stela across Europe from Spain to the Ukraine. Metalwork arose in this period principally as a means of enhancing the body, tying into visual idioms equating colour and shine with social prominence and giving both men and women the paraphernalia to perform ideals of gendered personhood. For women particularly, ornamentation became a way of situating the body in complex social networks (Sørensen, 1997). The body of “Ötzi”, the Alpine “Ice Man” – bedecked with multiple forms of weaponry, engaged in long-distance travel and killed violently –, suggests how through such objects a particular embodied habitus worked its way into the bodies of the living.

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This new way of displaying identity and status on the body did not simply appear out of nowhere, but rather emerged through the period, drawing on older Neolithic ways of doing things but reorganizing them around central concepts of gendered prestige. Gender, for example, was no doubt an essential element of body worlds prior to this period, but it seems to have been situationally emergent in particular contexts and at particular times. From the Copper Age onwards gender appears to have been more of a cross-context structuring principle in a way familiar in later periods, possibly signalling a change in the definitional nature of gender itself. Similarly, the material foci of prestige in the Copper and Bronze Age -- weapons, hunting, ornaments and display -- were not simply invented from nowhere. Instead we can identify how specific elements of the Neolithic world, from the construction of standing stones to elements of interpersonal violence become linked and reworked. Burial provides another example of change building upon continuity. The rise of cremation throughout much of Europe in the mid-2

nd millennium BC is often seen as an abrupt and

dramatic change, but when examined close-up in detail, this transition happened through the ongoing accumulation of minor changes of existing practice and through gradual shifts in preference among alternative ways of dealing with the dead (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury, 2008a, b, Sørensen and Rebay, 2008). The body drives these changing histories as it knits together different fields of action into an increasingly homogeneous understanding of what a body is, and what a body should aim to be. The initial Bronze Age is sometimes seen as a “rise of the individual”, a moment in a meta-narrative connecting prehistory with Classical Greek values and the rise of the West. This isn’t what happens! Rather we see a switch from one form of body world in the Neolithic, built upon a form of relational identity that emphasises the body’s potential for difference, to another, equally relational emphasis on the similarities, comparison and competition, and display. In the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, especially in the Mediterranean, such logic began to intersect with increasingly accumulative economies; the result was increasing levels of hierarchy lived through the elaborated bodies of the elite.

Figure 4. Male and female statue-stelae from Lunigiana, Italy (Image: Robb).

Bodies and politics: the Classical world

The “Classical body” – to us today, the phrase immediately conjures up images of white marble statues, the nude male athlete or warrior. Scholars often equate the “Classical body” with such statues for good reasons. Not only are they the most distinct and visible imagery representing the bodies of Classical Greece and Rome; they introduced a “naturalistic” way of showing the body in anatomical detail and in movement which has supplied the standard for Western artistic representation ever since. Art historians often describe Classical statuary as a great leap forward for art, the moment the static, rigid images of the Archaic period gave way to a more fluid and human representation. This particular vision of the body has been linked to the growth of humanism, philosophy and democracy.

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Yet if we step back from such often teleological meta-narratives, the Classical body of art is only one of a cacophony of bodies which made up the body world of ancient Greece. Classical bodies were lumpy, old, young, fat, thin, just like bodies in other times and places. Important distinctions such as citizen and non-citizen, free and slave, divine and human were not visible in statuary; it screened out bodies formed by work or made grotesque by disease or even poverty. There were separate and complex discourses of medical and scientific bodies and of ritually pure and impure bodies (Osborne, 2011). Women, supposedly sequestered at home, go about their business. Gender was ambiguous and contested; the world was deeply gendered, far more unequally than ours, but male writers promulgating restrictive ideals often at odds with daily experience. The Classical body world involved a fecund and often disorderly multiplicity of bodies; in contrast to the medieval and modern periods, beyond gender, there seems to have been little attempt to closely regulate what people thought about or believed about bodies.

