Discourse, the Body, and Identity

Abstract

This chapter will use videotapes of young archaeologists learning how to see and excavate the traces of an ancient village in the dirt they are digging to explore some of the ways in which the human body is implicated in the structuring of human language, cognition and social organization. Clearly the part played by the body in such processes can be analyzed from a number of different perspectives. One can focus, for example, on how experiencing the world through a brain embedded in a body structures human cognition (Damasio 1994, 1999). Such a perspective provides a counter to theories that treat cognition as the disembodied manipulation of symbolic structures, and places the body in the world at the center of much contemporary thinking about the neural infrastructure of cognitive processes (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998). Moreover, it sheds light on pervasive processes that shape how the symbols that human beings construct emerge from forms of experience that have a crucial embodied component (Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). For example. the universal experience of bodies situated within a gravitational field leads in all languages and cultures to a range of metaphors that contrast high and low or up and down (e.g. the symbols used to describe social hierarchies). However, it is possible to focus such analysis of embodiment largely or entirely on the experience of what is in fact an isolated individual, for example to investigate how being in a body shapes cognition and consciousness. What results is a rich analysis of psychological processes, but one in which other bodies and social processes play only a minor, peripheral role. By way of contrast, in this chapter I want to investigate how multiple participants take each other’s bodies into account as they build relevant action in concert with each other. Moreover, human bodies, and the actions they are visibly performing, are situated within a consequential setting. The positioning, actions, and orientation of the body in the environment are crucial to how participants understand what is happening and build action together. In this chapter, embodiment will be investigated as a central component of the public practices used to build meaning and action within situated human interaction. Analysis will focus on the talk, gestures and actions of archaeologists in the field as they work to reveal the structure of an ancient society in the dirt they are excavating.