An Overview of Childhood Embodiment - Essay Example

Body-Work: An Overview of Childhood Embodiment The focus towards childhood embodiment has increased markedly in the last fifty years of so of anthropological studies. Even though, the finer points of the distinctions and divisions between key aspects of the nature, culture and the relationships between the bodily and the social are to worked out in the formation of a coherent theoretical groundwork for a study of individual childhood, yet the need to focus on the growth of the child’s body as a necessary part of the growing up process has been universally conceded. There are various ways in which childhood embodiment can be considered and there is no single linear and monolithic theoretical tenet that can possibly include all social, cultural and anthropological aspects of childhood embodiment. However, childhood embodiment is unique than other phases of the development of an individual because it is when the body is directly in a rapid flux, which is not experienced at other phases of human life, except may be at an extreme old age. Embodiment of children, thus need to take into account all the aspects that go into the formation of the childhood body.   Nature and Culture: Naturalist and Social Reductionist Thoughts towards Childhood Embodiment In order to execute a comprehensive theory of childhood embodiment it is important to locate the ‘body’ within the history of cultural, sociological and anthropological disciplines that have been vigorously, and at times, violently, divided into camps of biological and social reductionism. One point of view has been intent on summarily precluding the other view, and at times quite unexpected ideological fidelity has been worked out among conflicting schools. If we divide the whole approaches into ‘foundationalism’ and ‘non-foundationalism’ schools, then probably the conflicting trends become much clearer. The Foundationalist schools have a strong grounding on the body. It believes in a kind of physiological starting point, as the body being the nodal point in which and through which all other experiences are grounded. It is the base on which the superstructure of society is based. This is very clearly associated with the naturalistic view of the body. The naturalistic view is best expressed in Shillings words: The capabilities and constraints of human bodies define individuals, and generate the social, political and economic relations which characterize national and international patterns of living. Inequalities in material wealth legal rights and political power…are given, or at the very least legitimized, by the determining power of the biological body. (Shilling 41) While there is a clear prioritization of the body, the naturalistic clarification of embodiment also appears have a transcendental view that believes and promotes something constant, however changing that may be, that unify body together. This line of thought have its heritage in the liberal humanist schools of thought that came to characterize all theoretical formulations pervading in the Anglo-American universities at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the other extreme of the foundationalist schools, lie the non-foundationalist schools of thought, who look at the body as merely a product of social constructions. Often equated with the approach of social reductionism, this line of thought is anxious of giving the ‘body’ as such, any real of transcendental identity. At its radical height, the social reductionist approach is characterized by the work of someone like Michael Foucault, for whom the ‘body’ in itself does not exist, but is merely a product of discourses of power. It disappears as a material entity. If this view appears to be extreme in the sense that it denies the body any role as a meaningful and operative agency, there are other social constructionist approaches that are less radical and appear, on the face of it, more plausible. We can, for example, take a look at Feathersone’s theory, which looks at the body as a product of consumer culture. The biggest problem of these views are that they summarily ignore the role of the body as an agency, one that simply take the fact of embodiment for granted and do not problematize the experiencing body. (Csordas 6) Along with the identification of the social reductionist as well as the biological reductionist theories of embodiment, we can take a look at some of the attempts to fuse this two, an approach that can be essential in an understanding of childhood embodiment, in that it is exclusive and special than the general ideas of embodiment. Turner’s extensive study that looks at the body as an outcome of complex historical and social processes may look as non-foundational and social reductionist at the face of it, but actually attempts to fuse the two approaches. However, one of the biggest criticisms of Turner’s view is that it is additive rather than rational, which brings together two completely different premises on a ground in a wild sweep of intellectual eclecticism. However, with the premise of these two contradictory and contrasting views unmitigated and unqualified, the entire project of synthesizing the two, no relationship between the natural and the social is worked out. However, there are other possibilities that are opened by some of the alternative modes that exist within the overarching framework of social reductionism itself. These are laid open when we look at social reductionism as discursive rather than necessarily