Mapping Reflexive Body Techniques

Body & Society
http://bod.sagepub.com Mapping Reflexive Body Techniques: On Body Modification and Maintenance

Nick Crossley Body Society 2005; 11; 1 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05049848 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/1/1
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Mapping Reexive Body Techniques: On Body Modication and Maintenance

NICK CROSSLEY
Much work in the sociology of the body has been devoted to an analysis of body modication and maintenance; that is, to practices such as diet, exercise, bodybuilding, tattooing, piercing, dress and cosmetic surgery (e.g. Crossley, 2004a, 2004b; DeMello, 2000; Entwistle, 2000; Featherstone, 1982, 2000; Gurney, 2000; Monaghan, 2001; Pitts, 1998, 2003; Rosenblatt, 1997; Sanders, 1988; Sassatelli, 1999a, 1999b; Smith, 2001; Sweetman, 1999; Turner, 1999). In this paper I seek to contribute to this work on two fronts. First, developing a theme already present in the literature, I explore the reexive and embodied nature of practices of modication/maintenance. It is very easy when discussing this topic to slip into a dualistic framework, opposing the body to either self or society and seeming to suggest that the former is transformed by the latter. We talk, for example, about my body, what I think of it, what I put it through and what I want it to look like. On one level this linguistic habit resonates with our experience. Our socially instituted capacity for reexivity allows us to turn back upon and objectify ourselves, effecting a distinction between what Mead (1967) referred to as the I and the me; the body as subject and the body as object. On this level
Body & Society 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 11(1): 135 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05049848
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Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1
we both are our bodies and we have a body (Crossley, 2001). However, it is necessary to recognize this split as reexive rather than substantial in nature. It derives from our acquired capacity to assume the role of another and thereby to achieve an outside perspective on ourselves, a process which generates a sense of our being distinct from the qualities we identify with our self when assuming this other role. It does not indicate a substantial distinction between mind/self and body. It does not often even reect the emergent stratication between the body as a biochemical structure and the body as a sensuous, active agent. My body, the body I have, is a moral, aesthetic, acting and sensuous being. I worry as much about its appearance, performances and transgressions as I do about its biological structure. The best work in the sociology of the body recognizes this. It challenges dualism, insisting that I am my body and that body projects are therefore reexive projects (see esp. Crossley, 2001, 2004a; Entwistle, 2000; Monaghan, 1999; Smith, 2001; Sweetman, 1999; Wacquant, 1995, 2004). In this article I advance this idea through an exploration of what I call reexive body techniques (RBTs), a concept which builds upon Marcel Mausss (1979) concept of body techniques (see also Crossley, 1995, 2004a, 2004c) and upon my own earlier work on reexive embodiment (Crossley, 2001). The concept of RBTs, I will show, affords a powerful analytic purchase upon the embodied and reexive processes and practices involved in projects of body modication/maintenance and, indeed, upon the reexive separation of the embodied I and me. The concept of RBTs also frames my second theme: the social distribution and diffusion of practices of modication. Specically, I will demonstrate and seek to explain the fact that the overall repertoire of RBTs belonging to any group can always be differentiated into: (i) clusters which all members practise, (ii) clusters which the majority or a large minority practise and (iii) clusters which only a small minority practise. Furthermore, I will demonstrate and seek to explain the fact that within the zone of less widely practised RBTs we nd clusters which go together thematically and/or in the sense of being statistically associated. Recognizing this pattern of distribution is important because it alerts us both to the different meanings attaching to specic clusters and to their variable conditions of diffusion and appropriation; their levels of accessibility and the different balance of costs and rewards that attach to them. This is an important observation in relationship to our broader focus. General descriptions such as body modication and body maintenance can be misleading because they imply that we are dealing with a set of practices with a common identity, purpose, accessibility, etc. They fail to distinguish between the social logic of distinct sets of practices. This can lead to theoretical accounts which do likewise. Giddens (1991) theory of the body in late modernity, to take one
Mapping Reexive Body Techniques
example, offers a single explanation of practices of body maintenance, based around the need for social agents to construct coherent self-narratives in an increasingly detraditionalized and risk-aware environment. This is arguably a good account in relationship to some practices of modication, perhaps diet and exercise (although see Crossley, 2004b). But it is far from obvious that it explains all modication practices. We are forced to ask whether other practices, including both more mundane and widespread practices, such as tooth-brushing and washing, and also more marginal practices, such as scarication and multiple piercing, can be explained in the same way. And even if they can we must question whether the difference in rates of uptake between such practices can be ignored, as it is by those who theorize body modication at a very high level of abstraction and generalization, in a largely undifferentiated fashion. The fact that some practices achieve an almost 100 percent rate of uptake in our society, whilst others are practised by less than 1 percent of the population, and others still by 30 percent, 40 percent or 50 percent is and should be question begging for sociologists of the body, as indeed should the clustering and association of specic techniques. They suggest the presence of a social dynamic we have not yet recognized or analysed. There are, of course, many focused empirical studies which explore in detail the specicities of particular practices, such as bodybuilding, piercing or cosmetic surgery (Davis, 1995; DeMello, 2000; Irwin, 2001; Klein, 1993; Klesse, 1999; Kosut, 2000; Monaghan, 1999, 2001; Myers, 1992; Pitts, 1998; Rosenblatt, 1997; Sanders, 1988; St Martin and Gavey, 1996; Sweetman, 1999; Turner, 1999; Vail, 1999). These are an important antidote to overgeneralized theories and they shed light upon individual practices. However, their specicity denies us the possibility of a broader, comparative grasp of the spectrum of practices to be found in contemporary societies. What is needed, to complement these studies, and what I hope to move towards in this article, is a broad and differentiated framework for thinking about body modication/maintenance in general; a framework that can draw a diverse range of practices together, while remaining sensitive to their particularities. The article will not take us all of the way to this goal but I hope at least to take a few important steps in that direction. A thorough analysis of patterns of differentiation, at least insofar as it includes consideration of different rates of uptake, requires that we integrate the qualitative methods and theoretical investigations common in the sociology of the body with certain more quantitative techniques, designed specically to enable exploration of distributions, associations, clustering, etc. Any of a range of such techniques might be used, from quite basic frequency distributions through to more complex statistical techniques. In this article, alongside frequency
