Area of inquiry (group 1): the body practice questions.

Mauss argued in a 1934 lecture that the marching step of French and British troops differed, that his own generation had been taught to swim while spitting water, and that ways of digging, sitting and walking vary systematically between societies. He concluded that such actions are

• reflexes fixed early in life that later training can modify only within very narrow limits
• learned and transmitted, so that the body is itself an instrument of culture
• natural movements that differ only because of variation in physique between populations
• individual mannerisms whose patterning is too slight to repay systematic comparison

Answer: learned and transmitted, so that the body is itself an instrument of culture

The point is that the most natural-looking uses of the body are acquired and socially transmitted, which makes physical action a legitimate ethnographic object. Mauss chose examples that seem too basic to be cultural precisely for that reason.

Ong described episodes of spirit possession on the shop floors of foreign-owned electronics plants in Malaysia around 1980. Young Malay women recently arrived from rural households would be seized on the assembly line, production stopped, and a bomoh was called to cleanse the site. Ong read these episodes as

• a residue of village religion that a generation of industrial work would remove
• a disorder produced solely by long shifts and chemical exposure inside the plants
• an idiom through which factory discipline was contested without open confrontation
• evidence that the workers had not yet adapted to the tempo and discipline of industrial employment

Answer: an idiom through which factory discipline was contested without open confrontation

Ong's reading treats the body as a site where a conflict that could not safely be voiced was expressed and had effects, since the line stopped. Reading possession as maladjustment restores the developmental story her analysis was written against.

A student writing about tattooing among dockworkers records three things: how a tattooed man describes the feel of his own marked skin; how the design identifies him to the rest of a crew; and how port authorities have at times used tattoos to register and track the workforce. In Scheper-Hughes and Lock's framework these correspond to

• the individual body-self, the social body and the body politic
• the physical body, the psychological body and the medical body
• the emic body, the etic body and the comparative body
• the lived body, the remembered body and the body as officially recorded

Answer: the individual body-self, the social body and the body politic

Their 1987 essay proposed the three as distinct analytical levels so that one practice can be followed from felt experience up to state regulation. The other triads are invented; the value of the framework is that each level asks a different question of the same material.

Douglas argued in 1966 that the substances most often treated as polluting are those that have crossed a margin of the body: spittle once it has left the mouth, hair once it has been cut, blood once it has been shed. Applied to the body, the argument implies that

• pollution rules are early approximations to hygiene later confirmed by germ theory
• what counts as dirt could be settled by chemical analysis of the substance in question
• emissions are treated as dangerous in some societies and as wholly neutral in all others
• rules about bodily margins voice a society's concern with its own boundaries

Answer: rules about bodily margins voice a society's concern with its own boundaries

Her claim is classificatory: dirt is matter out of place, so pollution beliefs map where a group draws its lines rather than what it knows about infection. Reading her as an early theorist of hygiene reverses the argument.

Wacquant trained for three years at a boxing gym on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s, taking part in the daily routine and eventually fighting in the ring. He reports that the coach corrected posture and footwork by adjusting bodies rather than by explanation, and that the fighters could not put into words what they had learned. His methodological conclusion is that

• an ethnographer studying such a setting should rely on recorded interviews with the fighters and their coach
• some competences exist only as acquired bodily capacity, so the researcher's own training becomes an instrument
• boxing is unusual in this respect, since most social skills can be stated in words by those who possess them
• the fighters were withholding what they knew because they did not trust a researcher who had come from a university

Answer: some competences exist only as acquired bodily capacity, so the researcher's own training becomes an instrument

This is apprenticeship used as method: the ethnographer's body is put through what the members' bodies are put through, because the knowledge in question does not exist in a form an interview could recover. The general point extends well beyond boxing, to any craft or discipline learned by correction rather than instruction.

Becker carried out fieldwork in a Fijian village in the late 1980s, where a person's body was routinely commented on by relatives and neighbours, and where a remark that someone had 'gone thin' was heard as a criticism of the household that should have been feeding them. Her analysis of this is that

• villagers were unusually preoccupied with appearance compared with people in the settings she had studied before
• bodily form was read as evidence about the household's care, so the body belonged to a set of relations
• the comments show that the villagers had no interest in the health of the people they were describing
• the remarks were made only about visitors and never about permanent members of the community itself

Answer: bodily form was read as evidence about the household's care, so the body belonged to a set of relations

The contrast Becker draws is with settings where the body is treated as an individual project to be worked on and displayed. In the Fijian material a body is a report on the relationships that sustain it, which is why the comment lands on the household rather than on the person.