Narratives of e m b o d im e n t: T h e discursive form ulatio n of m ultiple b od ie s 1

MEIRA W E ISS

The category o f the person (Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985) is a much discussed, contested, and little-understood concept in the social sciences. Socio-anthropologists have traditionally split this category into a holy triad o f person, self, and body (Gergen and Keith 1985), each o f these concepts entailing its own theoretical ambiguity. The category o f the person, it could be argued, is a priori a problem in categorization, in which epistemological assumptions produce recalcitrant dichotomies (e.g., m ind/body) which are then turned into research categories. Any study o f the person, the self, o r the body hence always begins with a study o f boundaries o f w hat o u r categories are to be like. Since the scientific language is one o f distinctions (Bourdieu 1984), its agenda has always striven to disjoin holistic notions. However, the lines along which prim ary disjunctions took place were always culturally pre-conditioned. The category o f the person, with its various elaborations o f person, self, o r body typologies, is perhaps the m ost prom inent example o f this. My aim in this article is to offer a partial deconstruction o f prevalent typologies o f the self/body by pointing to their Western, Cartesian preconditioning as well as offering an alternative approach emphasizing the perform ative multiplicity o f the body/self. For that purpose, I divide the article in three parts. The first p art will introduce the socioanthropological discourse o f embodied selves by illustrating, and criticizing, several models pertaining to this notion. The second part will present an ethnography o f w hat I term here embodiment narratives. It will illustrate the stories people narrate when asked to reflect about their inner and outer body, the body at war and in disease. The third and last part will conclude by re-examining, from an anthropological point of view, the Western *illusion o f wholeness (Ewing 1990) in regard to embodied selves. It will offer a constructionist perspective (H arre 1984, 1991; U rban 1989; Shotter 1983) capable o f accounting for the discursive production o f multiple and inconsistent embodied selves.
Semiotica 118-3/4 (1998), 239-260 0037-1998/98/0118-0239 W alter de G ruyter

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A final note is due in order to explain my use o f the term embodied selves. The term was coined in order to rejoin the culturally-split domains o f self and body. The framework for discussing embodied selves is a phenomenology o f the body th at recognizes embodim ent as the existential condition in which culture and self are grounded (Csordas 1993: 136; see also Csordas 1990; Corin 1990; Frank 1986; Jackson 1989; Shapiro 1985). By focusing on the body as a locus o f symbolism where culture and self are grounded, I attem pt to break the spell o f the Cartesian m ind/self dichotomy. Analytically, this allows the discussion to focus on a more discernible theoretical field typologies o f selves as these are embodied, i.e., bodily experienced rather than attem pting to tackle the whole, equally am biguous territory named *the category o f the person.

Categorizing the person: From disparate to multiple selves (and beyond) In what follows, I briefly dem onstrate some o f the m ore interesting typologies o f the embodied self, th at is, the self as somatically reflected, experienced, and expressed. These typologies could be generally subsumed under three groups. The first group deals with w hat I call culturallydetermined, disparate selves. It defines several socio-cultural, o r historical, categories (usually between 3 to 5) denoting the type o f embodied self. Real persons can then be allocated to specific categories according to their socio-cultural, or historical, attributes. Evidently there is only one category, and no m ore than one, which fits every single individual. This is due to the simple fact th at a specimen which would be found to fit more than one category, would also invalidate the topological system. Such typologies are hence the m ost close to the Cartesian worldview ideal systems representing ideal types, where each object is denoted by a single word. The second group o f typologies defines a multiple-self person, whose body, however, remains a relatively closed and unchanged locus o f meaning. T hat is, the same body can project various selves at various times but remain unchanged in itself. Here a person could occupy several categories, all according to the situation as well as to the analytical framing. The third group is an extension o f the second. It denotes a multiple-self, multiple-body person, who rather than occupying o r assuming certain categories, in fact creates them to himself or herself and by himself (or herself). Here a whole spectrum o f (often inconsistent) selves as well as bodies is rhetorically performed according to the situation.

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Obviously, I cannot review here the whole literature in regard to these groups. Instead, I shall illustrate each by giving one or two prom inent examples. Douglas and Calvezs (1990) recent model, which combines D ouglass previous work on the body (D ouglas 1966, 1970) with her grid/group model (D ouglas 1978), is perhaps the paradigm o f group one the disparate self typologies. D ouglas and Calvez define four types o f bodies, which also imply four types o f selves, and which are inhabited by four respective populations. The first body is very strong, with an effective immune system, it has power to cope with infection, its resources produce self-restoring equilibrium (1990: 453). This is the body of the center com m unity, where the established professions exercise their authority and bio-medical culture prevails. The second body, in contrast, is a porous thing, completely open to every dangerous invasion ... basically unprotectable, in a constant awareness o f death (1990: 453). This is the body o f the isolates, the ex-communicated, those on the margin o f community, who are fatalists, expect conspiracy, and attach it to dem onic causes o f ill fortune (1990: 453). The third and fourth bodies are intermediate variations. The third body is m ade o f two protective layers: its own physical skin, as well as the community, which makes a social clarifications o f boundaries, control points o f entry and egress, and serves as the best immune system (1990: 454). This is the body o f the cultural frontiersmen and cosmopolitans whatever they may be. The fourth body is a machine that has its own protective envelope (1990: 454). It is the body o f the enclave culture o f dissenting minorities. Such a model obviously presents a deterministic prediction which prescribes each person with a tailored body according to his or her social status and cultural position. Evidently no person can occupy more than one cell (or category) in the typology. For a parallel model o f types o f bodies in different historical periods, see Synnott (1992). In contrast to Douglas and Calvez (1990), Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) present w hat could be taken as the paradigm o f the second group o f typologies. They offer a typology o f three bodies: the individual, social, and political. The individual body is understood in the phenomenological sense o f the lived experience o f the body-self (1987: 7). The social body refers to the representational uses o f the body as a natural symbol with which to think about nature, society, and culture (1987: 7) much as D ouglas (1970) had already suggested. The body politic refers to the regulation, surveillance, and control o f bodies in reproduction and sexuality, in work and in leisure, in sickness and other forms o f deviance and hum an difference (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 8). Foucaults work is obviously exemplary in this regard. Scheper-Hughes and Locks three bodies thus present three alternatives which each person may synchron

