Body & Society-2005-Crossley-1-35

Mapping Reflexive Body Techniques 31

towards involuntary weight gain and obesity, which has triggered an increase in dieting and working out, being a clear illustration of this (see Crossley, 2004b). However, we have here a basic framework which invites further elaboration – both qualitative and quantitative – and which takes our understanding of body modification/maintenance forward.

Conclusion

In this article I have attempted to push the sociological analysis of body modification/maintenance forward on substantive, theoretical and methodological fronts. Practices of modification/maintenance, I have argued, can be understood as reflexive body techniques; social techniques, collectively shared but individually rooted in the corporeal schemas of agents. The concept of RBTs has many advantages, but specifically it is important because it emphasizes reflexivity, refuses dualism and facilitates empirical investigation.

Each society, I have suggested, has a specific repertoire of such techniques but techniques are not equally or evenly distributed and diffused throughout the social body. Specifically I have argued (i) that RBTs fall into different frequency zones (core, intermediate and marginal), and (ii) that further differentiation is visible in the intermediate and marginal zones, as RBTs cluster in accordance with specific subcultures, fields and movements (and the concerns associated with these fields). Alerting ourselves to these distinctions is important, I have suggested, because different clusters of RBTs have different socio-logics and need to be explained in different ways. Where some RBTs are strongly encouraged, if not made compulsory, for example, others are outlawed, and we must account for this in our attempts to explain these practices.

Alongside this substantive engagement it has been my intention to explore, for methodological purposes, the utility of multi-dimensional scaling. This method, like any method, has limitations. What I have attempted to show in this article, however, is the way in which we can use it to map out the social distribution of RBTs, identifying their distinct patterns of clustering. Moreover, in relation to my ‘heavy exercise’ cluster, I showed how we might move from general clusters of RBTs through to a cluster of social agents themselves, a step which may, in turn, facilitate a sophisticated form of social and biographical profiling of particular practitioner communities – e.g. primitivist communities or bodybuilding communities.

Many loose ends remain at the end of the article. Many avenues are yet to be explored. This is a good thing. It invites and facilitates further analysis. One very obvious way in which the analysis might be extended, however, is through a

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Higher School of Economics on February 9, 2016

32 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

more detailed exploration of the specific clusters marked out on my map (Figure 4). This is an exercise that might use statistical procedures such as MDS, but perhaps in conjunction with the more ethnographical and qualitative forms of analysis which the analysis of RBTs also affords.

Notes

1.Things are not quite so simple as this, as there are different techniques for determining distances, and any mapping exercise involves a process of variable selection – not least because outliers can throw the map off course. These processes of selection are part of the interpretative process and do shape the map. Nevertheless, there are still limits built into the use of the procedure about what its possible output can be.

2.E.g. concerning beauty, health, tattooing, bodybuilding.

3.The sample was 39.5 percent male and 60.5 percent female.

4.In terms of age, 14.1 percent of the sample were 16–19-year-olds, 25.7 percent were in their 20s, 27 percent in their 30s, 14.1 percent in their 40s, 15.1 percent in their 50s, 2.6 percent in their 60s, 1 percent in their 70s, 0.3 percent in their 80s.

5.In the sample, 29.3 percent were students, 4.6 percent retired, 1.3 percent unemployed, 4.3 percent unskilled manual workers, 5.9 percent semi-skilled manual workers, 6.9 percent skilled manual workers, 14.8 percent clerical workers, 10.5 percent managerial grade workers, 19.1 percent professionals, and 3.3 percent owned small businesses.

6.In the sample, 88 percent identified as White, 3.7 percent as Indian, 3.7 percent as Pakistani, 1.3 percent as black, 1 percent as Chinese, 1.3 percent as mixed race and 1 percent in other terms.

7.The religious breakdown was: 30.2 percent Protestant, 10.3 percent Catholic, 8.3 percent unspecified Christian, 5.3 percent Muslim, 2.7 percent Hindu, 0.7 percent Jewish, 0.7 percent Sikh, 0.7 percent ‘other’ religious and 41.2 percent ‘not religious’.

8.Some of my respondents were recruited from the health club I attend and have been studying ethnographically. They do represent a sampling bias in terms of a ‘body’ questionnaire. However, this was a minority of the sample.

9.‘Disposition’ is the usual English translation of ‘hexis’ and ‘habitus’. ‘Habit’ would have worked but, as Camic (1986) notes, its meaning has been considerably changed and degraded in the 20th century, largely under the impact of psychological/physiological behaviourism.