distributions and cross-tabulation, I will use multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), a technique which allows us to visualize, in the form of scatterplots or perceptual maps, the statistical associations between large numbers of categorical variables (Canter, 1985; Kruskal and Wish, 1978). On an MDS plot we can see which RBTs go together, in the sense that practice of one is associated with practice of the other(s), because they form visible clusters. These statistical associations and clusters often reect thematic clustering. RBTs are statistically associated because they belong to a common lifestyle, habitus or self-narrative. Their association at the level of meaning increases the probability that agents drawn to one will be drawn to the other(s), which in turn generates a statistical association between them. Moreover, under certain conditions an MDS plot allows us, simultaneously, to map frequency distributions. One example of this is a pattern of distribution/interpretation, which I return to later, known as the radex (Canter, 1985). In a radex, variables (e.g. body techniques) which occur most frequently in a population cluster towards the centre of the plot, or towards a point that we can treat as the centre. Most people do most of them and this causes them to congeal centrally on the plot. Less frequently occurring variables spread progressively outwards from this centre, with the least frequent appearing at the extremes of the plot. In our attempt to interpret such plots we can represent these frequency patterns by drawing concentric circles onto the plot which locate specic sets of variables in different frequency zones. In addition, however, as we move out from our innermost circle, we nd that the less frequently occurring variables form distinct clusters in accordance with the other variables that they are positively and negatively associated with and with which, as noted above, they may also therefore be thematically associated. This allows us to further subdivide our plot. We can mark out clusters at the margins of our plot by way of segments. In Figure 1, for example, three concentric circles demarcate frequency zones into which hypothetical variables (represented by letters) fall. A and J are variables which occur most frequently (e.g. they might be very commonly practised body techniques). F, T, G, P and Q are variables which occur less frequently. And D, I and N are variables which occur relatively rarely (they might be techniques which very few people practise). In addition to mapping frequencies, however, the plot allows us to map out thematic clusters. We can divide our map into interpretable segments. We might seek to interpret the clustering D, T and G, for example, as evidence of their belonging to a common habitus or, following Giddens (1991), a specic narrative trajectory (A is too commonly practised to count). Perhaps they are all techniques which embody values of health and tness, while P, Q and N
T D G
J N
P Q
Figure 1 A Radex
belong to a modern primitivist habitus. How we divide the plot, where we draw our lines, will reect our own theoretical judgements. We might wish to use theoretical understandings to formulate hypotheses regarding clustering prior to our mapping exercise or may simply use theory for retrospective interpretation. In either case, however, maps require theoretically based interpretation if they are to have any sense. We try to match clusters with theoretical accounts always expecting that some anomalies will be thrown up along the way. What prevents this from being an interpretative free for all is the underlying structure of the map we are working with which is largely given by virtue of MDS technique.1 We have considerable room for manoeuvre when we slice the map up, but we are always restrained by the relative positioning of the variables (and our understanding of the technique that has produced it). We cannot pretend that two variables are close if they are not. Aims, Method and Data I begin the main body of the article by outlining the concept of RBTs, discussing certain thorny issues that attach to it, such as the problem posed by the idea of purpose, and elaborating its relationship to human selfhood. Having established the concept in this way, I then reect upon the distribution of RBTs within the population, returning to the radex concept outlined above, showing how it relates to reexive body techniques and positing a preliminary account for explaining the social distribution of RBTs. Before doing any of this, however, it is necessary to spell out the four primary aims of the article in a little more detail.
First, I aim to advance our substantive understanding of practices of body modication/maintenance by formulating an approach, centred upon RBTs and their distribution, which allows us to deal with a broad range of practices, in a non-dualistic way, without subsuming them into an over-general theoretical account. Second, following Williams and Bendelows criticism that Discourses on . . . the reexive body continue to be pitched, for the most part, at the level of broad claims and sweeping generalisations with little concern for empirical detail (1998: 104), I aim to demonstrate a way in which the analysis of body modication/maintenance can be made more empirical. Moreover, it is my contention that the framework I posit, centred upon RBTs, lends itself equally to qualitative and quantitative forms of investigation. Indeed it demands both. The present article leans in the quantitative direction, but it ags up qualitative issues and I have researched RBTs in a more ethnographic and phenomenological way elsewhere (Crossley, 2004a). Third, I aim to advance both my own earlier attempts to build upon Mausss (1979) concept of body techniques, a concept which I believe to be crucial for the sociology of the body (see also Crossley, 1995, 2004a, 2004c) and my own earlier theorization of reexive embodiment (Crossley, 2001). Finally, I aim by way of a discussion of statistical methods that have been little used in sociology, to explore a potential methodological innovation for the study of the body, and particularly for the analysis of body techniques. To allow me to demonstrate this more fully I have conducted a small questionnaire survey (n = 304), focused upon the distribution and diffusion of a number of RBTs and ensembles (dened below). The questions used in the survey were drawn from a consultation and piloting exercise, and also a media search. These preliminary investigations allowed me to build a rough picture of the current societal repertoire of RBTs and their ensembles. In the questionnaire itself respondents were asked to indicate whether they had engaged in any of these techniques within a given time-frame, which varied according to the practice. In some cases further elaboration was asked for (e.g. What sort of exercise? How many hours? How many tattoos? Where on your body?). A number of questions concerning consultation of body-related2 web-sites, magazines and magazine/newspaper articles all potential sources of information on RBTs were also included. Finally, I included a few basic demographic questions. Sampling for the survey was opportunistic and snowballed. I approached friends, family, colleagues and students, asking them both to ll in the questionnaire and to distribute it within their own personal networks. The resulting sample was relatively balanced with respect to gender though with slightly
more females3 and involved representation from a variety of age,4 social class,5 ethnic6 and religious7 groups. I make no claim with respect to representativeness, however. The sample was convenient and sufcient for my present, preliminary investigations, but it is far from perfect. Nor do I suggest that the survey results are particularly startling. I found what I expected to nd. The point of the survey, however, was to allow me to check that my assumptions were borne out amongst a population whom I have no reason to believe are unusual,8 to consider how we might move from assumptions to empirically veriable models, and also to explore the above-mentioned methodological innovations. With this said, we can turn to the main arguments of the article. I begin with a discussion of Mausss formulation of body techniques. My claim, to reiterate, is that we can conceptualize and analyse practices of body modication/maintenance as particular types of body technique, namely reexive body techniques, and that there are advantages to doing so. Body Techniques Mauss (1979) arrived at the concept of body techniques after having observed both that certain embodied practices (e.g. spitting, hunting techniques and eating with a knife and fork) are specic to particular societies, and that others vary considerably in style across societies and social groups. Women walk differently to men, the bourgeoisie talk differently to the proletariat, the French military march and dig differently to British troops and so on. Building on these observations, he denes body techniques as ways in which from society to society men [sic] know how to use their bodies (1979: 97). This denition is potentially problematic as it can seem to suggest, in the fashion warned against above, that men and their bodies are different things. Given the way in which Mauss pursues his point, however, it is reasonable to assume that this is not his intention. Indeed, the concept is used to effect a sophisticated, albeit often tacit innovation in non-dualistic sociology. Mausss description of body techniques as habitus is an important point of entry for grasping this innovation. Habitus, he explains, is a Latin rendering of the Greek hexis (or exis), a concept which is central to Aristotles philosophy, wherein it denotes acquired and embodied dispositions9 which constitute forms of practical reason or wisdom (see Aristotle, 1955). Habitus and thus body techniques have a double edge in this denition. They are forms of embodied, pre-reective understanding, knowledge or reason. And they are social. They emerge and spread within a collective context, as the result of interaction, such that they can be identied with specic social groups or networks:

. . . I have had this notion of the social nature of the habitus for many years. Please note that I use the Latin word it should be understood in France habitus. The word translates innitely better than habitude (habit or custom), the exis, the acquired ability and faculty of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). It does not designate those metaphysical habitudes, that mysterious memory, the subject of volumes or short and famous theses. These habits do not vary just with individuals and their imitations; they vary between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties. (Mauss, 1979: 101)
I will return to the question of how body techniques distinguish and differentiate social groups later. Here I am interested in the manner in which the concept simultaneously holds together social, corporeal and cognitive elements. In doing this body techniques rejoins the Durkheimian tradition it derives from in two respects. First, it rejoins the concept of social facts, integrating it with a consideration of biological and psychological facts (see also Lvi-Strauss, 1987). Body techniques are social facts. They vary across societies and social groups. They pre-exist and will outlive the specic individuals who practise them at any point in time. Mauss even seeks to show albeit somewhat problematically (Crossley, 1995, 2004a) how they constrain agents. At the same time, however, they presuppose biological structures and embody knowledge, reason and psychological properties. Styles of walking vary across social groups, for example, indicating a social basis, but all of these different styles presuppose bipedalism, not to mention the plasticity and intelligence that allow the organism to develop and learn different ways of walking. They thus have biological preconditions. Furthermore, styles of walking embody understanding and knowledge. Switching to tiptoes when silence is required, for example, indicates a grasp of the conditions most conducive to minimizing noise, while walking a tightrope, and indeed walking per se, requires a practical grasp of principles of balance, force, etc. When we adjust our posture to steady ourselves we engage in practical physics. Finally, certain styles of walking, such as a proud march or arrogant strut, embody an emotional intention (in the phenomenological sense of intention) and may even be employed as a means of generating such an intention (see Crossley, 2004c). As both Sartre (1993) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) note, we can generate emotional intentions, putting ourselves into particular moods, by acting out the mood; that is, by performing the body techniques (partly) constitutive of it. This is a key function of body techniques within certain rituals (Crossley, 2004c). Thus, body techniques have a psychological dimension too. Second, body techniques extends the Durkheimian notion of collective representations, a notion that Mauss himself developed with Durkheim (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963). It identies collective forms of wisdom and
reasoning which are pre-representational in form; that is, forms of pre-reective knowledge (know-how) and understanding that consist entirely in a capacity to do certain sorts of things. The movements of the body, for Mauss, are not, as they were for the behaviourists and other writers of his time, mere movements. They are practical and embodied forms of knowledge and understanding. Importantly, this does not mean that movement is guided by knowledge but rather that certain forms of knowledge and understanding are inseparable from and consist entirely in particular forms of acquired, embodied competence. By the same token this means that certain forms of knowledge and understanding are inseparable from the capacity to do certain sorts of things, irrespective of whether representations or propositions are involved. Body techniques are collective pre-representations though, as we will see shortly, not everyone in the collective has equal access to them. The mindful aspect of body techniques is not very well developed in Mausss work and its lack of development is one among a number of problems. We need to engage more seriously with the embodied subjectivity and agency he hints at, drawing upon the work of other writers who have developed this theme (Crossley, 2001; Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1965; Ryle, 1945; Sartre, 1969, 1972). Furthermore, we need to recognize more exibility and room for imagination and improvisation in bodily action than he does (Crossley, 1995, 2004a). Finally, we need to do more to grasp the link between body techniques and the intercorporeal contexts in which they are practised. The sociality of body techniques, for Mauss, consists in their group specicity, but we must recognize also a form of sociality that consists in the way in which their performance is shaped to meet the interactive exigencies of specic situations (Crossley, 1995, 2004a). None of this detracts from the importance of Mausss innovation, however. His concept of body techniques gives us a way of thinking sociologically about bodily activities, a way that prioritizes the social dimension while simultaneously building links to biology and psychology. This is a gain for theory, but it equally grows out of and facilitates solid empirical analysis, thereby providing muchneeded means to ll a gap within the sociology of the body. Reexive Body Techniques (RBTs) Much of Mausss essay is devoted to an attempt to catalogue different body techniques according to their purposes and attributes. My concept of reexive body techniques extends this effort. RBTs, as I dene them, are those body techniques whose primary purpose is to work back upon the body, so as to modify, maintain or thematize it in some way. This might involve two embodied agents.
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Hairdressing, massage, dental work and cosmetic surgery, for example, usually entail that one body is worked upon, physically, by another or by a team of embodied agents. It might even be extended to include such distanciated and mediated interactions as those that connect the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals to those who distribute and use them. Pill-popping is a socially complex, distanciated and mediated RBT. Equally, it can entail a single body acting upon itself. This might involve one part of the body being used to modify/maintain another part; for example, when I use my hand to brush my hair or clean my teeth. It might, however, entail a total immersion of the body into a stream of activity whose purpose is to modify or maintain that body as a whole. When I jog, for example, I launch my whole body into action, in an effort to increase my tness, burn off fat/calories, tone up my lower body, etc. Each society or social group has a repertoire of RBTs. This repertoire is one element in the broader set of collective pre-representations of that society. And a portion of our daily routine is taken up performing techniques from this repertoire. We wash, clean our teeth, brush our hair, dress ourselves, perhaps shave and/or apply cosmetics. Other techniques from the repertoire are built into weekly or monthly routines. We exercise, shave parts of our body, have our hair cut, cut our nger nails, dress up for a night out, etc. And beyond our routines, we periodically venture one-off modications, such as a piercing, tattoos or cosmetic surgery, all of which involve bodily manipulation of the body; that is, RBTs. RBTs are techniques of the body, performed by the body and involving a form of knowledge and understanding that consists entirely in embodied competence, below the threshold of language and consciousness; but they are equally techniques for the body, techniques that modify and maintain the body in particular ways. It might seem peculiar to regard the more mundane of these techniques as acquired aspects of a culture. As Mausss work shows, however, they do vary across societies. And, as Goffman has argued, they only seem mundane to those of us who have achieved sufcient temporal distance from the process of learning them to have forgotten that we did have to learn them, sometimes with difculty:
To walk, to cross a road, to utter a complete sentence, to wear long pants, to tie ones shoes, to add a column of gures all these routines that allow the individual unthinking, competent performance were attained through an acquisition process whose early stages were negotiated in cold sweat. (Goffman, 1972: 293)
For practical purposes it also makes sense to refer to ensembles of RBTs; that is, sets of techniques which are practised together for a common purpose. Exercising, getting dressed and putting on make-up are each examples of this. Each refers not to a single body technique but to a set (an ensemble) of techniques. It
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may be necessary, for purposes of certain types of research, to break these ensembles down into their constituent techniques. If we were studying health and tness, for example, we might want to break exercising down into ner categories such as gym work and swimming, or even 2 12 reps bench press and 20 lengths front crawl. We may even need to tease out the peculiarities of the way in which the technique is performed: e.g. bench press with arms parallel and feet touching the ground. It is not always necessary to chase the description down to this level, however. Identication of the basic ensemble may be sufcient. My above-mentioned survey includes a mix of specic body techniques and ensembles but for economy of expression I will use RBT to refer to both. It is my contention that practices of body modication/maintenance are best understood in terms of RBTs. I have three reasons for this. First, the concept of RBTs entails that bodies are maintained and modied by way of bodily effort and embodied competence. We thus both avoid dualism and thematize reexivity. Second, the concept encourages us to identify the mindful and social aspects of embodied activity (e.g. know-how and understanding), not subordinating those aspects to the symbolic meaning bestowed by representations, discourse, consciousness, etc., and not reducing embodied activity to mere mechanical behaviour. Third, the concept is sufciently concrete to facilitate empirical analysis and sufciently rich for that to include both ethnographical/phenomenological investigation of the doing of RBTs, their lived dimension (see Crossley, 2004a; Wacquant, 2004), and also more quantitative explorations of them. As forms of practical understanding, RBTs need to be understood qualitatively, in a phenomenological manner. And they are also thematized within projects and narratives which call for qualitative investigation. But qua social techniques they are diffused and distributed through society. They can be observed, categorized, enumerated and tested for statistical association both with one another and with other social phenomena. They thus call for and admit quantitative analysis also. Before we can push ahead with this concept, however, we need to reect upon the role of purpose in relation to RBTs. I have said that RBTs are body techniques whose primary purpose is to act back upon the body so as to modify or maintain it. At its most basic this entails that RBTs are generic body techniques which an agent annexes, in a specic context, for the explicit purpose of (perhaps amongst other things) modifying their body in a particular way: for example, in an effort to lose weight they elect to take a walk once a week. In many cases, however, reexive purposes have generated either dedicated techniques or dedicated variations upon generic techniques. Jogging, for example, is a form of