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ously occupy according to the situation and to the theoretical approach of the researcher. O Neills (1985) five bodies (the physical, social, political, communicative, and consumerist) are another case in point. Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987: 31) adm it, in a note which reveals more than it intended to, th at O Neills proliferation o f bodies had our decidedly nonquantitative minds stum ped for a bit, b u t they are quick to add the book is nonetheless a provocative and insightful w ork. Implied in this statem ent is the inevitable conclusion th at categorizations o f the body are in fact infinite. Their ordering reflects analytical convenience and inadvertently reifies pre-existing cultural dichotomies. The third group, which I would like to discuss here, has no typologies, but rather a blurred spectrum o f alternatives. It is this group which is illustrated in the following ethnography. Here, embodied selves are not a given ontology, an ideal type to be allocated o r assumed. Rather, they are rhetorical constructions, to be narrated by individuals. Few models employing this outlook exist in the anthropological literature; interestingly, they have been developed mainly in the context o f othering. For example, in order to explain (to the West) the Japanese social relativism, where the self is informed by ones social identities; o r in the context of post-traum atic stress disorders o f Vietnam W ar veterans. K ondos (1990) study o f the discourse o f identity in a Japanese artisan workplace is an example o f the former. According to K ondo, selves are multiple, fraught with tension and contradiction, and asserted in specific perform ative contexts ... selves are embodied and constructed oppositionally and relationally. They are no t referential symbols, the Transcendental signifier, but strategically deployed signifiers, stories which we narrate and perform for each other (1990: 307). Young (1990, 1993), whose study is an example o f the latter, notes that individuals were not troubled by inconsistencies between narrative selves. He shows th at this reality o f multiple selves encourages an exam ination o f our mistaken faith in the unity o f the m ind (1990: 82). Lock (1993: 146) claims that Y oungs work, which challenges the core o f the post-Enlightenm ent philosophic tradition, poses one o f the m ost radical challenges to date o f psychological and psychiatric discourses. The multiple self, while existing in anthropological discourse, is still associated with the pathological and the other either the inscrutable Japanese o r the schizophrenic. Yet Youngs findings, it should be noted, have been also collected though perhaps in a somewhat less provocative tone in m ore m undane contexts, although such th at are still within the medical realm, for example, historytaking during medical exam inations (Y oung 1989; M ishler 1984) o r the re-interpretation o f self after stroke (K aufm an 1988) or institutionalizetion (G olander 1995).

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I shall return in my concluding section to discussing the pathologizing o f the multiple self/body as a surveillance strategy o f the postEnlightenm ent, Western rationality. But before doing this, let me offer my own ethnographic account of how norm al people narrate different stories about their bodies for themselves and for others.

Tales from the classroom: Narratives of embodiment The study I conducted open interviews, as well as structured classes, in 1982-1993 with undergraduate and graduate students at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and at Tel-Aviv University. The students were asked to visualize and m etaphorize their body in various situations: to move in imagination in the world inside their body, to visualize and describe verbally the norm al body as well as the body in states o f disease (A ID S, cancer, and heart attack), and to describe it in relation to (before, during, and after) the G u lf War (1991). The directions given to them were close your eyes and try to visualize your body, your inner body, the body in disease and the body in the G ulf War. D o not interpret o r explain, just let yourself be carried in free associations. M ost o f the students also made use o f drawing as another medium o f free expression. Overall, the reactions were basically similar, and their general pattern is epitomized here.