Classical art thus reveals not the natural truth of the world, but rather a particular technology for representing it, one that emphasised one aspect of the body world over others. Why this ideal, presented in this form? The answer lies in politics and especially class. The central image of sculpture was the male nude, idealised and generic. Their muscle-defined bodies emphasise a particular form of normative masculinity. The fields of action represented are warfare, athletics and public dedications; all forms of action which helped constitute a particular class of citizenry and which were economically and socially unavailable to the vast majority of people. These thus were aspirational bodies, the kind of body you ought to have if you were (or wanted to be) a member of this class of people. Their “naturalistic” style – which presents a quasi-real body whose individuality has been carefully blurred, made generic – gives a vehicle to project into which the self-image of citizens could be projected, enlisting them in the projects of a class-divided society. The closest analogue nowadays is probably the generic-yet-individual bodies of clothing catalogues and shop mannequins, which present bodies whose level of individualizing detail is carefully calculated to suggest but not determine identity and back-story, contingent bodies which have the potentiality to be any viewer who subscribes to their ideal. The emergence of Classical art is thus not a transformation in artistic vision, or a new emphasis on democracy, humanism or individualism. Instead it represents a clear development from the emphasis that had been developing across Europe since the Bronze Age linking particular kinds of representation to particular forms of body and particular claims to social and political status.

Figure 5. The nude male in Classical sculpture (British Museum; Berlin Museum; photos: Robb).

The body and God: the medieval body

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If there was no direct or centralised attempt to control what you thought about the body in the Classical world, this was to change dramatically in medieval times. A new monotheistic religion, Christianity, was above all a religion of bodily paradox and regulation. Its foundation in miraculous bodies (virgin birth, walking on water, healing, resurrecting) was predicated upon an opposition of daily experience and higher truth, material evidence and inner spirit. From theories of the body to eating, praying, clothing, movement, sex, the Church laid down guidelines about all sorts of elements of the medieval body world in an attempt to police sin and to keep the soul pure. Whilst the soul might seem like the primary focus of Christianity, it was often the body that was the focus of practical action, whether as holy, incorruptible and miraculous bodies of Christ and the saints to the inherently sinful flesh of real bodies.

Figure 6. Christian bodies in art. The left hand stained glass window represents pilgrims, the one on the right sufferers in prayer for a miracle. Both photos from Shrine of St Thomas, Canterbury Cathedral (photos: Robb).

Yet the medieval body world was about much more than religious regulation. We can identify at least two other ways of understanding and experiencing the body – what we might term modalities – in this period. The first was a growing scientific understanding that drew directly on Classical beliefs about the four humours which made up the body (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) and whose balance maintained its health. While the moral body was centered around the choices made by the person as a moral agent, this body was permeable, invaded by the influences of flood, climate, winds, seasons, stars and planets, magical substances and qualities. It was, fundamentally, a microcosmic body which replicated the relationality of the world around it. Secondly, alongside religious and scientific/ medical views, another modality of the body world existed. This was the lived body, a body of vitality – work, song, dance, sex, eating, sport, fighting, dress and magnificence, pleasure and pain. This body is much less visible textually than religious and scientific bodies – in some ways it is visible mostly in how it shaped the contours of religious and scientific views by providing an omnipresent tension, a substrate, explanandum, or thing to act upon and against. It is evident mostly in appetites, the chronic unruliness of the body, and the magnificence of princes. But once we break through the textual barrier and recognise a medieval body full of vitality and experience, we can actually understand many of the medieval paradoxes of the body. To take one prominent example (Bynum, 1995): religious views of the resurrection of the body after death were full of contradictions; for centuries scholars tried to come up with coherent accounts of whether the body would be resurrected whole even if buried in pieces, whether the resurrected would have to spend eternity in the form of the decrepit aged bodies they died as or would be transformed into a more perfect age, and so on. Why not just dispense with resurrecting the body and have people live on eternally as pure spirit? Theologically, this would be a much tidier solution. The reason was because individual identity was grounded above all in the lived body. If you were promoted to eternity only as a pure spirit without age, gender, individual bodily uniquenesses, and sensation, would it really be you living on?

