BodyWatching

Introduction

The title BodyWatching, I have borrowed quite unashamedly from Desmond Morris [1]. Although we have certain similarities in our approaches, Morris is more concerned about the behaviours that people display through the use of their bodies in terms of movements, postures, expressions, gestures etc. Morris is also primarily concerned with human beings as primates. I am more concerned with how bodies as biological entities in general – not just human bodies – appear in the world. Thus, for Morris body watching was really primate/human body watching rather than body watching in its strictest sense of watching all bodies.

Morris also takes something of a quasi anatomical approach. His book Bodywatching is divided into 20 chapters moving from the top of the head to the soles of the feet [2]. I find this pre-structuring rather restrictive. Throughout this website I am trying to let structure emerge from content and, so far as is possible, not fit ideas into any predetermined format.

Importantly, it does not follow that what I want to explore can be given a prescribed format. In certain respects what I am trying to do is re-explore the body without necessarily carving it at the same old joints or in the same old way. The work of the anatomist Melvin Moss (which I read many years ago) raises the idea that one can divide the body in different ways. Moss envisaged functional units that do not conform to the standard anatomical divisions. For example, for purposes of typical anatomical description, the elbow has certain prescribed boundaries. As a functional unit, however, the structures which contribute to the elbow's actions extend beyond these anatomical boundaries. Furthermore, what we might call the elbow's actions are not necessarily the same as its functions. The elbow has a certain fairly limited set of actions but its functions in terms of what it can do in the greater scheme of things is much greater.

Men are often accused of undressing women with their eyes. (See the attached file at the foot of this page for a humourous take on this notion.) I was reminded of this on the bus to work one morning. The bus had stopped at some traffic lights and a young woman in a short skirt crossed over in front of us and proceeded to walk up a side street. I didn't so much undress her with my eyes as dissect her. That is, on the back of each calf I could see the bulge of the belly of a muscle called the plantaris. This muscle is something of a vestigial structure and is only likely to be described in more specialist anatomical books. As the woman walked away from me, I found myself looking through the skin of her legs and watching, in my mind's eye, two dissected legs clearly depicting the plantaris walking away from me.

On another occasion, I found myself in a market on a hot summer's day, looking down to see the feet of another young woman who was wearing sandals. What was noticeable was how, on both feet, her second and third toes were webbed – that is, the cleft in the skin did not go as far down between her toes as one usually finds. Another young woman came over and spoke to the first. Their facial features looked similar, but one would not have assumed from this alone that they were sisters were it not for the fact that the second woman had the same webbing on both feet. There was a distinct likelihood that they were related in some way.

Soon after, I told a couple of my colleagues about this very interesting occurrence. They appeared somewhat bemused exclaiming 'The things you notice!' To them the occurrence was not at all interesting. A couple of days later however, I was walking with one of them across campus when we bumped into a colleague from another department and talked as we walked some distance. She was wearing sandals and she too had the type of webbing I had seen in those women in the market. While I noticed this, the colleague to whom I had described the condition not many days before remained quite oblivious to the fact - still uninterested in what was before their very eyes.

Noticing things about the bodies of others and how life is lived and expressed physically through them, I see as part of the examination of life [3]. While Morris places his major focus on the behaviours, gestures etc. that people express through their bodies, I want to explore the body as an object and how it lives in the world. I am not concerned with the person inside or how they want to express their personality outwardly; I am concerned with what different bodies and parts of bodies say - indeed, what these things meant to the physical world.

To some extent there will be an element of interpretation in this. How I interpret and understand what I see is sure to be different from the interpretation and understanding somebody else places on the same thing. However, while we are sure to differ, we will both have in common the fact that neither of us will be complete in what we bring to the subject and so both of us will have something to offer the other does not.

See Also:

Attachments below.

Notes

1 - See: Morris, D. (1985). Bodywatching. London: Jonathan Cape.

2 - Morris's chapters are, in order, The Hair, The Brow, The Eyes, The Nose, The Ears, The Cheeks, The Mouth, The Beard, The Neck, The Shoulders, The Arms, The Hands, The Chest, The Back, The Belly, The Hips, The Buttocks, The Genitals, The Legs, The Feet. These conform largely to common anatomical divisions.

3 - Socrates stated that 'the unexamined life was not worth living' (Apology 38a). Socrates would rather have died than give up philosophy. For him and for many after him, there is something all-consuming about the love of knowledge. Indeed, what is the point of being so busy living that we miss what living is. In the context of this website, I am trying to examine life biologically and philosophically.