10.I use Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘institution’ here, which is a modification of the phenomenological concept of ‘constitution’. ‘Constitution’, Merleau-Ponty argues, suggests that the agent bestows meaning and order ex nihilo, where ‘institution’ suggests that the agent deploys socially acquired schemas of meaning and order – ‘techniques’ in this case (Merleau-Ponty, 1979).

11.As Merleau-Ponty (1968) notes, to recognize their image in the mirror infants must first learn to ‘derealize’ the image; that is, they must learn to see it as an image and not as another person. Then they must learn to use the mirror to manipulate their own image, matching actions to their inverted reflections. Much work in child development focuses upon this process whereby children learn to use the mirror image to manipulate aspects of their own appearance (e.g. Amsterdam, 1971). And Romanyshyn (1982) notes how this is extended in adolescent and adult life, where we play with and in front of the mirror, rehearsing anticipated agentic ‘performances’ and fantasizing. Mirror play is a complex and acquired technique.

12.One can use different measures of ‘distance’ in multi-dimensional scaling, each of which yields different results. If frequency distribution is important and one is dealing with head counts then Phisquared is often a useful measure. I have used Phi-squared here.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Higher School of Economics on February 9, 2016

Mapping Reflexive Body Techniques 33

13.On this occasion ‘Euclidean square distance’ proved a more useful measure of distance for the MDS analysis.

14.Again distances were measured using Euclidean square distance. See notes 12 and 13.

15.Cluster membership is not clear from the diagram as cases overlap in the same space. It is available as output for MDS on SPSS. I have not included it here because the existence and basic profile of the clusters is more important than their actual composition, and because case numbers are arbitrary and are only of use to us if we want to further explore the details of cluster members, which we do not in this context.

References

Amsterdam, B. (1971) ‘Mirror Self-image Reactions Before Age Two’, Developmental Psychobiology 5(4): 297–305.

Aristotle (1955) The Ethics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bartky, S. (1993) Gender and Domination. London: Routledge. Baudrillard, J. (1999) The Consumer Society. London: Sage.

Bettleheim, B. (1986) The Informed Heart. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) ‘Remarques provisoires sur la perception sociale du corps’, Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales 14: 51–4.

Bourdieu, P. (1979) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bourdieu, P. (1989) Practical Reason. Cambridge: Polity.

Camic, C. (1986) ‘The Matter of Habit’, American Journal of Sociology 91: 1039–87. Canter, D. (ed.) (1985) Facet Theory. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Charlesworth, S. (2000) The Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connell, R. (1987) Gender and Power. Cambridge: Polity.

Cresswell, M. (2003) ‘Psy-crats and Survivors’ (working paper, Department of Sociology, University of Manchester).

Crossley, N. (1995) ‘Body Techniques, Agency and Intercorporeality: On Goffman’s Relations in Public’, Sociology 29(1): 133–49.

Crossley, N. (1996) Intersubjectivity. London: Sage.

Crossley, N. (2001) The Social Body. London: Sage.

Crossley, N. (2002) Making Sense of Social Movements. Buckingham: Open University Press. Crossley, N. (2003) ‘From Reproduction to Transformation: Social Movement Fields and the Radical

Habitus’, Theory, Culture & Society 20(6): 43–68.

Crossley, N. (2004a) ‘The Circuit Trainer’s Habitus: Reflexive Body Techniques and the Sociality of the Workout’, Body & Society 10(1): 37–70.

Crossley, N. (2004b) ‘Fat is a Sociological Issue: Obesity in Late Modern, Body-conscious Societies’,

Health and Social Theory 2(3): 222–53.

Crossley, N. (2004c) ‘Ritual, Body Technique and (Inter)subjectivity’, pp. 31–51 in K. Schilbrack (ed.)

Thinking through Ritual: Philosophical Perspectives. London: Routledge. Davis, K. (1995) Reshaping the Female Body. London: Routledge. DeMello, M. (2000) Bodies of Inscription. London: Duke University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1915) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. and M. Mauss (1963) Primitive Classification. London: Cohen and West. Elias, N. (1984) The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Higher School of Economics on February 9, 2016

34 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

Entwistle, J. (2000) The Fashioned Body. Cambridge: Polity.

Featherstone, M. (1982) ‘The Body in Consumer Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society 1(2): 18–33. Featherstone, M. (ed.) (2000) Body Modification. London: Sage.

Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity. Cambridge: Polity. Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Goffman, E. (1972) Relations in Public. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Gurney, C. (2000) ‘Accommodating Bodies’, pp. 55–80 in L. McKie and N. Watson (eds) Organising Bodies. London: Macmillan.

Irwin, K. (2001) ‘Legitimating the First Tattoo’, Symbolic Interaction 24(1): 49–73. Klein, A. (1993) Little Big Men. Albany: SUNY.

Klesse, C. (1999) ‘“Modern Primitivism”: Non-mainstream Body Modification and Racialised Representation’, Body & Society 5(2–3): 15–38.

Kosut, M. (2000) ‘Tattoo Narratives’, Visual Sociology 15: 79–100. Kruskal, J. and M. Wish (1978) Multidimensional Scaling. London: Sage.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1987) Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge.

Mauss, M. (1979) ‘Body Techniques’, pp. 95–123 in Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Mead, G.H. (1967) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1965) The Structure of Behaviour. London: Methuen.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1979) ‘Institution in Personal and Public History’, in Themes from the Lectures

at the College de France. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Monaghan, L. (1999) ‘Creating “The Perfect Body”: A Variable Project’, Body & Society 5(2–3): 267–90.

Monaghan, L. (2001) Bodybuilding: Drugs and Risk. London: Routledge.

Mort, F. (1987) Dangerous Sexualities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Myers, J. (1992) ‘Nonmainstream Body Modification: Genital Piercing, Branding, Burning, Cutting’,

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 21(3): 267–306.

Nettleton, S. (1992) Power, Pain and Dentistry. Buckingham: Open University Press. ONS (Office for National Statistics) (1993) Social Trends. London: ONS.

Pitts, V. (1998) ‘“Reclaiming” the Female Body: Embodied Identity Work, Resistance and the Grotesque’, Body & Society 4(3): 67–84.

Pitts, V. (2003) In the Flesh. New York: Palgrave.

Romanyshyn, R. (1982) Psychological Life. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Rosenblatt, D. (1997) ‘The Anti-social Skin: Structure, Resistance, and “Modern Primitive” Adornment in the United States’, Cultural Anthropology 12(3): 287–334.

Ryle, G. (1945) The Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Sanders, C. (1988) ‘Marks of Mischief’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 16(4): 395–442. Sartre, J.-P. (1969) Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge.

Sartre, J.-P. (1972) The Psychology of Imagination. London: Methuen. Sartre, J.-P. (1993) The Emotions: Sketch for a Theory. New York: Citadel.

Sassatelli, R. (1999a) ‘Interaction Order and Beyond: A Field Analysis of Body Culture within Fitness Gyms’, Body & Society 5(2–3): 227–48.

Sassatelli, R. (1999b) ‘Fitness Gyms and the Local Organisation of Experience’, Sociological Research Online 4(3): available online at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/4/3/sassatelli.html

Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Higher School of Economics on February 9, 2016

Mapping Reflexive Body Techniques 35

Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage.

Smith, G. (2001) ‘Techniques of Neutralisation, Techniques of Body Management and the Public Harassment of Runners’, pp. 163–82 in S. Cunningham-Burley and K. Backett-Milburn (eds) Exploring the Body. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

St Martin, L. and N. Gavey (1996) ‘Women’s Bodybuilding: Feminist Resistance and/or Femininity’s Recuperation’, Body & Society 2(4): 45–57.

Sweetman, P. (1999) ‘Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity’, Body & Society 5(2–3): 51–76.

Turner, B. (1999) ‘The Possibility of Primitiveness: Towards a Sociology of Body Marks in Cool Societies’, Body & Society 5(2–3): 39–50.

Vail, A. (1999) ‘Tattoos Are Like Potato Chips . . . You Can’t Just Have One’, Deviant Behaviour 20(3): 253–73.

Wacquant, L. (1995) ‘Pugs at Work’, Body & Society 1(1): 65–94. Wacquant, L. (2004) Body and Soul. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, S. and G. Bendelow (1998) ‘Malignant Bodies’, in S. Nettleton and J. Watson (eds) The Body in Everyday Life. London: Routledge.

Nick Crossley is Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester (UK). He has published widely on the issue of human embodiment. His first book on the subject, The Social Body, was published by Sage in 2001. He is currently writing a follow-on book, Reflexions in the Flesh: Embodiment in Late Modernity, which will be published by McGraw-Hill/Open University Press.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Higher School of Economics on February 9, 2016