Thomas Csordas (Cultural and Psychological Anthropologist, University of California, San Diego)
Something Other Than Its Own Mass
The reflections on embodiment made by Merleau-Ponty late in his life in the context of his courses at the College de France offer an ideal takeoff point for a consideration of borders, boundaries, and thresholds of the body. In these courses his central concern is to elaborate a “theory of the flesh” the locus of which is at the threshold of nature and culture, animality and humanity, body and world, body and body. Against the background of these considerations, this paper examines the threshold across which one embodied being interacts with another in the form of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality as the co-presence of alter egos. It is an exercise in cultural phenomenology insofar as ethnographic instances provide the concrete data for phenomenological reflection. In examining two instances in which the intercorporeal hinge between participants in an interaction is in the lips, I touch in varying degrees on elements of embodiment including language, gesture, touch, alterity, spontaneity, body image, sonority, mimesis, and immediacy. The analysis supports the substantive conclusion that intersubjectivity is a concrete rather than an abstract relationship and that it is primary rather than a secondary achievement of isolated egos.
Thomas J. Csordas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego. His research interests include anthropological theory, comparative religion, medical and psychological anthropology, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture. He has conducted fieldwork funded by the National Institute of Mental Health on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, among Navajo Indians, and on adolescent mental health in the American Southwest. He has served as co-editor (with Janis Jenkins) of Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (1996-2001) and as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (1998-2002). Among his publications are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); (edited) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; paperback ed. Palgrave 2002); Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave, 2002); and (edited) Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
