Memory in our body

JAIDA KIM SAMUDRAUniversity of Hawai‘i at M¯a noa Memory in our body:Thick participation and the translation of kinesthetic experienceA B S T R A C TAnthropologists studying dance,sports,or other kinesthetic cultures may face the difficulty of rendering into analytic discourse those bodily practices consultants do not express verbally. Through thick participation,we may use our bodies to acquire shared cultural knowledge,but then we must translate our somatic experience into words. Encoding kinesthetic details,describing new sensations,and narrating physical training episodes are three different ways of writing about participatory experiences in thefield to yield data that can then be compared with observations and life histories of consultant practitioners.Each approach provides distinctive avenues for investigating coherence across multiple bodies inhabiting the same kinesthetic culture,in this case,a Chinese Indonesian self-defense and health movement system known as White Crane Silat. [body,kinesthetic culture,thick participation, ethnography,silat,martial art]And when you moved,you moved with intention and you moved where you had to go.And there was thought behind it,but it wasn’t necessarily verbal thought.—European American student of White Crane SilatI saw one time a crazy person on the street,he’s gonna get hit by a car.But with his reflexes,he spontaneously did a lot of silat[self-defense] movement[and avoided being hit].I was shocked.I was really surprised.At that time he was crazy,he couldn’t even communicate,but he still remembered...to come to the[silat]school and we teased him and we did tui ciu[H.,sparring]with him and he still could parry.He’s never that aggressive and his reflexes have never disappeared.So I think silat is strange.People can go crazy,but silat cannot disappear.So I think this movement has a memory that is good:in the nerves,in our blood,in the sweat.It becomes memory in our body.—Javanese Indonesian student of White Crane Silat1 I n my research on how shared bodily practices facilitate the acqui-sition of new social identities,I have frequently run up against thelimits of language for expressing embodied knowledge.During life-history interviews,practitioners of Silat Bangau Putih(White CraneSilat),a syncretic,Chinese Indonesian self-defense and health move-ment system,met my questions about their bodily experiences with silence and puzzled requests to rephrase my queries.2They provided testimoni-als to the mental,social,and health benefits of silat training but danced around descriptions of their own kinesthetic practices.Typical in this re-spect,an assistant trainer in New York hesitated and then declared that the “physical effects”could not be talked about or recalled in discursive terms: Well I used to have a lot of weird physical effects,even now when I’m training....Just by taking a breath I can feel all kinds of stuff.Very subtle, but...I can’t,you can’t even really talk about it in a way,because it’s so subtle.I’m trying to think about it.It’s like when youfirst start working out.People are telling you what to do and everything,but when you workAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST,Vol.35,No.4,pp.665–681,ISSN0094-0496,onlineISSN1548-1425.C 2008by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved.DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00104.xAmerican Ethnologist Volume35Number4November2008out on your own...and you’re trying to remember what they told you,at a certain point you don’t have to remember anything....You don’t have to think in those terms.The cultural knowledge of people with specialized body techniques,including spirit mediums who trigger trance states through repetitive movement,musicians,dancers, soldiers,and martial artists and other athletes,is deeply embodied and often not transmuted into semiotic code. Silat students report problems remembering movements in words or images,rather than in their bodies.A European American silat student described this difficulty:You’re in your body and your mind isn’t ruling it as much as it’s fused and unified.It’s not your body:you’re one unit,you’re one working machine.You can’t think too much when you’re doing silat or you can’t do it.And you have to think while you’re doing silat or you really can’t do it!...You have to use your mind to remember it,but if you think about it too much you can’t remem-ber it!People can be expected toflounder in the attempt to verbalize kinesthetic practices that cannot be performed smoothly iffilteredfirst through language.Indeed,silat practitioners often seemed to intuit the difference between what Anthony Giddens calls“discursive”and“practical”consciousness,the former connoting“those forms of re-call which the actor is able to express verbally”and the lat-ter involving“recall to which the agent has access in the dur´e e of action without being able to express what he or she thereby‘knows’”(1984:49).Giddens here differs from Pierre Bourdieu,whose practice theory has proven a ro-bust approach to linking bodily and social