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running adapted to serve the purpose of exercise. In contrast to a mad dash for the bus, a jog entails that I pace myself (a temporal modication), adjust my breathing and settle into a comfortable and efcient posture and stride. Jogging embodies a particular temporal projection (I will run for this long). It is oblivious to the urgency that animates the person running after the bus. And in these respects it embodies the purpose of running for the benet of running. When I jog I relate to my environment in a different way. Perhaps I lengthen my step, utilizing my body differently in order to utilize the ground differently; simultaneously utilizing the ground differently in order to utilize my body differently, pushing it towards the burn that I am seeking. Street-lights and other random objects become stage markers, triggering alterations in pace and direction, for a journey whose only goal is transformation of the vehicle itself and whose success is measured against this goal. In this way, both agent and environment are instituted10 in a specic jogging-like manner by way of a dedicated RBT. Moreover, in contrast to the person running after the bus, whose fear of missing the bus and looking silly often leads them to disguise their sprint as much as possible, I commit myself publicly to my jog. My action is accountable. I embody a social type or role, the jogger. And I am able to do this because jogging is not my private invention but rather a socially emergent and publicly known technique that belongs to my societys repertoire. I have selected and learned from this repertoire and for this reason everybody knows what I am doing when I stagger past them. Purpose also enters into the analysis of reexive body techniques in the respect that the body can be modied for different reasons. One might modify ones body for reasons of health, beauty, sporting success, etc. Again, this might involve signicant permutations of an apparently singular technique. Bodybuilders, powerlifters and individuals who want to tone up and trim down might each use dumbbells and barbells, for example, and might even do the same exercises (bench press, squat, etc.). However, the way in which they do those exercises will vary. The toner will tend to do a high number of repetitions with weights they can quite easily lift because this is good for toning; the powerlifter will do relatively few reps with a weight that is very heavy for them because this increases strength; the bodybuilder, who is concerned to increase muscle bulk but also muscular denition and rips, will use a combination of the two. Furthermore, both of the latter two will tend to work out for much longer in any weekly cycle. We need to be mindful of these differences when studying RBTs.
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Body Techniques and Selfhood Reexive body techniques play a central role in the construction of a reexive sense of self; that is, in the process whereby the agent turns back upon their self, effecting a split between what Mead (1967) calls I and me. Whenever we dress ourselves, wash ourselves, exercise, etc., we effect this split. We act towards ourselves in such a way that we become objects for ourselves. Qua active agent (I) we act upon ourselves as a passive object (me). The rhythm by which we vacillate between I and me in these activities will vary according to the body technique in question. An agent on a long run might lose their self in their run for long periods, immersed in the pre-reectiveness of the I and never appearing before their self as me until they nish. An agent who is cleaning their teeth, by contrast, might be rocking constantly between the positions of the brushing I and the brushed me. In all cases, however, as both Mead and Merleau-Ponty (1962) emphasize, I and me remain distinct. If I touch my own hand, to use Merleau-Pontys (1962) example, I always reach a point at which the experience shifts from that of touching to that of being touched. The two experiences never coincide and, as such, I never coincide with myself. I am always split (Crossley, 1996, 2001). So it is with all reexive body techniques. I and me vacillate and interact but never coincide. Even as I look in the mirror the use of the mirror itself being an RBT11 the lived I who perceives and the perceived me remain separated. I see my body (me) but that external image does not coincide with the lived experience that confronts it. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:
At the same time that the image of oneself makes possible the knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately to be; I am that image of myself that is offered by the mirror. . . . I leave the reality of the lived me in order to refer myself constantly to the ideal, ctitious or imaginary me, of which the specular image is the rst outline. In this sense I am torn from myself . . . (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 136)
As the mirror demonstrates, however, this is a separation that is integral to a developed sense of self and, indeed, of self-as-embodied. The mirror, to use Merleau-Pontys expression, tears us away from ourselves but thereby gives us the distance from ourselves that allows us to see, perceive and form a perspective upon ourselves. The same holds for other RBTs. They turn us back upon ourselves, thematize our bodily aspect within our own embodied intentionality and thereby put us into a relationship with an objectied image of our self. Learning reexive body techniques is, in this respect, part of the process through which our specic sense of self is developed. By means of these techniques we learn to constitute ourselves for ourselves, practically. Learning to attend to ourselves is learning to posit ourselves for ourselves. It constitutes a
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specic experience of self. We learn to play the role of another in relationship to ourselves, much as Mead (1967) says of play and games in infancy. Indeed, in many cases where we tend to ourselves in these ways we are precisely taking over the role of another, a parent or guardian, who once tended and cared for us in these ways. We do to ourselves what they have done for us at an earlier time and have taught us to do, applying their standards and techniques to ourselves. Having said that RBTs facilitate the differentiation of I and me, effectively thereby constituting the self process, it is important to add that they may be selected in accordance with agents projects of self-development. Specic types of self presuppose particular reexive body techniques for their practice. Even in these cases, however, the effect of practising the technique may be to heighten the Ime distinction and shape the perception of the me in particular ways, such that RBTs are more than mere instrumental props. Techniques of weight training are deployed by the bodybuilder in pursuit of muscular gain, for example, but at the same time these techniques orient the agent towards their body in particular ways. They embody a particular attitude towards the body, that of the body sculptor, which the bodybuilder appropriates as they appropriate these techniques within their habitus. They heighten body and muscular awareness. Furthermore, RBTs can have a ritual function, serving to symbolically and magically mark the transition of the self from one situation to another (Crossley, 2004c). As rituals, body techniques have the power to transform imaginative and affective structures of intentionality (in the phenomenological sense), thereby situating those who practise them differently. We capture this notion colloquially when we refer to the Friday-night rituals through which people prepare themselves for a night out (washing, making up, applying aftershaves and deodorants, dressing and doing their hair). Performing these techniques, in the manner of a ritual, is part and parcel of the way in which agents put themselves in the mood for a night out, effecting an existential (affective, imaginative, cognitive) transition from their mundane, workday mode to their soire self. Similarly, Sweetmans (1999) work on tattooing and piercing suggests that these rituals mark a symbolic transition for those who undergo them, allowing these agents to effect transformations of their self. Change, transformation and trajectory are important here; but so too are conservation and repetition. Many of the above-mentioned techniques are oriented towards preserving and maintaining a particular aspect of self. Furthermore, they form part of a routine. They are repeated on a daily, weekly, monthly and/or yearly basis. Certain technical interventions, such as a tattoo or cosmetic surgery, might serve to mark a new chapter in a life narrative, but others, by virtue of their repetition, function to structure time in a more familiar and
15
safe-because-same manner. They invest the ow of lived time with meaning by punctuating it, but this meaning centres upon continuity and sameness rather than transition. It is integral to grasp this balance of reproduction and transformation in our understanding and analysis of RBTs, and indeed also the different temporal conguration that specic techniques can assume. RBTs have a spatio-temporality that is central to their meaning. This is reected in the linguistic duality of body maintenance and body modication, which I have employed hitherto in this paper. The former denotes techniques used repetitively, for reproductive purposes, the latter denotes techniques used to effect a specic transformation. Why agents engage in this body work is a key question in sociology, about which most of the major perspectives in the area have something to say (see Bartky, 1993; Baudrillard, 1999; Bordo, 1993; Bourdieu, 1977, 1984; Foucault, 1980; Giddens, 1991; Shilling, 1993). I do not have the space to address this question fully here. However, it is my contention that we must approach it in a way that recognizes the great diversity of RBTs in the societal repertoire and the very different social logics that can attach to their appropriation. One size ts all explanations, such as we get from most of the above-mentioned theorists, are deeply problematic because they fail to recognize this diversity. In what follows I will explore this issue of diversity and social logics in more detail in an effort to lay the basis for a more sophisticated approach to body work, centred upon RBTs. Group and Technique One of Mausss key contentions with respect to body techniques concerns their group specicity. This specicity is such that some techniques serve to mark out group boundaries. Indeed, where they are specically reexive techniques they can serve to cultivate bodily markers of collective identity. Durkheims (1915) famous analysis of aboriginal totemic clans, for example, places great emphasis upon the role of techniques of body marking in the construction of collective, clan identities:
They do not put their coat-of-arms merely upon things which they possess, but they put it upon their person; they imprint it upon their esh; it becomes part of them . . . it is more frequently upon the body itself that the totemic mark is stamped . . . (Durkheim, 1915: 137) The best way of proving to oneself and to others that one is a member of a certain group is to place a distinctive mark on the body. (Durkheim, 1915: 265)
Likewise, Bourdieus (1977, 1984) focus upon distinction and Eliass (1984) upon the civilizing process both draw out forms of bodily practices, specic to social
16
groups, which alter bodily appearance and thereby distinguish and mark out those groups visually. Furthermore, as Durkheim also emphasized, techniques of body modication are sometimes employed to mark out categorical distinctions within a group, for example between males and females or adults and children. Contemporary western societies differ considerably from the totemic clans studied by Durkheim. Interestingly, however, my above-mentioned survey revealed gender to be a key factor affecting appropriation of reexive body techniques. The survey found statistically signicant and often very large differences for gender in relation to 21 (out of 40) RBTs and 6 (out of 19) forms of consultation (see Table 1). In particular, practices such as the shaving of armpits and legs, the painting of toenails and ngernails, manicure and the use of cosmetics (other than soap and shampoo) were sharply gender differentiated. This nding bears out the claim of those who argue (i) that gender remains an extremely strong locus of social division in contemporary societies, (ii) that the body is a key site where this division is constructed and played out and (iii) that gender identity is something which is done or practised (e.g. Bartky, 1993; Connell, 1987). In addition, the arguments of these writers provide a strong and important lead for the analysis of RBTs, which I will return to later on. Importantly, however, the concept of RBTs, as both a theoretical and an empirical notion, allows us to further elaborate upon and explore these ideas about gender; to go beyond general theoretical claims about transformations of the body associated with, for example, emphasised femininity (Connell, 1987) by specifying just what transformations are effected, by what means and by what types and proportions of women (relative to men). Furthermore, as I discuss in more detail below, we can begin to explore the patterns of clustering of these various techniques and, by means of this, differentiate varieties within emphasized femininity. The low numbers of men practising certain techniques is as interesting as the high number of women in this respect. Shaved armpits are as much an affront to hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987), punishable amongst men, at least in the absence of extenuating circumstances, as they are an expected standard of emphasised femininity. And a monitoring of the appropriation of these techniques among men allows us to gauge changes in masculinity. We can speculate upon all of this without recourse to the concept of RBTs, of course, but the latter provides an important and workable means for empirically operationalizing such speculation and recording change. Shifting rates of uptake for particular RBTs among men and women respectively, allow us to track shifts in dominant models of masculinity/femininity although, of course, the meaning of changes is never self-evident and must be deduced.

