Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings

Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity

Dominic Montserrat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134778850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

First Published in 2004. The seventeenth-century physician John Bulwer's book, better known by its neologistic classical title Anthropometamorphosis, 'humanitychanging', provided the inspiration for a conference held in the Classics Department at Warwick University in April 1994. The papers delivered there are the nucleus of this collection.

1 INTRODUCTION

Dominic Montserrat

Man Transform’d, or The Artificiall Changeling; A view of the people of the Whole World or, a short survey of their Policies, Dispositions, Naturall Deportments, Complexions, Ancient and Moderne Customes, Manners, Habits and Fashions. A Worke every where adorned with Philosophicall, Morall and Historicall Observations on the Occasions of their Mutations and Changes throughout all Ages.

The seventeenth-century physician John Bulwer’s book, better known by its neologistic classical title Anthropometamorphosis, ‘humanity-changing’, provided the inspiration for a conference held in the Classics Department at Warwick University in April 1994. The papers delivered there are the nucleus of this collection. The idea unifying the contributions was to adopt a form of Bulwer’s methodology, and approach the body in the ancient world through a single aspect: different types of modification, which was to be defined in the broadest sense. The conference itself was a response to the growing awareness of the problematic status of the human body, particularly the ancient body, as an historiographical category. In some ways, the study of the ancient body is developing along lines comparable with early studies of ancient women: indeed, much scholarship on the body in antiquity has a direct link with the study of sex and gender, though by and large it has avoided the same methodological pitfalls.¹ Recent studies on the ancient body are withdrawing from the idea of ‘the body’ as an undifferentiated, nomothetic category (as ‘women’ were considered) and are beginning to examine the diversity and complexity of attitudes, practices and contexts. Concentrating on ideas surrounding change, modification and transition seemed to be an interesting way of exploring the plurality of the ancient body. Speakers were asked to think about how the different ways in which the body altered could be a means of conveying ideologies—of status and control, of gender and ethnicity, of nature and culture. Sometimes in antiquity, body modification constituted a social norm, such as among Herodotus’ tattooed Thracians; when modification was not normative, what was being delineated by opposition? Was body modification the constraint of a natural structure to a societal norm? Do ancient forms of modification have anything to contribute to the debate on whether the most fundamental structures of the group are anchored in the most basic experiences of the body?

Having said that, the work of an obscure doctor writing in England under the Commonwealth might seem a strange point of departure for a collection of essays on the changing body in antiquity. Because of the splendid woodcut illustrations in the 1654 edition of Anthropometamorphosis, Bulwer is most often encountered in popular books on the history of bodily ‘aberration’, implying that his project was the same kind of ethnographic antiquarianism. In such books, Bulwer’s modified bodies mutate once again, into quaint props in an exotic, otherly environment.² But Bulwer was doing something very different. Anthropometamorphosis was one of the first early modern works of what might now be termed comparative cultural anthropology, and an early study of the body as social metaphor. As the epigraph to the title page of the 1654 edition shows, Bulwer presents a pluralist world composed of diverse societies, which are in turn composed of living, functioning individual bodies—bodies which change according to societal pressures or geographical conditions. Bulwer was also aware of the links between the fragmented, mutable, social bodies he described and his own time and place: the changing body politic of an England which had executed its King and was experimenting with a new form of government.

Anthropometamorphosis was not the first book by Bulwer to place the changed or divergent human body at its centre. As a physician, Bulwer was a pioneer in audiology, with a special interest in teaching the deaf to lip-read and speak, or to communicate by using sign-language. Previously, he had published Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644) and Philocophus; or the Deafe and Dumbe Man’s Friend. Exhibiting the Philosophicall Verity of that subtile Art, which may inable one with an observant Eie, to hear what any man speaks by the moving of his Lips…apparently proving that a Man borne Deafe and Dumbe may be taught to Heare the sound of words with his Eie, and thence learn to speake with his Tongue (1648).³ The latter book is movingly dedicated to two deaf aristocrats, Sir Edward Gostwicke and his younger brother William, as well as to ‘all other intelligent and ingenious gentlemen, who as yet can neither hear nor speake’. For Bulwer, the modified or aberrant body is a means for people to communicate across boundaries: his bodies speak. And while he is suspicious of the blasphemy implicit in body modification—why should man want to alter what God has made perfect?—he still treats these bodies with empathy. In fact, Bulwer saw the ancient world as being superior to his own times in this respect. Commenting on the physical changes wrought by midwives or nurses on the new-born, he says that they

abolish that figure which is preternatural & introduce into the head the shape desired. Afterwards (as Pansa saith) all the body is to be extended & remitted, and every part reminded of its office. And these crimes both of commission and omission, committed by Midwives & Nurses so frequently in these times against the tender bodies of Infants, appear more notorious if we reflect upon the carefull practise of ancient times in this matter of high concernment.

It is important to note Bulwer’s empathy with the strange or changing bodies he describes, because this is one of the central themes that emerged in the papers presented at the conference which appear in this volume.

