Page 97 - Contribution To Phenomenology

90 MAXINE SHEETS'JOHNSTONE

able.'** The striking insight of postmodern thought—that 20th century
evolutionary biology in its paleoanthropological understandings and
reconstructions has been a cultural construction—unfortunately stopped
short of its full potential, and this because the built-in opacity of
postmodernist thought with respect to the Uving body precludes realization
of how and in fact why evolutionary biology need not be so skewed.^ An
understanding of the human body as first of all a hominid body, and as
such engendering pan-hominid invariants by way of animate form and
tactile-kinesthetic experience, is the basis for an understanding of the
body as pan-cultural universal. Moreover an understanding of the human
body as a social body, and as such engendering intercorporeal in-
variants—again by way of animate form and tactile-kinesthetic experien-
ce—is a further basis for an understanding of the body as pan-cultural
universal. In other words, evolutionarily speaking, there are corporeal
matters of fact to be discovered. The hominid body, of which humans are
the latest variation, has in fundamental respects not changed over the
past three and a half million years. It has changed styles of living, its
brain has grown, and so also has its size, but it is still bipedal; it is still
weaponless; its developmental sensory scheme, beginning in tactility, has
not changed. What paleoanthropologists fail to recognize is the full
import of these corporeal invariants. To do so, they would need to begin
asking questions about origins beyond the single, typical question they
aheady ask, and they would furthermore need to take those other
questions about origins seriously in a methodological sense. Whereas their
typical question—"What was it like?," i.e., what was it like to hve two

* The phrase comes originally from Frank A. Beach "Human Sexuality and
Evolution," in Reproductive Behavior, edited by William Montagna and William A.
Sadler (New York: Plenum Press, 1974), 357. But see also Donald Symons, The
Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 106. For
a critical discussion of the characterization, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "Corporeal
Archetypes and Power: Preliminary Clarifications and Considerations of Sex,"
Hypatia 7.3 (Summer 1992): 39-76. (The latter article is a version of chapter 3 of
The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies (forthcoming from Rowman
and Littlefield, 1993).
' For a critical analysis of how the living body is put sous rature by post-
modernism, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "Corporeal Archetypes and Postmodern
Theory," a paper delivered at the symposium "Philosophy of Bodymind," American
Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, Portland, March 1992. The paper
is a version of chapter 4 of The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered
Bodies.