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Body and Anthropology: Symbolic Effectiveness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

David Le Breton
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Every human community creates its own representation of its surrounding world and of the men who constitute that world. It sets out in an orderly fashion the raison d’être of social and cultural organisation, it ritualises the ties between men and their relationship with their environment. Man creates the world while the world creates man, through a relationship which varies with each society; ethnography shows us innumerable versions. Human cultures consist of symbols. It is always a matter of reducing the world to the human factor, but in line with a social imaginary quantity specific to a particular group, which is itself the tributary of its past and the possible influence of other groups.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 39 , Issue 153 , March 1991 , pp. 85 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. A. Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, Paris, Picard 1938, vol. IV, p. 557. All quotes are translated by the translator.

2. E. Cassirer, Essai sur l'homme, Paris, Minuit, 1975, p. 43 (available in English as An Essay on Man, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944).

3. On all these points, cf. David Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernité, Paris, P.U.F., 1990, chaps. 1 and 4.

4. E. de Martino, Il mondo magico. Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo, Turin, Einaudi, 1948. See also the commentaries of M. Eliade, who was much influenced by this work: M. Eliade, ‘Sciences, idéalisme et phénomènes paranormaux', Critique, no. 23, 1948, pp. 315-23.

5. Cf. J. Favret-Saada, Les Mots, la Mort, les Sorts, Paris, Gallimard, 1977.

6. See also the summary established by M. Eliade in his study of shamanism, Le Chamanisme ou les techniques archaïques de l'extase, Paris, Payot, 1983; Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter be tween Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, New York, Harper and Row, n.d., chap. V.

7. Cf. L. Dumont, Homo hierarchicus: le système des castes et ses impli cations, Paris, Gallimard, 1966 (available in English as Homo Hier archicus : Cast System and its Implications, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981); Homo aequalis: genèse et épanouissement de l'idéologie économique, Paris, Gallimard, 1977.

8. M. Leenhardt, ‘La propriété et la personne dans les sociétés archaiques', Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 1952, p. 289.

9. We hold that the modern formula of the body implies a triple break: man is divided from himself (knowledge of the body is no longer in our society a knowledge of man), cut off from others (the move from ‘us, we' to ‘me, I', which makes of the body a factor of individuation), and cut off from nature (official knowledge of the body in our so cieties, i.e. biomedical knowledge, takes its analytical principles from the body itself; the body is not an echo of the universe, a micro cosm). We cannot go into detail here on each of these levels, but refer the reader to D. Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernité, chaps. 1-4.

10. We are not concerned here with the associated question of impos ture. This is not our subject. There are enough effective ‘healers' and, a fortiori, fire-healers whose activity is very specific, to omit those who rely only on their own authority and provide an illusion rather than effectiveness - the more so in that division in material matters is difficult, arising largely from symbolic effectiveness. Strictly speaking, it is always a relationship which should be ana lysed. Belief that the possession of a university diploma could guarantee the practice of charlatans would moreover be another type of credulity.

11. Cf. Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps, chap. 9.

12. See, for example, L'Homme et sa psychose, Paris, Aubier, 1983.

13. In the Revue de l'Histoire des religions, 1949, vol. 135, no. 1, pp. 15-27.

14. C. Lévi-Strauss, ‘L'efficacité symbolique (I)', in Anthropologie struc turale, Paris, Plon, 1958, p. 218 (available in English as Structural Anthropology, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1963).

15. Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps.

16. Lévi-Strauss, ‘L'efficacité symbolique (I)', p. 207.

17. The paradox of the psychosomatic is that it opposes the basic dual ism of modem medicine and its focus on the body, contenting itself with a combination of the organic and the psychological. Many re searchers today try to invent some form of human medicine which totally escapes this legacy. The paradigm of the symbolic for consid ering the condition of man and his anchorage in the flesh approaches a physiosemanticism.

18. Lévi-Strauss, ‘L'efficacité symbolique (I)', p. 220.

19. Ibid., p. 218.

20. We are thinking, for example, of hypnotists, dowsers, invisible bandagers, fire-healers, etc.

21. C. Lévi-Strauss, ‘Le sorcier et sa magie (I)', in Anthropologie structu rale, pp. 183-203.