Table 1 Gendered Reexive Body Techniques
Female (%) Reexive Body Techniques Big differences (with female predominance) Shaved leg hair in last 4 weeks Used cosmetics in last 7 days Shaved armpit hair in last 4 weeks Worn earrings in last 7 days Worn a necklace in last 7 days Combed hair in last 7 days Worn a ring in last 7 days Had or done a manicure in last 4 weeks Painted toenails in last 4 weeks Painted (hand) nails in last 4 weeks Worn a bracelet in last 7 days Male (%) p=
17
83.2 84.8 85.3 71.2 74.9 95.7 81.5 53.6 48.9 44.6 56
5 9.2 11.7 7.5 30 59.2 42.5 10 0.8 0 20 89.2 71.7 1.7 4.2 30.8 43.3 5.8 8.3 3.3 2.5 3.4 10.8 2.6 16 24.2 5.8 0
.000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .002 .001 .005 .002 .001 .000 .000 .013 .031 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .034 .032
Small but statistically signicant differences (with female predominance) Used anti-perspirant/deodorant in last 7 days 98.4 Used aftershave/perfume in last 7 days 85.9 Dieted for weight loss over last 7 days 8.2 Body piercings other than ears 14.1 Flossed in last 4 weeks 48.9 Sunbathed in last 12 months 58.2 Dyed or coloured hair in last 4 weeks 32.1 Used Quick Tan lotion in last 12 months 29.3 Male predominance (small but statistically signicant differences) Used bodybuilding supplements in last 6 months 0 Has 3 or more tattoos 0 Consultation Practices Read magazine/newspaper article on beauty tips Read magazine/newspaper article on health tips Read magazine/newspaper article on skin care tips Read magazine/newspaper article on exercise tips Read any of the above Read a health-dedicated magazine Consulted a beauty-dedicated website 57.1 50 48.4 36.1 69.6 21.7 3.8
One might expect to nd similar sharp distinctions in relation to the practices of certain religious groups and perhaps subcultures of various kinds. I found no statistically signicant differences pertaining to class, however. And although contemporary ethnographic studies of specic working-class communities have
18
identied aspects of a distinctly working-class body consciousness (Charlesworth, 2000; Skeggs, 1997), the available sources of secondary statistical data in this area suggest that differences in uptake of RBTs are relatively small. The General Household Survey for 1990, for example, suggests that the middle classes are slightly more likely to engage in a range of forms of exercise (reported in Social Trends, ONS, 1993). The differences are only slight in most cases, however, and each of the main forms of exercise is a minority pursuit in relation to every class, such that linking these forms of exercise to specic class identities is highly problematic. Clearly this is an area that calls for further research; research that is sensitive to the details picked up in the more qualitative forms of inquiry. It may be that we need to specify RBTs very precisely, in terms of nuances and purposes, to hook into signicant class differences. In this article, however, I want to push the idea of a social distribution of RBTs in a different direction, and to identify further principles of differentiation governing their appropriation. However one denes a group, I suggest, whether one focuses upon national societies, gender and class groupings or highly specic subcultures, there is always an internal differentiation and distribution of RBTs, with its own distinct socio-logic. In what follows I will map this out in more detail, focusing upon the group constituted by my questionnaire survey. For the purposes of my particular survey it was necessary to make certain assumptions about the purposes of particular RBTs, bracketing out further qualitative exploration of those purposes. I opted to sacrice depth for the pursuit of breadth in circumstances where the pursuit of both was not possible. I hope it will be apparent, however, that this both yields ndings not attainable by more qualitative means, and that it raises questions which, although perhaps best answered by more qualitative approaches, would not be raised in the rst place by means of those methods. What follows is one half of a story but is no less valuable than the other half. Mapping Techniques Consider, rst, the frequency distribution for the techniques surveyed by my questionnaire, as given in Figures 2 and 3. The range of this distribution stretches from 100 percent, for having washed ones hands at least once in the last seven days, through to 0.3 percent, for having had a septum or tongue piercing, or having ever used anabolic steroids for purposes of building ones muscles. This is a continuum and any attempt to demarcate denite lines of division along it would inevitably be arbitrary. Moreover, we already know that certain of the practices are heavily gendered, such that some scores represent a mean of high