The inner body When asked to describe their inner body, students referred to three different bodies, which could be classified as (1) the biological body, (2) the emotive body (which included mind, emotions, thoughts, and m orality), and finally (3) the body *as seen from within. The Biological Body. The following quotations illustrate the students reference to the biological body. I imagine a biological system, including bones, respiratory organs, digestive organs, and brain. The inside o f the body consists o f what we studied in biology lessons. Organs. I can give you a schematic description o f my internal organs, in a m anner parallel to those drawings found in clinics, anatom y textbooks, etc. Its like the posters from high school biology lessons. The heart, the liver, the lungs. The students, who distinguished between the three frames o f reference employed by them to discuss the inner body, termed this one the

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biological body. Furtherm ore, they claimed it was the m ost objective frame o f reference o f all three. I would like to suggest that the biological body, rather than representing some objective reality, represents the objectifying bio-medical discourse o f the body, which is reproduced and made visible in the anatom y atlas, biology lessons, surgery rooms, etc. (H irschauer 1991; Laqueur 1990). The emotive body. The following citations were m ade by the same students. The body has its own internal emotions. They come out o f the heart, the brain, the conscious. The em otions are wrapped, as it were, in organs. The head contains optimistic and pessimistic thoughts. When you said describe your internal body I saw internal feelings centered in the stom ach. My ideas are inside my head. Particular organs, body fluids, and systems are prescribed with emotive characteristics in almost every culture (see, for example, Snow [1974] and Linke [1986] on sweet and bitter as well as p ro u d blood, Strauss (1966) on the upright and spineless backbone, and Leeman (1986) on the flipped liver. The body as seen fro m within. This third reference was employed as the most com m on frame o f description. Students commented th at I tried to imagine w hat would a particle travelling inside o f the body see. Mazes, blue, quiet, fluid, underwater, three-dim ensional... These were my associations. Very gentle sounds, like underw ater humming, distant wails perhaps ... I felt like leaving my body, in fact. M ovement inside your own body ... this is the difficult part to describe. Very colorful. N o sexual identity. Bubbling environm ent, fluid, dynamic, in flux, yet selfcontrolled, governed by some internal coordination. I have no idea. I ts a mess in there, but also a wonderful order no m an-made machine can ever replicate. Its like swimming in plasma. A feeling o f alienation. Im small, and my inner body is huge. N o contours. It surrounds you, blue, transparent plasm a. I first closed my eyes and then I saw something like a huge container. Full o f fluids, green or yellow. I cannot see any specific organs o r things. Everything is blurred. The inside o f the body never rests, always in movement. Like a highway, flow everywhere, but in an orderly m anner. It is no t in parts, like the biological body, not static, but a whole organic inter-related system, a dynam ic flow. The internal body has no boundaries or contours. It is not regarded as mechanical, neither does it have any gender. It also raises issues o f reflexivity, often o f estrangem ent, o f experiencing something universal which is part o f nature, no t o f culture. M artin (1990: 125) describes a similar feeling am ong her American interviewees, who often found the experience [of describing their inner body] spatially dislocating ... {a

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feeling o f] a tiny figure in a cosmic landscape, both greatly exciting and greatly bewildering. The students distinguished between the three bodies as constituting three distinct frames o f embodiment. When I describe the biological body, I am trying to visualize organs as 1 saw them in biological textbooks ... when I try to imagine the body as seen from within, it is something completely different. Contours m atter in regard to the biological body, they m ake the biological body ... but they disappear and dont really m atter in the case o f the internal body, or the emotive body. I shall return to the significance o f bodily contours and their absence in the ensuing descriptions o f the body in disease.

The body in disease: Cancer, AID S, and heart attack The theme o f change and transform ation in the context o f cancer and AIDS reappeared in many variations. N on-patients and cancer patients presented what seems to be an opposite approach on this matter. M any cancer patients have been reported to claim that it is not I th at have cancer, but a certain part (organ, tissue) th at is cancerous. Sontag (1988: 66) notes, for example, R onald Reagans denial o f the reality o f his illness: when asked how he felt after his cancer operation, Reagan said I didnt have cancer. I had something inside of me that had cancer in it and it was removed. T hat is, cancer patients prefer to m ake the distinction between themselves and the tum or as soon and as clear as possible (see also Com aroff and M aguire 1981; Saillant 1990). In contrast, nonpatients seem to foster the idea that it is the whole person th at has cancer, or, evidently, AIDS. The theme of the transform ed body in cancer and A ID S is illustrated in the following quotations.
M iri (female, age 24): I try to visualize m y body in cancer ... C ancer is an internal p a rt o f the body, so it should be visualized from the inside, I think. Its part o f us, p a rt o f the body, p a rt o f ou r genes. It is produced by ou r body. We are cancer, but it m akes us anew. N o t as before. T he new is self-subversive. It leads to its ow n destruction. This is why the cancer patient cannot be draw n. Its body is alw ays changing, from one m om ent to the next, a flux o f change ... Internal systems change, degenerate, transform . Z o h ar (female, age 25): C ancer eats up your body. I visualize it as a packm an. It eats w hatever it comes across. It has an open m outh with teeth and it bites off everything. T he body is falling apart.

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Com puter-age m etaphors such as packm an5 were also joined by science-fiction images o f the alien which eats its way up the victims body and emerges from its belly a true hidden passenger, a parasite living off its host body. Such imagery is not restricted to cancer o r any other disease; it can be seen as part o f the postm odern calling into question of taken-for-granted assum ptions about the humanness o f the self, and the locus and com position o f identity (F ontana and Tillet 1993). A nother articulation o f that ambiguity was encapsulated in the various metaphorizations o f cancer as an animal.
M iri (fem ale, age 24): T he disease is like a beautiful fruit th at has w orm s inside. Inside its a real mess. W orm s have no limits. C om plete mess. They are in different sizes and colors. Long, thick, sm all, thin. A s they becom e older they get a d arker color, m ore om inous, threatening, obtrusive. A nd o f course there are m ore w orm s then. They even start to m ake their way out. Because in the beginning the peel is untouched. You cannot see inside. T he m an (the fruit) know s, as if. Yes and no. Som e do n o t w ant to know . T hen it all com es out and spills on you. N o m ore peel: only peeling.