representational. This discursive view is integral in an understanding of the sociology of childhood, a question integrally linked with the study of the childhood ‘body’. The ‘body’ of the children, even when viewed as a kind of sociological construct, must be viewed as an agency. The child is not just a passive recipient of social tendencies and forces, but also takes an active role in shaping society through a kind of proactive negotiations within the formulations foregrounded by social formation. Thus, the subject is made to take a more central position within the framework of conditional theories themselves. It is within this theoretical framework that the ‘habitus’ theory of Bourdieu needs to be located. However, before discussing childhood embodiment as a concrete example of the class habitus as put forward by Bourdieu, we need to return to Shilling and his critic of turner in a discussion of the subjective agency. Shilling necessarily places childhood itself as an incomplete phase of mental and physical development. The set of experiences through which this inherent incompleteness attain completion is something that we usually designate as ‘childhood’, and this process of attaining completion is the ‘embodiment’ of childhood. This embodiment is social and biological at the same time. There are three reasons for which the biological forms as important a part of this development as the social conditional: First, if the body is necessarily ‘unfinished’ at birth and is only ‘completed’ through action in society, then it is during childhood, marked as it is by rapid bodily change, that this process of finishing the body should be particularly well revealed. Second, precisely because, as noted, the child’s body is characterized by accelerated biological change, children’s embodiment will be markedly different from that of adults, with perhaps only a comparable rapidity being experienced at the very of the life course. Third, childhood is commonly envisaged as the literal embodiment of change over time – means that a focus on children’s experience of embodiment as the experience of changing bodies should be central to any account of children’s social action. Although, these views appear to be foundationalist in their views, yet it negates the universality and constancy that is associated with childhood. Works of Duroche, for example, has unveiled that both children embodiment and resultant psychology have changed over time, although the body continues to play an important part in the creation of the societal views expressed in the subject’s childhood. With the reconnection of the relationship between the body and society, we find a revocation and re-establishment of a line of thought that unqualified social reductionism disconnects. Therefore, the consideration of childhood as an unfinished product is theoretically open-ended, working against any reductionist closure. We find how society works towards helping, or rather directing the body, towards fulfillment of its embodiment at home, school, and its general relationship towards social conditioning. Now, from within this theoretical framework we can come back to the views of Borediue, and the way it can be employed towards childhood embodiment. If childhood is a part towards completion/ perfection of a social being, then childhood socialization is as much a part of the ‘civilizing process’, which is transmitted towards the children, much like their adult counterparts, through a process of class habitus. Habitus, according to Bourdieu, is a system of perduring disposition which is the unconscious, collectively inculcated principle for the generation and structuring of practices and representations. (Csordas 11) According to Bourdieu, objective conditions do not cause practices, and neither do practices determine objective conditions. By putting it outside the realm of objectivism, Bourdieu directly places it within a system of ‘dialectical structuralism’. Although it certifies a kind of discursive construction of embodiment, it however, searches for a structure which resides underneath the level of individual perceptions, or subjectivity. At the same time, Bourdieu looks at consciousness itself as a kind of strategic calculation fused with a system of objective potentialities, as different from consciousness as the body projecting itself into the world as proposed by Merleu-Ponty. Bourdieu’s negation of the presence of any duality between structure and practice reinstates a kind of objectivity in the subjective understanding of the social conditions and the way it is appropriated and executed by the child subject. However, despite the theoretical rigor of Bourdieu’s views, we cannot ignore that the thought has been believed to be inadequate in at least two ways. Prout thinks that one of the biggest drawbacks of Bordieu’s theory is that it continues to look as the child subject as a passive and unobtrusive site for social conditioning, completely ignoring the way in which the child may, in a pro-active way, negotiate the conditioning space that it finds around itself in novel and radical ways. In this way, Bourdieu’s views are seen to be similar in essence to the views of Elias. For Prout, they are either ‘deficient, or at best ambiguous, in their assumptions about childhood socialization’. (Prout 9) The other accusation is that it is, despite its theoretical point of departure that collapses practice and thought, Bordieu’s theory of habitus is located strongly within the framework of social reductionist