The really interesting thing about the medieval body world is not only that it is multiple – all body worlds are multiple – but it is how explicit this multiplicity is. Medieval theorists repeatedly attempted to create a grand synthesis of the body, usually via a syncretism of religion and science under a theological umbrella (for instance, Mandeville’s Travels is in some ways a journey among all the possible varieties of bodies – normal, holy, splendid, unnatural). But such attempts to unite human bodies under a single religious

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ontology acted to more closely define the differences between alternative ways of thinking about the body. The example of resurrection has already been mentioned. It led to religious texts that proclaim one truth whilst around the margins dance fanciful or obscene images that speak of another. Throughout people’s lives they switched between these different ways of understanding the body, the different modalities of the body world, tacitly negotiating with the different demands placed on them by the multiple contexts of daily life.

Figure 6. The three medieval ways of understanding the body in tension.

The body and knowledge: into modernity

The traditional academic narrative about knowledge through the Early Modern and Modern periods is one of progress, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment stripping back misunderstandings and superstition to disclose truth. But this narrative itself is part of the cosmology of the Enlightenment, an explanandum rather than an explanation. In theories of the body, new and sometimes remarkably efficacious metaphors arose, but they were always complemented by alternative, contradictory beliefs.

The new metaphor for the body was the machine. In part this can be attributed to the rise in anatomy from Vesalius onwards, which began to take the body to pieces and assign functions to different elements, tendons as levers, hearts as pumps and so on. The extension of anatomy to autopsy furthered this analogy, as illness, defined as mechanical malfunction, now required investigation and explanation. Although mechanistic knowledge was originally formulated within a Biblical framework, by the 17

th century it had become

ontologically independent of both Classical roots and religion (God, as for Newton, was now outside the clock-like, rule-bound world). This happened within the concurrent development of the concept of material “nature” as separate from culture or spirit, and of a suite of scientific technologies for investigating it objectively rather than subjectively; it is in this sense that the idea of a biological body separate from a social body is rooted in the 17

th century (cf. above). Yet as important as this growth in science and Cartesian philosophy was, the idea

of “”the body as machine” spread also, and perhaps more so, via social developments. As Michel Foucault (1977) has shown, from the 18

th century onwards, new modes of discipline were also helping to spread ideas

of the body as machine both at work, in prisons, hospitals, schools and even at home. The core idea was that the individual body was an element trained to serve a particular role in a larger social machine.

Yet the body-as-machine did not wipe out other, older understandings, many of which actually grew stronger in this period. The idea of a microcosmic, permeable, environmentally situated body continued continued through this period to the present day. Religious dualisms such as the battle between body and soul, did not vanish but indeed became more pointed; the mechanistic body was so clearly an empty material

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shell for the increasingly homeless soul. Through time, this underwrote a schism between bodies as machines, studied in materialistic sciences, and bodies as elusive, interior persons, studied and experienced in theology, psychology, literature and portraiture and other discourses of interiority. Meanwhile, in spite of theological belittling of the body as a worthless material shell, medieval ideas of the lived body and its social importance lived on in dress, foodways, the pleasures of the flesh and deathways, with bodies rewarded by imposing burials or punished by being gibbeted or dissected rather than buried. Finally, magical and ‘folk beliefs’ continued to attribute innate powers to the body, from the use of “mummy” – dried, powdered human flesh – as a medical ingredient to the power of corpses, particularly hanged or murdered ones, to cure illnesses, identify their killers, or bring good fortune. What it is critical to realise is that these four modalities – bodies as machines, as inner persons, as lived social display and as innately potent objects – coexisted often within the same people. Priests who decried the body as worthless, rotting flesh were nevertheless themselves interred with pomp and circumstance in prominent churches. Scientists such as William Harvey, formulating new mechanistic models of anatomy, also believed in the magical power of the dead corpse (Tarlow, 2010). In going from the medieval to the Modern period, what really changed was not the replacement of one body discourse with another, but the replacement of theology by mechanism as an always incomplete meta-rubric claiming to govern this congeries of contradiction.