Y oni (male, age 27): I visualize cancer as som ething sticky, disgusting, like an octopus, with lots o f arm s and suction buttons. It sticks to you, sucks and w on,t let go.

The notion o f the transform ed cancerous self o f the patient was visualized by students as caught within a dynam ic process, a flux o f change, in which the cancer is active, pursuing, while the patient is passive, a victim. This repeated itself many times and stands in sharp contrast to the concept o f the discourse o f hope (G ood et al. 1990). A ID S, in contrast to cancer, was n o t readily and commonly com pared to m etaphorical anim al parasites. Perhaps this is due to the difference in seeing cancer as having a focus a center from which it spreads and grows, while AIDS is seen as systemic, all-embracing, from its very advent.
R ose (female, age 24): I began from the center, spreading from it, since obviously were dealing here with som ething th a t spreads ... But then I realized th at I d o n t need a center. T here is no center. Its n o t like cancer, which begins in a tu m o r. A ID S does n o t have a center ... If a person gets A ID S , then its his whole body th a ts infected, n o t a single discernible organ o f i t ... You c a n n o t take it o u t and fix it, as in a h eart condition. H ere its total. Total invasion. It ends where y o u r body ends. But then again it is also secreted. So it doesnt end practically. N o discernible boundaries.

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Y ael (female, age 23): C ancer is cells growing out o f control. O ver-production. A ID S is m ore abstract. N o t tangible like cancer. C ancer grow s inside the body, b u t its different from the body ... A ID S is p a rt o f ou r selves. I can t see how they can rem ove A ID S out o f you as if it was a tum or. A ID S is in your blood ... contam inating, systemic. Blood is very fast.

R onen (male, age 26): I drew a net. A net with a hole in it. Its som ething th a ts protecting the body, and the disease breaks it, penetrating inside, through the net. These are the arrow s. T he body has holes in its surface. Its leaking. N o boundaries. A IDS attacks you from w ithout ... C ancer, from within.

R onens, Yonis, and many other students m etaphorical conceptions o f AIDS as penetrating the bodys surrounding net or shields o f selfdefense represent a world-wide com m on view o f the disease. The penetration o f shields is evidently at the heart o f the m etaphor o f disrupting the body boundaries. In a Central African Republic pam phlet on A ID S written in Sango, for example, the immune system is shown surrounding the hum an figure like a rope; viruses, pictured as beaked and batlike birds, are eating through the protective boundary (Treichler 1992: 67). Elsewhere I focus on the parallel symbolic construction o f AIDS and cancer (Weiss 1997a). Here I would like to concentrate on the narratives of em bodim ent these diseases produce. These narratives follow two key symbols: bodily transform ation and pollution. AIDS and cancer are symbolic counterparts designating a full, vicious circle, like the legendary snake holding its tail in its m outh. In A IDS, pollution (infective body fluids) transform s the body/self. In cancer, transform ation pollutes; cancerophobia largely stems from the imputed infection related to cancer (Berm an and W andersman 1990). Pollution transforms, transform ation pollutes. The two diseases are alm ost looking-glass reflections constituted in the same symbolic space. The notion o f pollution strongly appears in cancer, too, whether in the form o f a chemically polluted environment or in the form o f suspicions o f imputed infection. But it is the concept of body fluids which m ost significantly defines and reifies it in regard to AIDS. AIDS epidemiology has invented the coyly hum oral concept o f exchange o f body fluids (to cover blood transfusion, sexual intercourse, and intravenous injection) as a description o f the comm on transmissive risk factor. This concept, once brought into common usage, has farreaching implications towards our conception o f the body: not only the AIDS-afflicted body, but the body at large. The difference between focus (cancer) and system (A ID S ) also explains why transform ation does not serve as a key-symbol in regard to AIDS. Social identity and AIDS are already immediately, metonymically con-

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nected in the HIV/AIDS patient. In contrast, the notion o f pollution o f a contam inating leakage was articulated and connected to the theme o f body fluids. In AIDS, not the tum or (the cancer) but the whole body itself becomes fluid-like, amoebic, protean. It can be argued that in m etaphorizing both A ID S and cancer, students made use o f what they earlier termed as the third inner body the body as seen from within. Like this inner body, AIDS and cancer have no internal boundaries; rather they spread, transform , pollute, always changing, always in flux. AIDS and cancer m ake you feel a stranger in your own body. Their symbolic space, like th at o f the inner body, is a maze-like, fluid, flowing plasma. While AIDS and cancer are arguably constituted as diseases o f the inner body, other diseases occupy different m etaphorical bodies. For the purpose o f com parison, I presented the students with another paradigm atic disease: the heart attack. H eart attack was chosen because o f its parallel risk, frequency, and potential terminality: the two m ajor killing diseases o f the Western world are ischemic heart disease and cancer (Shapiro 1983). The reactions to heart attack, however, were completely different. Visual m etaphors evoked by heart attack were part o f the biological body rather than the body as seen from within. Almost all o f my respondents emphasized the specifity o f the disease, its localized nature, and expressed certainty regarding its course, nature, and behavior in terms that could not find their place in A ID S/cancer metaphorizing.
M ichal: W hen its a b o u t your heart, its a specific organ. A problem in plum bing. N o t contam inating. N o t altering your self o r y our body, not disrupting any boundaries. N o t like cancer o r A ID S. T he o ther is safe.