forms.3Bour-dieu,however,mistakenly conflates discourse with con-sciousness and then assumes those bodily experiences that are not put into words remain in the unconscious.4He ar-gues that“the fundamental principles of the arbitrary con-tent of the culture...em-bodied in this way are placed be-yond the grasp of consciousness”(Bourdieu1977:94)and that a normative scheme or principle“exists in a practical state in agents’practice and not in their consciousness,or rather,their discourse”(1977:27).Those involved in kines-thetic practices discover,instead,that one can be a fully conscious actor in the body without necessarily encoding the meaning of one’s actions in words.5An anthropologist intent on understanding the mean-ings of kinesthetic actions faces the peculiar difficulty of rendering into discourse exactly those practices his or her consultants consider verbally inexpressible.6The usual methods of collecting data through linguistic and visual media may not suffice;even participation alone is no guar-antee of success,for the researcher is still left with the prob-lem of how to analyze newly acquired physical skills as a shared social experience.Ethnography is culture written: The memory of the collective body must somehow be trans-lated into the inherently discursive consciousness of schol-arship.In this article,I suggest different ways in which a re-searcher’s participatory experiences might be transformed into textual data that can then be correlated with other peo-ple’s experiences to understand the social meanings of a particular kinesthetic culture.Thick participation:Ethnography from the body In the last decade of the20th century,social theorists be-gan to argue that the mind and language had too long been considered the agent and basis for culture,whereas the body had been shunted aside,assumed natural,bio-logical,universal,undifferentiated,and acultural and,thus, of little interest to social scientists(Shilling1993).7De-spite Marcel Mauss’s(1973)attention to“techniques of the body”as early as the1930s,experience and skill have largely been ignored as ways of knowing.8James Fentress and Chris Wickham claim that this is a habit of“Western”thought that tends to“divide knowledge into three broad categories:propositional knowledge,or knowledge about things;sensory and experiential knowledge,or knowledge directly of things;and skill knowledge,or knowledge how to do physical things,”with knowledge“about”privileged as complete knowledge(1992:3).Social theorists drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s(1962)phenomenology and Bourdieu’s(1977)practice theory suggest,however,that re-searchers seeking to understand how people make meaning in the world can also gain knowledge“of”and knowledge “how to”by learning skills and sharing bodily experiences with their consultants.9Thus,Thomas J.Csordas argues that“embodied experience is the starting point for ana-lyzing human participation in a cultural world”(1993:135). Similarly,dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull finds that“our own immediate experiences...can be remembered and transformed into observations relevant to our understanding of society and culture”(1997:269). This is nothing new if,as Sherry B.Ortner claims,“ethnog-raphy...has always meant the attempt to understand an-other life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing”(1995:173).What is different for those who study kinesthetic cultures is an emphasis on the physical self,on conducting research“not only of the body, in the sense of object,but also from the body,that is,de-ploying the body as tool of inquiry and vector of knowledge”(Wacquant2004:viii).Such calls for anthropologists to record and remem-ber ethnographic data directly in their bodies are some-times reiterated by members of the kinesthetic cultures they study.If the anthropologist is not already a practitioner of the physical form(although researchers often are drawn to kinesthetic cultures because of previous experiences as666Memory in our body American Ethnologistdancers,athletes,etc.),those who are may ask him or her to participate.At one point during myfieldwork in Persat-uan Gerak Badan(Body Movement Association;henceforth PGB),the nonprofit institution that oversees White Crane Silat training worldwide,I suggested that I attend fewer lati-han(training sessions)to make more time for interviews. People exclaimed,“How can you do research about PGB if you don’t do latihan?PGB is latihan!”A Chinese Indonesian student claimed that one has to learn silat in the body be-fore intellectual understanding and linguistic encoding can be achieved:Thought is one thing.Movement is another thing.Un-derstanding doesn’t mean I can do it.Sometimes it’s wasted if we have intelligence and we thought that we can do something,but we have not trained our body enough to balance our thoughts....The best is we train,yeah,until the body can reach so far.And then af-ter the body already reaches so far,then the intelligence comes and we can talk about that movement,how to apply it.