No. Technique 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Washed hands in last 7 days Bath/shower in last 7 days Brushed teeth in last 7 days Washed face in last 7 days Washed hair in last 7 days Used anti-perspirant/deodorant in last 7 days Combed hair in last 7 days Used aftershave perfume in last 7 days Worn ring in last 7 days Worn necklace in last 7 days Shaved armpit hair in last 4 weeks Used cosmetics in last 7 days Sunbathed in last 12 months Shaved leg hair in last 4 weeks Used any food supplement in last 6 months Used a breath/mouth freshener in last 4 weeks Worn an earring in last 7 days Flossed in the last 4 weeks Worn a bracelet in the last 7 days Eaten carefully for weight-loss reasons in last 7 days Used vitamin supplements in last 6 months Had or done a manicure in last 4 weeks Painted toenails in last 4 weeks Done between 1 and 4 hrs exercise in last 7 days Painted ngernails in last 4 weeks Used a sunbed in last 12 months Dyed or coloured hair in last 4 weeks Used Quick Tan lotion in last 12 months Done between 5 and 9 hrs exercise in last 7 days Ever had cosmetic dental surgery Got between 1 and 3 tattoos Had bellybutton pierced Done 10 hrs exercise or more in last 7 days Dieted for weight-loss purposes in last 7 days Had nostril pierced Had eyebrow pierced Had cosmetic surgery Got 3 or more tattoos Had genital and/or nipple piercings Had a septum piercing Had a tongue piercing Ever used steroids for bodybuilding purposes % 100 99.7 99.3 98.7 97.4 94.7 81.3 80.3 66.1 56.9 56.3 54.9 52.3 52.3 48.4 46.4 46.1 41.8 41.8 41.1 37.5 36.2 29.9 28.3 27 25.3 21.7 21.1 15.1 8.6 6.9 6.7 6.6 5.9 2.3 2.3 1.6 1 1 0.3 0.3 0.3
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Core Zone
Intermediate Zone
Marginal Zone
Figure 2 Frequency Distribution of Reexive Body Techniques
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Core Zone Intermediate Zone Marginal Zone
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42
Figure 3 Distribution of Reexive Body Techniques (percentages) (bar numbers correspond to RBTs named and numbered in Figure 2)
female and low male scores. I return to this latter point shortly. First, however, I want to suggest that, although any exact cut-off points would be arbitrary, we can divide this continuum into three overlapping zones. At one end of the continuum we have a core zone consisting of RBTs that are statistically normal; that is to say, which most people (e.g. 90 percent+) practise within a speciable time-frame. At the other end of the continuum we have a marginal zone consisting of RBTs that are statistically deviant; that is, which most people (e.g. 95 percent+) do not and never have practised. Between these two zones we have what we might think of as an intermediate zone, a broad continuum of RBTs with rates of uptake that vary in the general population but which are neither so high as to be normal and thus core, nor so low as to be statistically deviant and thus marginal. In what follows I will be using this concept of zones to develop a differentiated account of body work in late modern societies. The appropriation of RBTs in these different zones requires different explanations, I will suggest. First, however, I want to push the idea one step further by unpacking the idea of a continuum. While useful as a point of departure, the image of the continuum is problematic on account of its linearity. We know, for example, that some body techniques are strongly gendered, such that they might qualify as core for women, while they are marginal for men. Likewise, we can at least speculate that other techniques in the intermediate and marginal zones will be further differentiated from one another. Marginal techniques might belong to different
21
and competing subcultures, for example, such that placing them side by side in a common marginal category paints a misleadingly homogeneous picture. To do justice to this we can attempt a two-, rather than a one-dimensional mapping of RBTs, using multi-dimensional scaling (see Figure 4). As with all forms of multivariate statistics, multi-dimensional scaling offers contrasting methods for mapping data. As such we are forced to select the most
3
2
dyehair bellybutton paint f nails paint t nails cosmetics
diet cossurg manicure careful eat
quick tan floss sunbed vitamin supp
pithair bracelet ecklace n leghair
0
earring 1-4 hrs exercise ring
steroid bodybuilding supplem breathfreshner 5-9hrs exercise after/perfume wash teeth face comb hair bath/shower wash hands brush sunbathe wash hair anti/deo
food supplement
1-3 tattoos eyebrow tongue >3 tattoos other pierce
2 3 2
Figure 4 A Radex Model Key Reexive techniques located in the inner circle of the radex. In the last 7 days: washed hair, used deodorant or antiperspirant, used perfume or aftershave, had a bath or shower, washed hands, washed face, brushed teeth. Reexive body techniques located outside of the inner circle but within the wider oval. In the last 7 days: worn a ring, worn a necklace, used cosmetics, worn an earring, worn a bracelet, eaten carefully for purposes of weight management, done between 1 and 4 hrs exercise. In last 4 weeks: shaved armpit hair, shaved leg hair, used a breath/mouth freshener, ossed, had or done a manicure, painted toenails, painted ngernails, dyed or coloured hair. In last 6 months: used any food supplement, used any vitamin supplement. In last 12 months: sunbathed, used a sunbed, used quick tan lotion. Had bellybutton pierced. Reexive body techniques located outside of the oval: got 1, 2 or 3 tattoos, got more than 3 tattoos, got an eyebrow piercing, got a tongue piercing, got another more exotic piercing, done between 5 and 9 hrs exercise in the last week, used a bodybuilding supplement in the last 6 months, used steroids for bodybuilding purposes in the last 6 months, ever had cosmetic surgery, currently on a diet.
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appropriate mapping of variables from among a number of possibilities.12 Furthermore, outlying variables can skew maps inappropriately and sometimes have to be removed from the analysis. Nevertheless, with these points conceded, it is possible, as Figure 4 demonstrates, to map RBTs in the form of a radex (as described earlier). Concentric circles demarcate frequency zones (from high to low as we move outwards from the centre), while segments demarcate seemingly meaningful and coherent clusters of practices. Our core zone is represented on this map by a tiny circle near its centre, containing a tight cluster of those RBTs which are nearly universally practised amongst the population surveyed. The techniques mapped here are so close in space that their labels overlap and are impossible to read (they are listed in the key to the map along with a fuller explanation of all labels). These core RBTs are less important for present purposes, however, than those orbiting them. The broader oval drawn around the inner circle is the boundary between the intermediate zone and the marginal zone. Those RBTs on the inside of the oval are intermediate, those on the outside are marginal. Most of the labels in these zones are easier to read but there is a slightly obscured cluster to the upper left of the central core, to the right of bracelet (i.e. worn a bracelet in the last seven days), which contains shaved leg hair and shaved armpits (in previous four weeks), and overlaps slightly with necklace (i.e. worn necklace in previous seven days). This arrangement of concentric circles only tells us what the graph in Figure 3 tells us. The two-dimensional nature of the plot allows us to differentiate further among our RBTs, however. Specically, we nd that, as we move outwards from the central core, less frequently practised techniques begin to separate out from and cluster with one another in patterns which can be interpreted in broadly thematic terms. I have marked these clusters by way of segments. Thus, towards the top left of the map we nd a cluster specically related to the doing of femininity. Certain RBTs at either end of that cluster, such as exercising 14 hours a week, wearing a ring and being careful about what one eats (for reasons of weight management) are less gender specic but sandwiched between them we nd all of the strongly (feminine) gendered RBTs. Moving clockwise from that segment we come to a more heterogeneous segment of techniques, which perhaps indicate an elevated level of body consciousness relative to the norm but have little thematic unity apart from that. This segment involves techniques which serve both exclusively aesthetic (use of sunbed) and exclusively health-oriented (taking vitamins) ends, as well as techniques which could serve either/both end(s). It is possible, using MDS, to further differentiate the techniques in this section. Doing so I found that the techniques more closely associated with appearance tend to separate out from those associated with health, with
23
the either/and techniques falling between, such that we can regard health and appearance as distinct thematic segments. I do not have the space to explore this any further here, however. As we move further round we come to another more distinctive cluster, comprising 59 hours exercise a week, use of bodybuilding supplements and use of anabolic steroids for bodybuilding purposes. We might be tempted to deem this a bodybuilding cluster. As with any cluster, however, we can push our analysis further and differentiate within it. In this case, for purposes of illustrating MDS technique as much anything else, I have done this. In the rst instance I selected from my sample only those respondents who had done more than ve hours exercise in the previous seven days. I then reran the MDS analysis,13 selecting all variables with a direct relationship to bodybuilding: namely, working out with weights in a gym, reading bodybuilding magazines, visiting bodybuilding web-sites, taking bodybuilding food supplements and taking steroids (for bodybuilding purposes). The results, displayed in Figure 5(A), suggest a polarity between gym work and other bodybuilding practices. This indicates, as one might guess, that working out with weights in a gym is by no means indicative of bodybuilding. Many more people work out than bodybuild. Pushing this further still, I ran the MDS analysis again,14 using the same respondents and variables, but this time mapping respondents (cases) rather than the variables. Using MDS in this way allows us to conduct a form of cluster analysis. We are able to see what sorts of camps our respondents fall into when clustered according to specic variables, and which respondents fall into which camps. The results for this analysis are given in Figure 5(B). In all, the 82 respondents who exercised for more than five hours in the seven days prior to filling in my questionnaire break down into five clear clusters which we can profile in terms of their relationship to the basic variables we have used in our MDS analysis (I double-checked this using hierarchical cluster analysis and achieved the same results).15 Seventy-eight of the respondents fall into one of two clusters (Cluster B and Cluster C). Cluster C contains all respondents who exercised for more than five hours but did not work out in the gym or engage in any bodybuilding-related practice (n = 55). Cluster B contains respondents who did work out in the gym but didnt do any other bodybuilding-related activity (n = 23). Cluster A, to the left, contains two respondents, both of whom worked out in the gym and used a bodybuilding supplement. Further left again, in the bottom left corner, we have a single respondent (case 23) who registered positively for all indicators of bodybuilding, including steroid use. Finally, towards the bottom right of the plot we have case 52, a respondent