The medieval to modern period affords a unique opportunity for watching transformations not in single ways of understanding the body but in complex systems of multimodalities. At any moment several ways of understanding the body were in play, existing contextually, sometimes virtually unnoticed, sometimes in tensions which generated polemics and cultural struggles. Over time, individual strands morphed and evolved; but the overarching relations between them also evolved. One unprecedented and particularly interesting feature of these periods is the emergence of the idea that it was necessary to have a single, universal theory of the body – a meta-theory encompassing and regulating all experiences of the body. In medieval times a theological view of the body supplied such a meta-theory, always claiming but never achieving hegemony; through the 19

th and 20

th century a materialistic, mechanistic view increasingly has taken

on the same role (Figure 7).

The body and technology: into the 21st century

Through the 19th

century, the balance of these alternative modalities of the body shifted. By the middle of the 19

th century the two great materialist edifices of Marx and Darwin, combined with a substrate of

biology, physics, and chemistry, were increasingly invoked to explain important aspects of the body world without reference to God. Throughout the 19

th and especially the 20

th century the metaphor of a machine

became ever more dominant as the body’s parts and functional relationships were defined in ever greater detail. Even the brain is increasingly explained today in terms of chemistry and biology. Yet understanding and experiencing the body as a machine continues to run in tension with understanding the body as person. In many situations we shift seamlessly between modalities of the body without even noticing that we are doing so: when you discuss medicine, metaphors of function, repair and replacement of an impersonal machine take over, and when you hug a child to comfort it, the contact of bodies is a contact of persons. This tension is evident above all on borderlands where ambiguity needs to be policed; medicine is full of practices which depersonalise bodies in order to be able to view or touch them, specialists argue about whether mental illness should be treated through drugs or through therapy, and when bodies are treated too explicitly as machines – for instance when transplants dissociate parts of bodies from one person and associate them with another, or when drugs or prosthetics enhance our athletic capabilities too much – it provokes bioethical regulation (McDonald, 2011, Strathern, 1992, 2005). It is within this tension that technology is sometimes seen as threatening a radical transformation of our bodies. As cybernetic prosthesis become more common, as the potential for organs grown in labs to be transplanted becomes more real, the possibility of the human body really becoming machine emerges. Whether lauded as posthuman cyborgs or feared as the end of our “natural” humanity, the tensions between the body as person and body as machine run rampant from lurid tabloid headlines to the sober discussions of ethics panels. Yet this distinction, between body as person and body is machine, is a creation of our specific history of course, of our separation of nature and culture and body and mind. Technology is not an external force acting upon a pre-existing natural body, but one element of a body world that both forges and is forged by the bodies that are at its heart.

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Figure 7. Pathways of transformation in multi-modal beliefs about the body, between medieval and modern..

Meta-lessons: change and the nature of deep-time cultural history

So what does the long history of the human body in Europe tell us beyond the narrative we have described above? Whilst each individual study offers much, it is together that we can really say something about body worlds, and about the scale and pattern of history at the largest scale. Many of the points made at the start of this article – that history is multiscalar and that bodyworlds are not homogenous – have been brought out, but they have wider consequences for how we think about bodies, change, continuity and history over the long-term.

Multimodality, or We are always switching between multiple bodies

Body worlds are always multimodal: body worlds are always made up of multiple ways of understanding the body that contradict one another. They are not patternless and infinitely unconstrained, but they never have a single totalizing gestalt. The differences within these do not merely represent alternative ways of understanding the body. Instead these differences are fundamentally ontological, in that bodies can do different things within these different modalities in reality (Harris and Robb, 2012). And why not? The body is inherently a complex, paradoxical object and we think about it for all different purposes and contexts, so it should hardly surprise us that a flexible, working set of concepts should give us different ways of

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seeing it. Usually multimodality is so functional as to be invisible. It is only when we expect a priori a single logic of the body – or when groups within a society attempt to impose one, as with religion in the medieval period and perhaps with science today – that multimodality becomes painfully evident.