[The body]can reach...thought,rather than what we thought[coming]first.Similarly,Suhu Gunawan Rahardja,the current head of PGB,explained,You can’t talk about the movement until you have the essence....[It is]like a glass.One person is talking about what the glass is made of,another the shape of the glass,the colors on it,or someone is talking about what’s inside the glass,or is it empty or full.They all think they are talking about the same thing,but they aren’t.Just making confusion.Only after you know the movement,the essence,you can talk about the whole, like knowing all about the glass,inside and out,shape and character,all at once.Researchers may have to participate deeply in the ac-tivities of their consultants to achieve relevant“thought”or grasp the“essence”of the subject of their research.This is most necessary in the context of a transnational system in which practitioners do not share a language but are united by shared skills and experiences.10White Crane Silat is not the exclusive cultural property of any single ethnic,racial, national,or religious group;rather,silat belongs to those who practice it.11The keluarga besar(greater family)of PGB is constituted by people who move their bodies in specific ways.Anthropologists entering such inclusive kinesthetic cultures may be confronted by practitioners who insist that the only way to understand them is through direct,body-to-body transmission of their cultural knowledge.Participation is,therefore,a method of data acquisi-tion that goes beyond achieving rapport or gaining access to opportunities for close observation.Dance ethnologists and ethnomusicologists have long recognized the produc-tivity of learning culturally specific body techniques while conducting research in the performing arts.Social scien-tists who have gotten deeply involved in kinesthetic cul-tures have discovered they can analyze cultural information recorded in their own bodies.Lo¨ıc Wacquant,a French soci-ologist who did extensive participatoryfieldwork on boxing in Chicago—that is,he became a boxer—found that,to understand the universe of boxing requires one to immerse oneself in itfirsthand,to learn it and expe-rience its constitutive moments from the inside.Na-tive understanding of the object is here the necessary condition of an adequate knowledge of the object.The “culture”of the boxer is not made up of afinite sum of discrete information,of notions that can be transmit-ted by words and normative models that would exist in-dependently of their application.Rather,it is formed of a diffuse complex of postures and(physical and men-tal)gestures that...exist in a sense only in action,and in the traces that this action leaves within(and upon) bodies.[2004:59]Sally Ann Ness discovered that meaning was gradually generated by the gestures she practiced when she was con-ducting research on choreography in the Philippines:As I grew more and more familiar with this gestural se-ries,my impression of it changed markedly.Atfirst I thought of it as a task to master,a skill to acquire,a puz-zle to solve.When the task was accomplished,however, and my hands could run quickly andfluidly down the scale,the series began to take on meaning in its resem-blance to similar movements,like those of the masseur, or the baker kneading dough,or the karate chop of a martial artist.The posture of the hands resembled that of the all-purpose Filipino hand wave....All of these images came and went in the instant of preparation. The sense of the specific skill acquired by the hands was not replaced,only enriched by these memories. [1992:9]Both of these scholars of kinesthetic cultures describe a somatic experience that becomes embedded in the body-mind.12Physical memory,performed repetitively,enacts sociocultural meanings for individuals,including the par-ticipating anthropologist.Thick participation is,thus,cultural knowledge recordedfirst in the anthropologist’s body and only later externalized as visual or textual data for purposes of analysis.Although thick participation is similar to Clifford Geertz’s(1973:20–21)“thick description”in its attention to detail,it differs in that it does not focus on interpreting social discourse.Rather,it centers on sharing social expe-rience.The communications of the body can be verified even when not encoded into language because they work in practice.As Csordas puts it,“Somatic modes of attention are culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with667American Ethnologist Volume35Number4November2008one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others”(1993:138).People use their bodies to pay attention to others’bodies in culturally specific, intersubjective ways.Because somatic knowledge is not semiotic knowledge, thick participation may or may not be subject to symbolic interpretation.Rendering somatic experience into words is not the same thing as“reading”the body as a kind of“text”or assuming that movements or sensual experiences only have meaning when they have symbolic value.Insisting on a semiotic analysis of movement risks distorting meaning, as when Elliot Lee