theories, thus giving only inadequate weightage to the bodily aspect of childhood embodiment. The Child as an Active Agency The biggest step towards child embodiment is the recognition of the child as an agency. One of the most persistent problems of classic social reductionist as well as of the humanist and universal naturalistic view is to treat the child subject as a kind of passive recipient. Once we have established the anthropological basis of child embodiment that children uses the body as a point of departure in the formation of consciousness and meaning-making, the next step is to understand that the child is an active agent in sociological formation. It is not merely an inert locus for the socially determined ideological constructions to exercise themselves. The child, it has been empirically noticed, uses its body to make sense and determine the world she finds around herself, and uses it actively. Body and childhood are no more two different phenomena, but an integral whole that emanate from a synthesized view of nature and culture. Latourd, for example, denies any differential view of nature and culture. Similarly, the child also uses its body in order to negotiate the ideological space that society impinges on this developing consciousness, including major ideological notions like class, gender, race and economic background of the family. The actual location of this pro-active child consciousness in the process of childhood embodiment is now the biggest questions related to this phenomenon. The understanding of the negotiation of the ideological space by the child presupposes the identification of the cognitive space that we understand as ‘childhood’. The child, in Western culture, is a category to have developed over centuries where its significations have gone through numerous changes at crucial historical junctures. Like all other dominant political, gender and economic ideologies prevalent in the West, the ‘child’ concept itself has gone through repeated revisions and re-statements. (Zornado, p 94) James, for example, notes that bodily differences like height and weight have been employed to create ‘the child’ as an Othered category in Western cultures. Cultural stereotypes about what constitutes a normally developing body for a child assume, she argues, great importance not only for the parents, but for the children themselves. Amongst children themselves, experiences of the body, and especially of bodily differences, function as important signifiers for social identity. It is this significant space in the construction of child ideology and categorically, that a child manipulates and negotiates to create and identity for herself. It is this recognition of childhood as a stage where the very act of growing up becomes an active epoch of cultural formations, involving reversals, transformations and inversions are necessary stages in the final recognition and realization of child embodiment. It is this recognition of the children as active, creative performers that can finally give us a complete and holistic view of the very phenomenon of child embodiment. The ways in which children use their body to negotiate the space given to them by the adult world can have numerous manifestations, its mores and manners and specific modes of discursive role can be as varied as there are subjects or subject groups. James, for example, in her study of the active child manipulates the certainty of bodily changes into formation of identity. Backett-Milburn, in a similar way, shows how middle class children and parents translate, and thereby partially transform, official discourses of health into everyday practices. Of particular interest is the work of Prendergast and Christensen in the study and understanding of female subjects: the girl child. The way Prendergast looks at the affair is to divide the entire process of living into nodal incidents of growing. Speaking particularly of the growing up of the girl child, Prendergast opines: The issue of embodiment as a cultural process surfaces most poignantly at key points in the life cycle: the trajectory of the body is given symbolic and moral value: bodily forms are paradigmatic of social transition…Each stage requires that we adjust to and attend to our body, or that of others, in an appropriate and special way. (Prendergast 1) Such a view necessarily implies that childhood is created through certain kinds of bodily performance. Contemporary children, in particular, inhabit a highly staged world – ‘childhood’ – a well delineated social group as different from the rest of the society. It stands in a paradoxical relationship with society, and can in no way be considered to be an incomplete or faulty version of it. There is an impending danger in this kind of categorization and social demarkation of children as a group. First, being ideologically separated from adults, they become targets of adult concern, help that at times amount to intervention. It summarily minimizes their capacity to deal with situations. Secondly, the conditions that the children themselves perceive as vulnerability are not perceived by adults as such, leading to breakages in identity formation and resultant psychological ramifications.  