Process: How change happens

What does this history teach us about how change happens over deep time? The first (and perhaps obvious) point is that change never results from the simple action of a prime mover. In order to identify a singular driving force, the causal factor has to be external to the thing it causes, and in the case of the body at least, this can never be so. Body worlds encompass social action; whatever factor we might want to identify as a prime mover for changing the body already contains the body. To take an example, we might ascribe the rise of elaborately ornamented elite bodies in the later Bronze Age to the rise of metals as a medium of value and transaction. But metals cannot be taken as a prime mover disembedded from sociality and the body; it is clear that the primary and original role of metals in European prehistory in the preceding Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age was neither as an economic commodity nor as a sharper cutting edge, but as a form of body enhancement. To take another example, Classical Greek class politics clearly called certain ways of expressing Classical bodies into existence, but these same politics already embodied (so to speak) existing ideas about gender and bodily distinction. Similarly, when the 17

th century development of science split understandings of

bodies into biological bodies and spiritual interiority, it developed this distinction based upon pre-existing medieval understandings of the relationship between matter and spirit in the human body.

Secondly, as these examples also show, new understandings of the body are rarely – if ever – actually new. Rather, ontologies of the body are multimodal and the practices based on them are amazingly diverse. What looks (at one scale of analysis) like a sudden invention of a new means of engaging with the body almost always turns out to be a continuation or development of some previous mode, perhaps a minor one now taking on greater importance. Thus the opposition between material body and soul was present but not particularly central in Classical beliefs; it was picked up, expanded and elaborated to become the central tenet of a continental-wide late Classical and medieval religion. Or the political and gendered status that began to be expressed on Bronze Age and Iron Age bodies in art and life could be expanded and emphasised until they were critical to the worlds of art, politics and society during the Classical period.

If we are not therefore trying to come up with simple big stories about how metals caused Bronze Age bodies or the invention of some new scientific apparatus caused modernity, and big-scale cultural history is about continuity as much as it is about change, what is the challenge we face in writing such a history? It is basically one of relating scales, for instance showing how changes in practice can eventually change larger scale ontological structures.

1. One mechanism has to do with the fields of action through which a particular modality of embodiment is enacted. At some historical points, particular fields of action within a body world become increasingly important, intersecting and coming to dominate others. Classical sculpture innovated a new means for representing embodied political ideals; it did this so successfully that it became the visual idiom of class within the much larger worlds of Roman and Renaissance Europe. Anatomical dissection is another example. It began on a relatively small scale in the 16

th century

within the framework of revealing God’s handiwork and providing public spectacle; by the 17th

century, it had been redefined to become the example par excellence of the exploration of mechanical function, a role which fit so squarely within other contemporary intellectual projects that it became a flagship field of action for the new science. In a somewhat parallel way, medicine’s success at treating illness in the modern world has given impetus for a mechanistic model of the body to spread to many fields beyond medicine itself.

2. A second model for how change happens recognises the way in which different areas of existing practice and be redefined within a newly dominant overarching perspective. For example, almost all of the practices which made up the Copper and Bronze Age body world were present in some way in the Neolithic, from hunting and warfare to ornamenting the body. As the 4

th and 3

rd millennia BC

went on, they became increasing integrated and reorganized around a coherent system of gender and political personhood. Similarly, early medieval Christianity actually introduced relatively little brand-new practices and bodies of knowledge; rather, it reordered how existing practices were understood within a new conceptualization of the body. In both these cases these practices were not new, but for

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the first time they were understood as part of a coherent ontology of a body that existed across contexts.

3. Finally there are occasions where unintended consequences of different sets of practices come together and new ways of understanding emerge from this. Unlike in the previous case where this unification happens through the emergence of new over-arching reinterpretations or conceptualizations it is the system itself that here drives the emergent outcomes. The best prehistoric example comes from transition to the Neolithic in Europe. People began farming for all sorts of reasons. People may have become sedentary as a result of farming, or in some areas become farmers as a result of being sedentary. Whatever the way in, however, the new relationships with place, space, architecture, animals and plants that resulted led to new understandings of the human body that were clearly different from those that had preceded them.

What we end up with, therefore, is not rules of change, or even a single set of processes driving change, but an analytical vocabulary for how to describe some of the processes we can see at play within a vast and varied canvas of history.

