Page 96 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE BODY AS PAN-CULTURAL UNIVERSAL 89

tactile-kinesthetic body. In the world of paleoanthropology, the body is
reduced to an object in the same sensory-effacing way that pain is
"reduced to a mere grimace." Unlike the surface that is no mere
externality but that is undergirded by a tactile-kinesthetic life and in this
sense has a living density about it, the visual body of the paleo-
anthropologist has insides only in the sense of an objectified anatomy and
physiology. As for the surface itself, only what is visible counts—thus,
behavior—and the behavioral surface with respect to tactility, for example,
is all on the side of the object. Experience in the sense of the felt
character of things is consistently discounted. It is ironic, then, that while
ancient stone tools are spoken of precisely in terms of tactility—they are
retouched or not (meaning they have been manually worked or
not)—language never opens up a vista on the tactile-kinesthetic body.
The touching/touched relationship is ignored. "My Body" is ignored.
Because the artifactual evidence is never grounded in tactile-kinesthetic
experience, the body ends up being consistently reduced to, and treated
as an object, indeed, a cultural object to the degree that although
recognized as having evolved, it is understood only in the reflected light
of its products—most notably, its stone tool-making, its cave drawings, its
burial practices.^
There is actually a compound irony here in that paleo-
anthropology—like other cultural disciplines—is itself a cultural object
complete with, for example, hunting males and gathering females, and
gathering females who being no longer periodically receptive are—in the
memorable words of several evolutionary scientists—"continuously copul-

^ This blindered understanding of the body is not unlike the postmodernist's
blindered understanding of the body, for the postmodernist too sees the body only
in a reflected light—the reflected light of language or of socio-political practices.
Thus it too reduces the body to nothing more than a cultural object—a linguistic
entity or a cultural construction inscribed with power relations. In both cases,
fundamental meanings of animate form and of tactile-kinesthetic experience are
overlooked. The body that is coincident with these fundamental meanings is precisely
the body that is a semantic template, the body that is not a mere semiotic
conveyance but is rather the very source of fundamental human concepts, indeed,
hommid concepts—the concept of power, the concept of a tool, the concept of
drawing, the concept of death, the concept of language itself. This body is nowhere
to be found in accounts which reduce the body to a cultural object.