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Figure 5(A) The Bodybuilding Segment (The obscured because overlapping variables at the right of Figure 5(A), are, from left to right, use of a bodybuilding supplement, use of steroids and consultation of bodybuilding websites [in identical positions], then readership of a bodybuilding magazine.)
Cluster A n =2
Cluster B n = 23
Cluster C n = 55
Figure 5(B) A Cluster Analysis
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who had exercised for over five hours in the previous seven days and had read a bodybuilding magazine in the previous month, but hadnt worked out in the gym and hadnt done anything else bodybuilding related. In effect then, the association between five hours+ exercise in a week and the various bodybuilding variables turn out to be more complex than Figure 4 suggests. Most of the 82 respondents who did a lot of exercise didnt do it in the gym, with weights, and the majority of those who did, did not engage in any other bodybuilding RBTs. Only three respondents out of the 82 really profile like bodybuilders on the closer inspection that this further analysis affords us. In addition, case 52 indicates that a person may do a lot of exercise and read about bodybuilding but not engage in the central RBT of the bodybuilding world (i.e. working out in the gym). Having identied our clusters in this way we could, in a more detailed analysis, proceed to prole our clusters socially and, if we had the data, perhaps biographically also. I am not going to push the analysis in this direction, however. My purpose has simply been to show how we can use MDS to further extend the analysis of Figure 4. At which point we can return to it. At the bottom of Figure 4 we have a cluster of tattooing- and piercingrelated variables. These are widely spread, reflecting the fact that the >3 tattoos and 13 tattoos variables are coded in a mutually exclusive fashion in the data set and so could not be positively associated, but their very distinct location, low on the plot, suggests a genuinely meaningful cluster based around these less conventional (perhaps primitivist-inspired) modifications. Interestingly, bellybutton piercing, which is also included on the plot, is located at some distance from this cluster (in the feminine segment), suggesting that this particular type of piercing has a different location within the societal repertoire of RBTs. It has migrated beyond the bounds of an alternative subculture on the margins into the mainstream (that is, the intermediate zone/feminine segment). As my discussion of the heavy exercise cluster demonstrates, Figure 4 is just the beginning of what could be a much more detailed analysis. Each cluster can be further analysed and mapped. As it stands, however, Figure 4 and my analysis of it are useful because they allow us to conceive of body modication/maintenance as a structured and differentiated social space. Moreover, they locate concrete practices in that space in accordance with real frequency distributions and real statistical associations. As such they invite and facilitate explanations that will advance our understanding of body work. In the nal section of the article I offer a preliminary explanatory framework.
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Explaining Zones and Segments Much work in the sociology of the body, as noted earlier, has tended to offer either very general accounts of body modication/maintenance, treating the RBTs which fall under this rubric as manifestations of a single phenomenon, or they have focused very specically upon particular clusters of practices. The analysis above allows us to begin to move beyond both of these approaches. It facilitates an approach which focuses upon the whole range of modication/maintenance techniques but differentiates and distinguishes between them. Or again, which focuses upon the specicity of particular techniques/clusters but seeks, in doing so, to locate them on a broader map. Reconguring the problematic of body modication/maintenance in this way allows us to consider the different meanings of the techniques in these zones and the different types of circumstances in which they emerge; their different social logics. I can only hope to offer a preliminary analysis along these lines in this article, not least because a full analysis would require much more research. Nevertheless we can make a fruitful start. The Core Zone The core zone constitutes a cluster of practices which are normal in both the statistical sense that most agents practise them and in the sense that they reect pervasive social (moral) norms specically norms of hygiene in this case. The techniques belonging to this zone are integral to the construction of a self but not in the choice and narrative-based sense suggested by Giddens (1991). They are too widely practised to reect anything distinctive about the self, as Giddens conception of distinct narrative trajectories suggests, and their practice is too much a part of the taken-for-granted texture of the contemporary lifeworld to appear to agents as a matter of choice. One doesnt choose to do these techniques in any meaningful sense. One just does them as matter of course. They are, to borrow Bourdieus (1979, 1989) term, doxic. This was revealed in my survey through the reactions of respondents to my questions. Several made it clear they felt it odd that I should ask about such matters as washing ones face of course they had washed their face in the last seven days! Moreover others jokingly feigned offence at being asked. The fact that respondents were able to claim moral injury is important as it indicates the normative aspect that attaches to these practices and suggests that, insofar as they play a role in the construction of selfhood, these techniques attach to a very basic level of selfhood and recognition. Techniques in the core zone represent a threshold that must be crossed if the agent is to be accepted as a
27
competent member of their society. Indeed, it is not uncommon for workers in mental health and other welfare services to take non-performance of these techniques as indications that intervention is necessary because the agent being scrutinized is unable to care for themselves. They are deemed incompetent. This is another reason why I would say that these techniques are not chosen. They are enforced and expected. Non-compliance is punished, usually through the informal sanctions of peers but sometimes through the specialized interventions of a variety of agents of normalization who collectively comprise the carceral network of late modern societies (Foucault, 1979, 1980). The other side of this is that agents are expected to have a right to perform these RBTs. Commentators on life in total institutions, for example, often suggest that restricted access to the equipment required for these techniques and/or loss of effective control over them is extremely damaging and represents a powerful assault upon self (Bettelheim, 1986; Goffman, 1961). The techniques in the core zone are much more likely to be oriented to maintenance than modication of the body, at least in the sense that they reproduce sameness through time. Moreover, their temporal structure is more likely to be repetitive than transitional. They structure, by punctuating, the lived time of the agent in a predictable because repetitive pattern. What belongs to this core zone is historically variable in the longer term, however. A cursory glance at Eliass (1984) account of the civilizing process or Nettletons (1992) genealogy of dentistry, for example, indicates that these core practices of contemporary society have not always been so (see also Gurney, 2000; Mort, 1987). The question of how these practices emerge and achieve both their extensive diffusion and their taken-for-grantedness goes beyond the remit of this article. There is no reason to suppose that there is only one path to the core zone. And I cannot begin to trace the many distinct paths that specic RBTs and ensembles have followed. However, drawing from the accounts cited above one might tentatively suggest that the core zone identied in my survey is the effect of: (i) a search for distinction among aspiring groups, whose techniques have then been variously adopted by the lower orders on account of their kudos and/or imposed upon them by charitable and philanthropic movements representing those (once aspiring now dominant) groups, extending their dominance; (ii) the struggles of different professional groups (e.g. dentists and public health ofcials) and the strong position they have been able to secure for themselves within the power balances of welfare societies; (iii) the inuence of the hygiene and cosmetics industries. Struggles for domination and balances of power are central in each case here and, as such, my designation of the core zone, following Bourdieu (1979, 1989), as doxic, is doubly apposite. The taken-for-grantedness of the techniques falling
28