Grossman(1998)argues that aikido part-ners control a“code”to communicate their“message.”For example,he glosses the initial punch in a series of sparring moves as“Kill!”and the evasion of the punch as“I decline to be the target of your violence”(Grossman1998:45).How-ever,the punch a self-defense teacher throws at a student almost never means“Kill!”Even punches outside the dojo can communicate any number of“messages”from“Let’s play”to“Back off”to“Let’s see who’s tougher.”Grossman’s reductive interpretation fails because he ignores the inten-tionality of the interchange and the relationships and bodily experiences of the participants.13How are researchers to explain what the body“means”when those meanings are not presented linguistically and symbolic interpretations miss the point?I concur with Wikan that an anthropologist must be willing to“use one’s experience...to grasp,or convey,meanings that reside nei-ther in words,‘facts,’nor text but are evoked in the meet-ing of one experiencing subject with another”(1992:463). However,even when we allow our bodies to be transformed through new practices,we may still be uncertain how to in-corporate these new experiences in our analysis.Bull points out that“writers on dance either leap quickly to general-ized cultural conclusions,not taking the time to notice what is actually going on in the dance they are writing about, or they emphasize the experiential and descriptive at the expense of commentary and analysis”(1997:269).Reflexive notes on our experiences in thefield do not necessarily lead to a rigorous study of those experiences or generate correla-tions with those of our consultants.I now turn to the ethno-graphic problem of translating direct experiential data into language,the medium of academia.I suggest that how we put our experienced,moving bodies into words,shapes the kinds of information we generate for analysis and,hence, the sociological questions we address.Translating experienceIn the following ethnographic experiments,I rely on my field notes and experiences as a silat practitioner tofill in for the normal lack of verbalization about silat among PGB members.14Ethnographers usually trust their consul-tants to translate from their experiences into language for them;they then analyze these translations.The experience of physical training is not often put into words,however.As already noted,silat students seldom attempt to describe the feeling of the movement or its effects on them other than in the most general and hesitant terms.Furthermore,most latihan are conducted in near silence,only occasionally broken by trainers’commands.As one Chinese American pesilat(martial artist)said,a student’s responsibility is not to talk but to“do new movements until you’re sick,so that they get into your body directly.”15Trainers often become impatient with students who attempt to enter silat intellec-tually,rather than bodily.A trainer may ignore,walk away from,or refuse to spar with students until they learn to accept training given with minimal explanation.Students who ask too many questions or expound too long on what they imagine silat is about are scolded:“Just do it!”“Don’t think,do.”“Those who speak don’t know.”Silent training is a deliberate part of the silat pedagogy.16The chief trainer for PGB in the United States explained,“A core principle of silat...is having an experience which is frustrating or con-fusing,then[it]generates some idea or question,and then the structure or answer helps you go forward.But if[an an-swer is]given too soon,it prevents you from having the ex-perience,because you think you already know.”Whereas less-experienced silat practitioners are sanc-tioned for talking too much because it inhibits their learning,fully credentialed trainers are expected to be able to analyze silat with their peers in some contexts,such as trainers’retreats.That some consultants in a kines-thetic culture talk about their practices does not resolve the dilemma for the anthropologist because many somatic experiences are likely to remain unverbalized by the ma-jority of practitioners.Furthermore,even if the experts are willing to verbally impart specialist knowledge,their eso-teric discourse may seem unintelligible until the researcher has established some experiential foundation for interpre-tation.The anthropologist must become familiar through thick participation with specific somatic communications to translate between body and word.The tactics I discuss below are based on my in situ attempts to translate participatory understanding of the shared silat experience.17These are tactics in Michel de Certeau’s(1984:xix)sense,an antidisciplinary creativity in-tended to erode some of the assumptions common to many analyses of the body and experience.I explore what can be said(within the cognitive categories and narrative struc-tures of language),what cannot be said(given the con-straints of linguistic encoding),and what perhaps should not be said(according to silat pedagogy).Each tactic gen-erates translations that can then be checked against other practitioners’movements