The mechanical depiction o f the heart may seem surprising, taking into account the hearts long-standing position as the center o f emotions. Even after the heart had lost its prominence as a locus o f selfhood in favor o f the brain, it was still regarded as emotionally significant. Yet heart attack was not m etaphorized by students as part o f the emotive body. The heart is still a prom inent symbol o f emotion, as reflected in the reactions o f m any heart transplant recipients world-wide (M ai 1986; Lock 1989). However, it is also possible th at the recipients em otional reaction stems from the complicated, risky, and life-changing operation rather than from the fact th at it was the heart th at has been transplanted; similar reactions were also observed with respect to kidney, pancreas, or liver transplantations (Fox and Swazey 1992). In addition, the very surgical possibility o f taking the heart out, replacing it and closing down the stitches adds to the mechanical view o f it. The medical knowledge o f

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heart ischemia and its popular articulation in the form o f the pipeline model (Lim burg 1979) also spells the symbolic construction o f the heart as a pump. The heart attack shared A ID S and cancers stigma o f being a punishment for im proper life-style but was more strongly regarded as an inherited disease. N o t ones fault. In contrast to the blurring and fragm entation o f body boundaries and contours in m etaphors o f AIDS and cancer, the heart attack patient was fully drawn, standing, healthy looking, sometimes even with rosy cheeks. In contrast to the cancer/AIDS patient, the heart attack patient is shown with his hair, his nose, eyes, m outh, face, neck, shirt, pants. He is a normal person. In drawing AIDS and cancer, students om itted signs o f gender and clothing. The AIDS patient was usually lying down, and often the painting showed not the person but its (rather than his o r her) inner body: its tissues, rogue cells, m utated T cells, and often splashes o f paint or just a black, ominous page. Susan Sontag (1988: 38) suggests th at cancer is m ore feared than heart disease, although someone who has had a coronary is more likely to die o f heart attack in the next few years than someone who has cancer is likely to die o f cancer. A heart attack is an event but it does not give someone a new identity, turning the patient into one o f them \ It is not transform ing. And m ost significantly perhaps, Sontag writes, heart attack in contrast to AIDS o r cancer is thought to produce, if only because it can be instantaneous, an easy death. The different m etaphors associated with heart attack versus cancer/AID S attest that what we have here is in fact a conceptualization o f two different bodies. However, the form er distinction between inner body (cancer, A ID S) and biological body (heart attack) can be further elaborated. The heart attack body is a machine: it is w hat M artin (1990: 121) terms the Fordist body: bodies organized around principles of centralized control and factory-based production. This model is related in form and function to early twentieth-century Fordist mass-production systems geared towards efficiency, producing large quantities o f standardized products put together from standardized components. The body as an assembly line. The dom inant m etaphors students used to depict the diseased heart included a piston th at stopped working, an assembly line on strike, a heart-shape closed-down factory with wounds in the shape o f screws, nails, stitches, and other mechanical apparatus on its surface, a water reservoir filled with stones. In contrast, AIDS/cancer define a different body: the body in late capitalism, the body in the postm odern. It is a body surrounded by and containing rapid, flexible change. Just like the globalization o f culture and economics in late capitalism (Harvey 1989; Jameson 1984), it is a

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body underpinned by globalization: a body in its whole, an interconnected system, not a standardized machine with replaceable parts but an engineered com m unication system, ordered by a fluid and dispersed command-control-intelligence netw ork (H araw ay 1989: 12). The scientific discourse o f immunology fits perfectly inside this m etaphor. The immune system is portrayed as a homeostatic, self-regulating system, complete unto itself (M artin 1990). M oreover, talk about the immune systems m aintenance o f a clear boundary between self and nonself imply the conception o f the nonself world as foreign and hostile: a world, for example, o f A ID S and cancer. While heart attack is the pathology o f the Fordist, biological body, A ID S/cancer are the pathologies o f the postmodern, inner body in late capitalism.

The body in war Descriptions o f the various bodies inner, normal, in disease, etc. were abruptly changed during the days o f the G ulf War (1991) in Israel. A new body seemed to have dom inated all others: the body in war. Let me briefly describe the G ulf War experience in Israel before articulating the features o f the body it produced. The G ulf W ar spelled a new kind o f military experience for Israel (W erm an 1993; Shaham and R aanan 1991). It did not entail the mobilization o f forces, arm y reserves, etc. (see Kimmerling 1985), but rather the demobilization o f Israeli society, which was put into the sealed room (prepared in each house for the possibility o f gas attack) and told to wait there for instructions a passive situation previously unfam iliar to Israeli society. The G ulf W ar was later known as the w ar which turned the rear into the front; meaning th at the country itself and its civilian population became the battleground on which Saddam Husseins missiles could and did land. A few weeks before O peration Desert Storm commenced, some Israelis deserted their homes and fled either abroad or to places inside the country m arked by experts as being out o f range o f Husseins SCU D missiles. T hat was despite continuous attem pts by military pundits to allay fears and to reassure the public th at Hussein was very unlikely to strike at Israeli civilian targets, for his knowledge o f Israeli military deterrents would prevent him from considering it. Even if such a remote eventuality occurred, m aintained politicians as well as com m entators, the Israeli w ar machine would know how to put an immediate stop to it. The first strike would also be the last.