within this zone is an effect of power balances which enforce their normalcy and involves a forgetting of the historical struggles involved in the achievement of that state of normalcy. The Intermediate Zone As we move out from the core zone, into the intermediate zone, we enter a more differentiated space (as indicated by the segmentation which cross-cuts the intermediate zone), which cannot be accounted for by a single explanation. What we nd in this zone, on one hand, are techniques that demarcate key categorical distinctions in our society, particularly those of gender; techniques that, for the incumbents of these categories, might still be doxic. In fact, as we saw in Table 1, there is a frequency distribution of these RBTs among females too; some are core, some intermediate and some marginal. Given more space for analysis we might construct a radex of these RBTs too, drawing out not only their broad frequency distribution but equally their thematic/associational clustering (pushing the analysis further as I did for the bodybuilding segment in Figure 5). For the present it must sufce to say that the doxic nature of core feminine techniques is as likely an effect of struggles and power balances as those of the more general core zone. This is, of course, the argument of many key accounts of the doing of femininity (Bartky, 1993; Connell, 1987). The gender segment is only one among a number in the intermediate zone, however. In addition we nd a selection of practices relating variously to the health and appearance of the body. These RBTs, arguably, are better accounted for by notions of choice and active self-construction. Fewer people practise them, so that they can serve to distinguish and mark out a distinct identity. And because they are less widely practised their appropriation is less likely to be obvious, taken for granted and expected, and more likely to be a matter of choice. Although informal pressures may attach to these RBTs no formal institutional mechanisms exist to enforce them, beyond the seductive allure of the fashion and advertising industries. Having said this, these techniques may well become habitual and routinized for specic agents. Moreover, we should not discount the possibility that an agents choices and narratives are affected by their resources (economic, cultural, symbolic and social), by the exigencies of their situation, by the particularities of their biographical trajectory and by features of the collective habitus which they share with similarly resourced/situated agents. As noted above, the statistical evidence for a classRBTs association is weak. A wider and more focused analysis might nd differences here, however. And of course other broad social groupings or categories may mark out their distinction within this zone too, forming a distinct segment within it as in the feminine segment.
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Like the core zone, the intermediate zone is historically variable. It is subject to the movements of fashion, and contains practices which might previously have belonged either to the core or the marginal zone. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for techniques from the marginal zone, a zone of innovation and experimentation, to migrate into the intermediate zone after being appropriated by the fashion and advertising industries. Likewise, when these techniques fall out of fashion they will tend to fall back into the marginal zone. And migration can occur between the core and intermediate zones also. Once fashionable techniques, appropriated because they mark distinction, can, as noted above, be appropriated by moralizing movements intent on imposing them upon society as a whole, or alternatively can become so fashionable as to outgrow fashion (and certainly their power of distinction) to become normal. The Marginal Zone The marginal zone too is highly differentiated. It is, as noted above, a site of innovation and proto-fashion but also perhaps a wasteland for dmod techniques. The techniques in this zone are statistically deviant. Some will belong to distinct social movements or social fields, such as modern primitivism or bodybuilding. And some of these, such as primitivism, will represent a current of resistance against the doxa and orthodoxy of the mainstream and core zones. They express a resistance or activist habitus (see Crossley, 2002 and esp. 2003). Some, like bodybuilding, will involve practices, such as the use of steroids, which are illegal. Some, however, might be socially defined as manifestations of individual psychopathology. The practices associated with deliberate selfharm, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa (not included in my survey) are examples of this (on these practices and the social movements mobilizing around them see Cresswell, 2003). In some cases these psychopathological RBTs are very difficult to dissociate from the more extreme techniques of, for example, modern primitivism; particularly as the former have become a focus of social movement mobilization and subcultural elaboration. Mobilization blurs the distinction, often used by psychiatrists, between individual pathology and subcultural variation. They are at least distinct, however, in the sense that they have not achieved the recognition afforded to primitivism, performance art (another movement at the margin) and bodybuilding. The latter, while regarded as weird and immoral by many, and often criticized because they are said to involve damage to the body, have achieved at least a sufficient degree of acceptance to keep the agents of psy-complex at bay. They are not completely free of attempts to regulate and police them, on account of the belief that they often transgress the law (e.g. steroid use) or basic standards of decency, but
30
they are not officially pathologized as deliberate self-harm as the eating disorders are. The politics and deviancy attaching to techniques in the marginal zone sets them aside from the practices of the intermediate zone even if some of them eventually make it into that zone. These techniques are not accepted as legitimate choices and generally have social sanctions, formal and informal, attached to them. To engage with them one must disengage from the broader societal community, whether deliberately or not. As such they betray a different social logic to that of practices in the intermediate and core zones. On one level it is arguable, following Giddens (1991), that they reect existential projects and choices (see also Monaghan, 1999; Sweetman, 1999), perhaps profoundly so. However, there is an element of transgression here that is not adequately captured by a generic and undifferentiated existential account. Electing to be branded with red hot irons or to push ones muscular development to the level of the bodybuilder, given the social stigmatization and other sanctions that attach to such modications, and that practitioners know attach to them, distinguishes them clearly from RBTs which are accepted, encouraged or enforced. They thus require a different type of explanation. The practices in this zone reect relatively closed social elds, which valorize otherwise disvalued practices, offering alternative congurations of meaning for them, and/or relatively closed individual phenomenological elds which do likewise. To fully understand the segments in this zone we would need to look to a form of social movement or subcultural analysis and/or methods more sensitive to individual biographical trajectories and phenomenological elds, such as existential psychoanalysis (Sartre, 1969). Moreover, to distinguish between segments in this eld it might also be necessary to focus upon the relative balances of power and social conditions that allow some (e.g. performance artists and modern primitives) to successfully pass off their activities as subversive actions, while the actions of others (e.g. self-harmers) are effectively pathologized. As noted above, however, the marginal zone too is historically variable. Most techniques begin life as the practices of a small minority, and some of these practices will go on to become the techniques of a majority or large minority, perhaps even normal techniques within a given society or group. Their marginality, at least qua practices, is in this sense a relational phenomenon. Any account of RBTs must be sensitive to such historical movement across zones. There is much more work to be done to ll out this explanatory framework. I have not even begun to address the fact, for example, that body work is located in a context that engenders all kinds of involuntary bodily changes which, in turn, agents seek to compensate for and correct the contemporary trend
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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 modication/maintenance forward. Conclusion In this article I have attempted to push the sociological analysis of body modication/maintenance forward on substantive, theoretical and methodological fronts. Practices of modication/maintenance, I have argued, can be understood as reexive body techniques; social techniques, collectively shared but individually rooted in the corporeal schemas of agents. The concept of RBTs has many advantages, but specically it is important because it emphasizes reexivity, refuses dualism and facilitates empirical investigation. Each society, I have suggested, has a specic repertoire of such techniques but techniques are not equally or evenly distributed and diffused throughout the social body. Specically 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 specic subcultures, elds and movements (and the concerns associated with these elds). 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 proling 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
32
more detailed exploration of the specic 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 1619-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 identied 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 unspecied 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-Pontys concept of institution here, which is a modication 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 rst 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 reections. 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.
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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 prole 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.
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Mapping Reexive Body Techniques: On Body Modication and Maintenance

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Mapping Reexive Body Techniques

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Mapping Reexive Body Techniques

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Mapping Reexive Body Techniques

Figure 2 Frequency Distribution of Reexive Body Techniques

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diet cossurg manicure careful eat

quick tan floss sunbed vitamin supp

pithair bracelet ecklace n leghair

1-3 tattoos eyebrow tongue >3 tattoos other pierce

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Figure 5(B) A Cluster Analysis

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