and words to analyze common experience.18668Memory in our bodyAmerican EthnologistTactic one:Kinesthetic detailsThe following instructions are from a notebook I started in 1983,when I first joined a silat class in California,more than a decade before I began training as an anthropologist.This passage was my description to my neophyte self on how to do the basic front stance (H.,besi ),the first movement every White Crane Silat student learns.Begin with one leg in a wide stance forward,knee bent.Front foot turned in,front of foot lined up with heel of back foot,which is turned out.Knee of front leg should be over toes of foot.Make stance as low and wide as possible,and while moving stay low,sliding foot through the movement without unbending knees.Tuck hips under,keep back straight and don’t lean for-ward.Keep hips and shoulders squared!Keep shoul-ders down,elbows up and far back,fists flat and tucked into armpits.Keep head up and back,facing in direc-tion of movement.Don’t squint or purse lips.These notes illustrate some of the problems in translat-ing movement into ordinary language.The first is the diffi-culty of describing all the minute details of postures,ges-tures,and physical adjustments.Without having seen or done the movement,a reader would find it nearly impossi-ble to interpret these notes.A sketch of the stance supplies more coherent information,although it still lacks detail (see Figure1).Figure 1.Sketch of besi,Jalan Pendek (Short Movement)#1.Source:Issue #1,May 2004,Warta Bangau (Crane News),on PGB’s official website (/Wartabangau/).Originally printed in the Asthma Relief Program booklet published by The Radiant Health Center,ed by permission of the artist,Nancy Crompton.My first silat trainer teased me when he saw me at-tempting to write down details of silat movements.He said it would interfere with the direct transmission of silat from his body to my body and inhibit my retention of the move-ments.Students are discouraged from making linguistic or visual recordings of silat movements because such media do not carry the “energy”or “character”of movement.19PGB students,instead,remark that they learn movements most effortlessly from highly experienced teachers who do not talk too much.A European American woman com-mented that her trainer “sometimes puts a whole move-ment into your body,just puts it there.”Whereas writing down kinesthetic details may be frowned on among silat practitioners,the attempt to lin-guistically record the minute details of one’s bodily train-ing is useful for the participant anthropologist.Minimally,it helps flesh out field notes,because people in kinesthetic cultures frequently demonstrate what they mean physically,rather than explain it.Descriptions of what they do with their bodies have to be included in transcriptions of in-terviews and conversations,so the ethnographer must de-velop a vocabulary for noting such movements.For exam-ple,my field notes included a conversation with a Javanese Indonesian trainer about why even simple movements have so many variations:He said,“At first you teach beginners the simplest way,or else it’s too complex.Then change it later.”He stood669American Ethnologist Volume35Number4November2008up and made a besi stance.“What is a besi?”he asked me.Then he shortened the distance between his feet a little,and asked,“Is this a besi?What’s a besi?”Then he shortened his stance further,until at last he was stand-ing upright,naturally.He asked again,“So,is this a besi?Look at how we tui ciu.Look at Guru[lit.Teacher; henceforth,Guru refers to Suhu Gunawan Rahardja]. He’s not in a full,low besi,but he’s still in besi,still has his foundation.He stands like this[upright],but it is besi because he says it is.”I asked,“So what makes it silat?Why learn all these movements,if the form doesn’t matter?Some things are wrong,like this,”I demonstrated someone start-ing a punch from waist-height.“You are supposed to punch from up here,right?”I punched from the armpit.He said,“First,let people do it how they want to. Change it later.But if they do this...”—twisting his fist inwards so it was tilted out of alignment—“that’s wrong,that you have to change right now.”This interchange shows how thick participation per-mits the anthropologist to communicate body to body with others within the kinesthetic system.Ethnographers can conduct somatic“interviews”in parallel with verbal ones as they test their increasing bodily knowledge against other bodies.They may“ask”with their body,“What do you mean by...?Show me...?Teach me...?”The consul-tant then demonstrates the movement or corrects the form of the anthropologist’s body.When other consultants do the same thing in response to the same query,the anthro-pologist begins to understand cross-body knowledge.One may eventually correlate culture-specific terms to bodily actions,thus developing greater precision in coding one’s writtenfield notes.Detailed notes also enable the anthropologist to no-tice which aspects of his or her own learning experience are unique and which seem to be salient among all practi-tioners.20This