Embodied Collective Memory: The making and unmaking of human nature

A close look at the social order reveals, in other words, collectively relevant aspects of embodiment, embodied aspects of collective memory. This book discusses the ways in which social actors come to reflect social conditions and how these social conditions often become entangled, precisely, with gestures, with sentiments, with phonetics — with the bodies of individuals who bring these conditions to life. Embodied collective memory (ECM), I will argue, is a social structure that results from the transubstantiation of history in people, from the collective in-corporation of bequests given by the past. Writers such as Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Connerton, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias and others have already helped us understand this preservative tendency of embodiment. They have helped us see how social actors embody, enact and vivify the demands of culture, so that the present devolves as a vivification of the past, of tradition and history, and so that the prescriptions of the social order become, precisely, “naturally” entangled with everyday life, organically sedimented within the social order. But ECM is not merely determined by the past, by the “imagination of the dead,” as Richard Rorty would say. It is also a site of possibilities. And embodied social actors often erode cultural norms inherited from their traditions, and thus create, even if not purposefully, new conditions of existence, for better and for worse. This book also deals with the ways in which social actors collectively detach themselves from what that past prescribes for their bodies (for example, from the values that previous generations ascribed to pre-marital virginity); so that, as they disentangle their everyday lives from the organic grip of tradition, they bring to life new collective practices, and indeed new collective futures. The discussion that follows, I should clarify, does not suggest that people either embody elements of the past or of the possible, dichotomously, as many possibilities may, of course, fall in between. Yet, the theory I propose deals with social mechanisms whereby the past becomes sedimented in individual and collective bodies, while, on the other hand, also dealing with embodied mechanisms that lead to social change. Betty Friedan (2001) has provided examples that illustrate these ideas. She showed that, in the fifties, many housewives embodied tradition, in a literal sense, vividly reflecting the social code in their “feminine” gestures, corporeal and phonetic rhythms, affects, sartorial standards. But on the other hand, the Second Wave, led by Friedan, brought forth not only new ideas but also new “natures”: new ways of vivifying and enacting femininity. Embodied social actors, that is to say, can usher in new ideas and collective discourses, and eventually new social structures, new laws, new collective identities and political agendas — new struggles for power among social forces. Embodied collective memory, in summary, involves mechanisms that affect, at times decisively, the life and the social course of individuals and groups. As Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and others have argued, bodies are very important instruments of social order, and of social control. To be sure, bodies are necessary channels of social and political domination. Gender domination, for example, is particularly effective when, precisely, the gestures, desires, ways of occupying space — when the bodies of men and women reflect and thus legitimize gender ideologies. But bodies, as I argue, are also channels of disorder, sites where people, for better or for worse, undo the organic grip that culture and tradition often have upon everyday life.