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The euphoric feeling o f an instant victory which was transm itted by the world media to Israeli homes amplified the shock o f the first missile attack. Israelis were caught by surprise in the middle o f the night and rushed to their designated sealed rooms frantically trying to complete the insulation procedures and to put the gas masks on. A num ber o f panic-stricken persons died o f suffocation caused by not removing the filter caps o f the masks. Confusion and uncertainty were total. TV and radio were for a few hours unable to provide any information, give guidance, o r offer comfort. Telephone switchboards became overloaded and lines were out o f order. Foreign broadcasting stations such as the BBC World Service reported a possible chemical attack and no military o r political communiques were issued. F urther attacks and their resulting devastation, coupled with the indecisive and presum ably undecided response o f the Israeli political and military establishment, confirmed that the situation in which Israelis found themselves was out o f their control. A new improvised order o f daily routine was introduced into the Israeli reality. M ost people did not go to work for a few weeks, outings were limited to shopping, and urgent errands were made with gas mask boxes dangling from shoulders (see D anet, Loshitzky, and Bechar-Israeli 1994). Schools were closed and home became both a total sanctuary and an inform ation center (see Ben-David and Lavee 1992). Radio stations merged into one channel and TV broadcasted 24 hours a day. The country was divided into graded zones o f safety and people moved to places and hotels seeking refuge from their own unsafe residences. In an article entitled reflections on the G ulf W ar, a famous Israeli psychiatrist wrote that: This war has changed everything. Instead of being in the front, we were in the rear. Instead of being conducted somewhere in the front lines, your city and your home became the front. You are stuck in your own home and you must wait, wait ... Suddenly you recall experiences you have long managed to forget, experiences belonging to our personal and collective past in Europe in the 40's. (Stern 1992: 53) Similar feelings are conveyed in the following excerpt taken from the curators foreword to the catalogue o f Real Time: Graphic Texts o f the G ulf War, an exhibition held in the Tel-Aviv Museum after the war: The Gulf War elicited in Israel a sense of helplessness, passivity and impotence of an attacked country being threatened with mass destruction and yet unable to take an active part in its self-defence. This situation was associated, in the collective memory, with the period of Jewish diaspora. (Doner 1991: 1)

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And now to the body in the G ulf War. Bodies were described and draw n before, during the G ulf War, and up to one m onth afterwards as fragmented, distorted, porous, w ithout internal organs, gaps and opened contours. N o faces were portrayed. Sometimes the faces were concealed behind a gas m ask, and sometimes they were altogether missing. The body was framed by the contours o f the sealed room, which could symbolize a womb (and/or, very likely, a tom b, see also Synnott 1992). Descriptions featured the dissolving o f the body, internal parts protruding outside, fragments o f body, no gender. Both sealed-room inhabitants and diseased bodies were depicted as wearing a space suit, the former with a gas m ask and the latter with a skeleton-face mask. It should be noted, however, th at in contrast to all other m etaphors used here, the m etaphor o f space suit is suggested by the author rather than by the respondents. Interestingly, these portrayals crossed ethnic borders and characterized both Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab populations. The body in war hence shared the characteristics o f w hat Racault (1986) terms the collective body: a standardized, genderless, faceless figure, dependent on external frames, in a state o f ordeal. The following description o f the body in war, m ade by Miri, a female student (age 24) is typical:
I see a frontal body ... alm ost like the norm al body, b ut with a gas m ask th at covers the face. It has a skirt, so it m ust be a w om an ... b u t the body is kept w ithin a rectangular fram e. T his is the sealed room . A sealed body in a sealed room . Individual traits o f the body give place to the com m unity ... I th ink o f the com m unity, n o t o f any specific body. W ithout the arm y, the politics, the m edia, we would n ot have any bodies. All o f us are in the sam e situation and we are all w aiting for the clearing m essage from the m ilitary spokesm an.

Before and after the G ulf War, in contrast, students portrayed the norm al body as strong, standing, with closed contours, hair, no gaps or internal organs; gender distinctions were depicted; there were additional signs o f body tending, i.e., lipstick, cloths, long hair, earrings. Older women drew younger bodies. There was an emphasis on proper proportions: narrow shoulders and waist (in the case o f females), wide shoulders in the case o f males. Descriptions o f the collective body, the body in war, can be connected to the body in disease the AIDS and cancer body. Both depict a body under threat, undergoing change, subjected to transform ation, fram ed by greater forces. Yet while the latter is an inner body, the former is seen from the outside. The external body in w ar and the inner body in disease are hence something like inverse reflections. Both w ar and disease represent bodily catastrophes. While the form er emphasizes the public, collective body by subjugating the private body to it, the latter emphasizes ths jj

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private body by disrupting the very balance between its constituents: body/m ind, whole/parts. W hereas the reference point in the case o f war is uniform ity and totality (hence: collectivism), the reference point in the case o f an inner body disease is nullification. Whereas in the case o f war the attack on the body comes from the outside, in the case o f the disease the attack is from within. W hereas w ar subjugates, disease objugates (this should be read as a derivative o f objectifies [Weiss 1997b]).