is the beginning of correlating shared experi-ences,necessary for checking the researcher’s growing body of information with that of the collective population of the kinesthetic culture.For example,in the sketch in Figure1, the artist added a diagram to show that the back foot is an-gled out and the front foot angled in about45degrees.Dur-ing myfieldwork,I frequently observed trainers correcting this foot position(see Figure2).Trainers also insist on students widening their stances and bending their front knees more deeply;they are less consistent in pulling students’elbows back or tapping their shoulders to lower them.I have never observed anyone re-ceive the injunction I originally gave myself not to squint or purse my lips.Thus,there is a hierarchy of importance in terms of which bodily configurations must be trained con-sistently.Learning which possibilities are really wrongand Figure2.An assistant trainer adjusts the foot of a child in besi stance (Jakarta,2000).Photo by J.Samudra.must be corrected,which are slightly wrong but inconse-quential,and which are acceptable variations can only be done through training and noting the differences across a variety of bodies.A researcher whose aim is correlatingfine-grained movement experiences across multiple individuals or com-paring the cultures of different“structured movement sys-tems”(Kaeppler1985)wouldfind learning a formal sys-tem for encoding movement worthwhile.21The best-known systems were originally developed to record and analyze choreography.The notation systems developed by Rudolf Laban in the1920s are still taught in dance departments. Labanotation records“the body’s changes in position and timing of those changes,”and Effort-Shape documents“the effort andflow of movement and the body’s shaped config-urations in relation to its own parts and other surrounding670Memory in our body AmericanEthnologistFigure3.The Honolulu group demonstrates the basic punch in Jalan Pendek#4(2003).Photo by J.Samudra.objects”(Foster1995:13).Learning these systems of coding body movements takes several years,however,and the tran-scriptions are unreadable except by other experts in these systems.Furthermore,adopting such a scheme forces the anthropologist to do a double translation:from the move-ment to the notation system and then to scholarly language.Whether one develops or adopts a formal system for coding movement,making the effort to note kinesthetic de-tails in ordinary language can lead to some interesting dis-coveries while one is in thefield.For example,it became clear from myfield notes and observations that precise an-gles were an important part of basic silat forms.New stu-dents receive instruction in rhythmically and mechanically simple movements and are taught to move their bodies along45,90,or180degree angles(see Figures3and4).However,silat practitioners most often describe and idealize White Crane Silat movements as graceful,fluid,and flexible,not angular or static.Such aesthetic qualities are only realized in advanced movements and among advanced practitioners who are not expected to follow precise forms. Indeed,they demonstrate their expertise by shaping the forms to their own“character.”Compare the perpendicular angles in the basic movements illustrated in Figures3and4 with the sinuous,dynamic advanced movements shown in Figures5and6.These differences in form visibly communicate a sta-tus hierarchy within PGB between beginners,intermediary students,trainers,and the most experienced pesilat elders. This is one example of how comparing detailed descriptions of my movements with my observations of otherpeople’s Figure4.A student demonstrates a basic Crane movement(Jakarta, 2000).Photo by J.Samudra.movements generated new analytic insight while I was in thefield.Knowing the structure of movement is not the same as experiencing the sensation of movement,however.Af-ter more than two decades of training,I know when I am executing a besi correctly:not by the shape of the form but by subtle sensations.The impetus for sliding forward comes from my hips,which feel as though they are on rollers on an invisible plane that passes through my lower abdomen par-allel to thefloor.As I step,I vary neither height(altering the vertical dimension)nor speed and force(altering forward or backward momentum)but glide smoothly on this invisible plane no matter where my feet are in relation to my torso. The soles of my feet are fully in contact with the ground,nei-ther lifting at the heels initially nor braking to a stop with the weight at the ball of the foot.In silat terms,I am ideally both “balanced”and“grounded”as I move,so that it would not be possible for someone to sweep my feet out from under me and throw me to thefloor.This kind of description sug-gests an order of bodily knowledge that is informed more by sensual quality than by form or shapes in space.Tactic two:Sensory impressionsThe next paragraph is extracted fromfield notes I took while conducting research on PGB in Indonesia in2000.At the time I wrote this passage,I was attempting to capture the671。