The first and foremost identity formation for a child is related to the physiological dimensions. The stereotype of the normal child provides a measure of any child’s conformity to that category that is delineated as ‘child’. It is through the everyday actions and fulfillment of everyday expectations in the spaces of family and school that the child develops a consciousness of the self as an individual and as an individual child. For those whose bodies differ from the norm, there grows a kind of acute self-consciousness. It is usually done through a process of constant comparison that takes place between a child and other members of the group. Through a comparison of such aspects as height, weight, intelligence, performance etc. the child experience their bodies, not just individuals, but as schools children and as playmates, social statuses and social relationships which create awareness of the variety of childhood bodies. Usually, among all children there appears to be an obsession that takes the form of comparison in comparing height and size, in short, transferring the meaning making within the social sphere through a parameter of physical attribute. What may be the reason for it? In order to understand the urge, one has to understand that childhood as seen through the eyes of the children themselves, is a formative process and is characterized by certain incompleteness. The child wants to see the process ‘finished’, and it is this close observation of the transition from incompleteness towards completeness of perfection that defines child embodiment, not only through the eyes of the society, but for the child herself, and it affects the behavior of different children in different ways. However, it is the body that always remains as the constant and the most dependable parameter for children to understand and conclude on the level of this development. Child embodiment, thus, in a profound and deeper sense, remains an embodiment not of the individual but of time. Just as height remains as one of the determinate parameters for concluding the finishing of the inherent incompleteness, other physical features also come under strict scrutiny among the children. However, here also we find a combination of the societal and the individual being worked out, which challenges the social reductionist views. We find an anxiety of obesity as well as underweight among the children, and these are not always because of the social stigma attached to these bodily forms. Apart from the dominant social perception that ‘fat people are funny’, children do not want to be fat, because they perceive that it is difficult for fat people to carry out the day to day activities, something as simple as walking, with ease. At times, this can take a more specialized performance like the tying of one’s shoelaces is, thus, not a passive acceptance of social stereotypes that inspire the children to adhere to them, but a kind of active observation of the social realities and associated practicalities. To be fat is not desirable, simply because it does not allow one to perform well on the playing field. At the same time, there is a very potent moral question that also imports body perceptions in a child. Obesity, for example, is connected with greed, and what is more problematic, with anti-social behavior of a bullying kind. Thus, it becomes clear that physical attributes in a way acts as representational. While height or tallness stands for maturity, fatness stands for absence of bodily control. The greatest problem and the most interesting part, however, come from bodily types that do not adhere to any of the above categories: the middling type. For them, with the loss of any well defined category, comes the option of negotiation. And this negotiation can often take that of role playing. There appears, thus, that there is no overarching theoretical framework that can support the different ways in which child embodiment is carried out. Children play an active role in determining its identity within a social conditioning which it faces, but does not blindly accept, rather negotiates to fulfill its own ends. The children routinely employ their physical bodies, which undergo changes, to make meaning and sense of the society and the world that they see around themselves. Through close observation and determined action, some children indulge in role playing, making it a well thought out strategy to re-represent themselves. For others, it is an unconscious yearning to fit in at all places, particularly home and schools, and the demands of the playground. Through ‘the daily, successfully negotiation of the ever-changing nature of their bodies and of the self which it presents, children are exploring not only their present social relationships but also laying the groundwork for those future, more adult ones. Each new rendering of the body is a potentially new rendering of the self’. (James 36) This self, however, needs to be worked out, and is worked out by the children themselves through a conscious act of manipulating their body-work and adapting it to meet the social needs, to bring about a successful ‘finish’ to what is essentially incomplete in a physiological and psychological sense: childhood. Works Cited 1. Csordas, Thomas J. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge University Press: 1994. 2. James, Allison. Embodies Being(s): Understanding the Self and the Body in Childhood. Body, Childhood and Society. Ed. Alan Prout. Palgrave Macmillan: Longon, 2000.  3. Prout, Alan. ‘Childhood Bodies: Construction, Agency and Hybridity’. Body, Childhood and Society. Ed. Alan Prout. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2000. 4. Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. SAGE: 2003.   5. Zornado, J. Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood. Garland Science. 2000. Read More