Conclusion: In search of the body The various bodies presented in this study the inner body, the emotive body, the biological body, the mechanical body, the transform ed body, the collective body, and so on were not listed here in order to define some ideal typology. On the contrary, they were meant to represent an endless chain o f possible narratives o f embodiment. Individuals, as narrators o f their own and others bodies, are free to choose as many scripts as they like, multiple and inconsistent as these might be, out o f this plethora o f narratives. Indeed, individuals in this study freely articulated, in different situations, different bodies; and several such different bodies could be narrated by them simultaneously. Let me cite one example in order to illustrate and recapitulate this claim. A lthough the following is taken from one respondent only, it should be read as a typical discursive form ulation o f multiple bodies, found to characterize all o f my respondents. M iriam, age 23, Israelibom , secular, unm arried female student o f Western origin, was asked by me to describe her body. The result was termed here, in accordance with the title used by respondents, as the individual body. M iriam described a wom an, young, with hair, eyelashes, nose, m outh, hands, fingers. She senses the world through her eyes, m outh, skin and nose. I drew her body from top and downwards. H er body is naked. It has obvious feminine contours. Breasts, thighs. I struggled with the proportions but they d id n t come out right. The shoulders were too wide for a woman. The legs were too muscular. The head came out too small. I hesitated whether to add pubic hair or n o t. The individual body o f M iriam, such as that o f all other students, was a composite cultural structure. It embodied great details, its self-presentation was gendered, its contours were well marked. These attributes were dissolved in the other bodies. The body in war, as described by M iriam in 1991 a few days before the G u lf War following her description o f her normal, individual body: I see two possibilities. The first is a small, schematic drawing of a man. His clothes are no t clear. He stands in profile, helmet on his head,

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and in front o f him there are m any arrows, all pointing to him. The second possibility is a woman. She is sitting on the floor, holding her knees, her face is erased, you cannot discern any body organs except for the hands. As if she is trying to fold herself inward. Arrows also surround her, pointing at her, and she turns her head aw ay\ These depictions also embodied cultural views o f the gendered body. While the male is active, stands on his feet, ready to face the danger, the female is passive, sitting, trying to distance herself from the danger. A bout 2-3 weeks later, during actual SCU D attacks on Israel, bodies took a different shape, which emphasized the collective feeling o f besiegement. The body in war was now described by M iriam (in a typical manner) as having a huge pair o f ears (to hear the radio), wearing an ugly black gas mask. Its contours are porous. It is surrounded by two frames. The first frame is the family, the sealed room , and the second is the telephone line, friends, the radio, the arm y spokesm an\ The two frames were thus constituted as an altem ative skin, while the bodys own protective layer was depicted as porous (and hence insufficient, permeable). W hen asked to visualize cancer and AIDS, M iriam quickly entered a whole new realm o f narrative embodiment. Describing cancer, she said that the body is in a mess. A dem on, a monster, is inside. It has no gender and no signs o f identity. N o concrete contours only a scheme. There are no pores in the skin, because unlike in war, the m onster is now inside the body. But its a weak body too. An U ncertain body. N o frames surround it. Community has nothing to do with the disease. The body is alone'. Only a week afterwards, the same respondent described A ID S as a body full o f needles, black blood. The body is all black. And weak. It is bent down, the head is bold, the organs in decay. The body is empty. An empty shell. N o gender, o f course. N o colors. Pores all around. H eart attack was later described by the same respondent as happening in a faulty body, a bad machine, a problem in plumbing, narrow arteries, high cholesterol, smoking, pills. Finally, the inner body was depicted as having no frame except perhaps for the skeleton, but this is only one o f its facets. Its like a train with many railroads, diverging and re-converging ... A composite network of arteries and veins, blue and red, with perm anent flow inside. It is in flux, always already changing, never resting ... A neatly organized system, although for me its alm ost chaotic. N o sexual m arkers inside. N o gender. A series o f em bodim ent narratives, or profiles for short, emerge from this epitomized description, as well as from the more elaborated review given before. This series consists o f the following. An individual body a young, detailed, discernible, recognizable, gendered body, bearing the signs o f cultural and social classification. Its contours are well-marked. It is often standing and described en face and from top to bottom . It is