As a final point, change in body worlds is a social process, and it therefore also depends upon the nature of contemporary society. Over the span of history considered here, society has been fundamentally transformed not once but many times. Each transformation alters not only the historical “content” of culture but also the processes available for change. It is difficult not to find examples of this. With the population increase, sedentism and bounded social landscapes of the Neolithic, potential future changes were refracted through what was probably the most local social landscape in all of Europe’s history. The political reorganization of the Bronze Age also set in place a network of local elites interconnected across Europe through which innovations of specific kinds could spread rapidly. In some ways, the Classical period is unique in providing an example of a class-divided society with diverse high and low cultures which nevertheless lacked any centralized or religious aspiration towards any overarching regulation of the body. Multimodalities which might have passed unnoticed in earlier periods became the stuff of overt controversy and tension in the religious regulatory environment of medieval times. From the 16

th century onwards, the course of change was

conditioned by increasingly influential knowledge specialists – institutions of dedicated research and development – and of industrialised or technological management of bodies in work and medicine, unevenly distributed over the various fields of action reproducing body worlds. The processes by which change happens themselves change in each period. What guidance does this give us for the future of the body?

The future body?

Especially in news media, discussion of the body today is often phrased in terms of crisis. Clones and face transplants? A crisis of individuality. Legal struggles over who owns genetic data, individual patients or commercial companies? A crisis of regulation. Babies with three parents? A crisis of relatedness. And so on, and so on. If you asked most people to imagine the body of the future, they would probably come up with something which is half immortal, cybernetic robot and half copyrighted commercial product, whose important relationalities extend to a dozen attenuated biological donors and a factory making replacement parts, perhaps with a minute, residual individual psyche lurking fearfully inside somewhere and nursing its neuroses.

But, dystopic fantasies aside, is there really a crisis of the body? In the light of history, it is not so simple. Unquestionably, we are developing technologies which allow us to do things never imaginable before. But we have seen that in all periods, the body is a site of tensions and conflicts, of power, anxiety, resistance and alternative ways of experiencing resistance. It is a nostalgic fiction to imagine the body as something once stable and unquestioned, now in crisis. In some ways it is closer to the truth to say that, like university finances, by definition the body is a permanent, ongoing crisis. Yet this ferment is simply part of having a body world. Like any other period, we don’t have crisis; we have change perceived as crisis.

Moreover, our perception of crisis derives from the history of our own body world. The body has no state of nature. But the belief that modern technology leads to somewhere “unnatural” presumes that it does, and this comes from the 17

th century separation of material nature and social culture, a dichotomy ever

present in tropes about the body such as “nature vs. nurture”, genetic vs. environmental, or neurological vs. psychoanalytic. Similarly, a central element of our body world has been the idea of individualism and the

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boundedness of the body; yet this idea has a long, diverse genealogy going back to the bounded moral individual of medieval theology, the replacement of a permeable microcosmic body with the material mechanism of a specific body in medicine, and the individualising discourses of disciplinary and economic practices. In pervasive, small ways such as “personal body space”, privacy, and discourses of choice, we equate a specific physical body with a bounded psychological individual. Hence when new technologies transgress this separation, we perceive it as a crisis.

We may finish on a note of optimism. History shows us beyond question what diverse body worlds humans have inhabited, how elastic bodily normality is. Things unimaginable in one body world are taken for granted in others. Why should growing human organs in animals be inherently problematic to think about? For Paleolithic Europeans, human-animal transformations were not unusual. Why should three-parent families break our kinship categories? Neolithic people probably lived much more complex forms of situational relatedness. Conversely, things we find unproblematic, even desirable now in our body world – contraception, dissection, transplant surgery, gender-blind employment, unbaptism, even trousers – would have provoked equally heartfelt cries of crisis in past societies. This elasticity, this diversity should give us confidence in our ability to face the future. New forms of relatedness created by shared bodily substance? Non-Western people around the world live human lives with these, creating magnificently elaborate kinship classifications; why not us? Reconfigurable opt-out multiple gender systems? These may have existed even in the most dichotomised periods of gender history. Distributed personhood free of an individual body over the Internet? Our Palaeolithic ancestors may have had forms of personhood anticipating this. Somewhere in our history of body worlds, endurable human futures exist, and somewhere in our own body world, its seeds are there.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the colleagues who have collaborated with us in The Body in History, and to many other colleagues who have helped with specific aspects of the research. We also thank the Leverhulme Trust for supporting the research programme and Cambridge University Press for editorial help in producing the volume.

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