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w hat we see, an external body with no inner organs. A body in war here the body is abstracted, schematicized, standardized. It lacks individual signs o f gender, nation, religion. As SCUD attacks threaten the very existence o f Israeli citizens, draw them into the sealed room, and blur geographical and physical boundaries formerly taken for granted, the body is wrapped in a collective skin. The immediate surroundings the sealed room, the telephone line, the radio are more detailed than the body. Recall that respondents were asked to describe their body, and brought what they called the com m unity in on their free choice. A body in disease here we have several profiles, and the list is obviously only partial. A cancerous body is described as having no individual signs, no gender. It is schematically depicted, with no collective surroundings, no community, no sense o f com m on destiny. It is alone, faceless, with unclear body contours. The AIDS body shares some o f the cancerous body traits and differs from it in others. It lacks signs o f life. It has no face, no hair. It is nude, and porous, opened to virus and infection. In heart attack, the body looks normal, the medical problem is located in one organ, the flaw is in the biological body in the machine. The body as seen from within is the last profile exemplified here. It is dynamic, changing, has no contours, is visualized as an immensely complicated, seemingly chaotic system. W hat we are left with, then, is the contention that we are the narrators o f our bodies, that bodies can be chosen by each o f us from a myriad of cultural-collective representations, and th at this narration, like any oral narration, is regulated by society. Times o f war may elicit certain body talk ; times o f disease, or o f peace, may invoke other bodily discourses. This invocation is, o f course, subject to a cultural frame o f reference. In th at sense it may even be said to be functional. A possible criticism might suggest that my respondents were actually representing those categories which I presented them with, and that the multiple bodies they were quick to articulate were merely produced by the artificial context o f the interview. A possible answer would consist o f two notable points. First, while respondents were indeed offered certain categories, they nonetheless reflected on them, examined them against their own lived experience, dismissed those categories which were found to be irrelevant, and changed them in order to suit their own demands. For example, the category o f the inner body as given by myself was deconstructed by the researchees into three sub-categories: the biological body, the emotive body, and the body as seen from within. Second, the public and live character o f the conversation reflected a genuine concern o f the respondents with the categories. During conversations, the categories were authenticized by those who commented on them, examined

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them, an d changed them. In parallel to the dram aturgical view of Goffm an with regard to the stories we tell ab o u t ourselves, we hence also need a reflective-dram aturgical view o f the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies perhaps a phenom enology o f perception (M erleau-Ponty 1962) com bined with a post-structuralist view o f the way society constrains such stories. The analysis o f such narratives o f em bodim ent appears to support, as Ewing (1990: 253) argues, the often-repeated claim by anthropologists th at the experience o f wholeness, continuity, and autonom y th at we norm ally associate with the self is a culture-bound, W estern notion. This notion can and should be deconstructed by an alternative reading o f an em bodied self which is defined contextually and relationally. People, argues Ewing (1990: 253), W esterners included, construct a shifting series o f self-representations th at are based on selected cultural concepts. These claims challenge the substance m etaphysics (B utler 1987; Outlaw 1987) o f the W estern m aster subject, which views identities as fixed, bounded entities containing some essence o r substance. This postEnlightenm ent legacy is p a rt o f the W estern logocentrism (D errida 1976), the desire to fix an d m aster m eaning in a one-to-one referential correspondence between w ord (narrative) and object (self). Recently an upsurge o f theorizing in social psychology assumed an opposite position under the general title o f social constructionism (see Shotter 1983; H arre 1984, 1991; U rb an 1989). A ccording to constructionists, identities are created and m aintained prim arily in the process of engaging in certain types o f spoken discourse. Stated in other terms, meaning can never be fixed, for there is no transcendental signified (a K antian self) th at com m ands authority and exists w ithout signifiers or beyond signification. R ather, signification involves a play o f shifting signifiers o f narratives linked in chains o f substitution within systems o f difference (D errid a 1978: 292). T he subject and its various bodies thus becom e a site for the play o f shifting and potentially conflicting meanings. T he identity o f the subject is multiple, potentially contradictory, an d though there can be a tem porary retrospective fixing (W eedon 1987: 25) o f m eaning and identity, no ready form o f coherence can be posited in advance. T he unitary subject is no longer unified. While this pragm atist notion could be traced back to M eads social psychology (H anson 1986), its linguistic thrust following the work o f Vygotsky and W ittgenstein was only recently com pleted by H arre (1986, 1987). In Personal Being (H arre 1984), the prim ary structure o f hum an reality-m aking activities is presented as a thesis o f conversational realism with the correlative proposition th a t the person is prior to

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em bodim ent (Varela 1994: 171). T h e narratives o f em bodim ent described here arguably show that phenom enological accounts are secondary constructions o f the prim ary (linguistic) structure. The narrative to a large extent precedes and prescribes the lived body. H arres conversational realism could therefore be taken as the guiding thesis, and theoretical proposition, o f this study. One could perhaps never com pletely jettison the sem antic load o f the word self, as this would lead to fears th at agency and indeed, norm alcy, will be abandoned. I hope, however, th at this study could m ake its small contribution to the problem atizing o f the ways anthropology reinscribes fixity, unity, boundedness, continuity, and consistency in its Western illusion o f the self.

Note
1. I w ould like to th an k Erik C ohen an d T am ar R a p p o p o rt fo r their help.

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M eira Weiss (b. 1947) is A ssistant Professor in the D epartm ent o f Sociology and A nthropology at the University o f Jerusalem . H er principal research interests include body and em bodim ent, sym bolic anthropology, medical sociology and anthropology, p arenthood, and gender. H er m ajor publications include C ancer and im puted infection: Im ages o f the disease am ong patients (1995), O f m an and beast: From person to n o n -person ' (1995), and Signifying the pandem ics: M etaphors o f A ID S, cancer, an d heart disease (forthcom ing 1997).

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