Anthropometamorphosis is a very topical subject. Those of us living in Europe in the late 1990s are confronted with modified bodies in all kinds of contexts. Extensively tattooed and body-pierced individuals are visible on the street or in the lecture theatre. TV guides now routinely contain advertisements for clinics offering breast implants, liposuction and other forms of cosmetic adaptation. Change of the human body is being taken to the limits of technology, though one might argue that this is not a wholly modern phenomenon. An Egyptian mummy, for example, is a sort of cyborg in that it represents the maximum technological effort available to transform the body at that time and place. Permanent modifications such as abortion, dentistry and cosmetic surgery were also available to the ancients. Yet with growing sophistication, the manifestations of our ability to modify the body become more extreme. Contemporary body artists like Orlan and Stelarc experiment with different somatic boundaries. They attempt to transcend the (corpo) real by grafting coral ‘horns’ onto the forehead or the largest physically sustainable nose onto the face. At the same time they raise questions about ownership and control of the body as biotechnology develops. Will it be possible for individuals in the future to go beyond the parameters of their genetic codes and determine the shape of their bodies via their own, chosen DNA sequences?

On one level, Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis might be used by the body artists and sociologists who see the (modern) body as the cultural product ne plus ultra.⁴ The sociologists argue that pervasive images of the modified body, of the kind I have outlined above, reflect the separation of the body from the political and economic strictures of society. These socio-cultural changes have been connected with the end of feudalism dependent on élite land ownership, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the emergence of a post-modern world based on control of communications and sign-systems where traditional links between property, the body and sexuality have become blurred. Self-identity is now more strongly invested in the corporeal self, and now more value is added to the body through the processes of commodification and enhancement. For sociologists like Bryan Turner and Anthony Giddens, the modified human body is a product of high modernity, and as such is a locus for theorisation about structures and movements that go far beyond the limits of the individual body. To put it another way, many post-modern treatments of the human body, and of the modified body in particular, are not about the body at all. They have little connection with the emotional and experiential reality of inhabiting a body, whether changed or unchanged. Bodies observed and theorised are bodies cast adrift from their human occupants.

For the ancient world, this approach is not entirely adequate. Nor is a Foucauldian archaeology of the body, with its tendency to place less emphasis on individuality and human intentionality than on (male) strategies of control over the body. Modern responses to the ancient body which do not take cognisance of such notions can too easily degenerate into ethnographic lists of bodily practices and prodigies, or present the ancient human body as a passive spectacle or museum artefact.⁵ Many ancient bodies have been treated in this way, such as the remains of those who fell victim to the eruption of Vesuvius. Their bodies are not only acorporeal (constructed from plaster blown into the matrix left in the hardened volcanic ash after the body decayed), but also ancient and otherly. As such they are not invested with the emotive realities of their lives—and of their deaths from asphyxiation. Literary treatments of the destruction of Pompeii have taken the bodies as their starting point, such as Théophile Gautier’s novel Arria Marcella. The plot hinges on a scene at Pompeii where the protagonist, Octavian, views a glass case containing a mass of solidified volcanic ash on which the outline of a dead woman’s body is imprinted. In Octavian’s mind, the dead Roman woman becomes transfigured into a member of an ideal harem of ancient beauties, including Cleopatra, Semiramis and Aspasia, all because of the curve of her body preserved by the eruption. The Pompeian body, then, becomes re-animated by a fetishistic attention to its preserved parts.⁶ Egyptian mummies are another example of the same phenomenon. The body is a husk, a prop in a drama, a tabula rasa on which fantasies of the ancient world are projected. I quote Susan Kus’ critique of the American exhibition of Pharaoh Ramses II’s mummy (the italics are my own):

the artifactual accoutrements were in place to re-create a historical drama but the sensual and the emotional were not— there was no ‘smell of death’ and for me Ramses is neither god, hero nor father…[w]e talk about desire for power, about awe before the gods and before kings, about magic as the audacious confrontation of human and natural forces, and about ideological notions of purity and danger being tied to psychological processes. The physical and the emotional are part of our social theoretical discussions as much as are cold, calculated motives and logics.⁷

To instate the physical and emotional as part of the discourse on the ancient body, I would certainly not advocate an essentialising empathy which creates false links between people across spatio-temporal boundaries. The extent to which one may empathise with the ancient world in any cognitive way is highly problematic, a difficulty which several of the chapters here address. But Bulwer, with his interest in the lived and varied experience of the body, and his desire to make the changed or aberrant body into a means of speaking, is perhaps uniquely applicable to the sources used by classicists, archaeologists and ancient historians. Through such an approach it may be possible to see reflections of individual, embodied selves in all their variability. The contributors to this book show how studying the ancient body in states of modification and transition can reveal glimpses of these reflections. So Gillian Clark points to the corporeal anguish suffered by Christian martyrs, and Lynn Meskell to how the funeral assemblages of infants hint at emotional reactions to child death in a Bronze Age community. The ancient body can be a reminder of both our closeness to, and our distance from, our ancestors.

In order to consider all these ideas, a group of speakers with a wide range of ancient world interests was invited to the conference. It was felt important that contributions represent divergent historical contexts and periods outside the traditional definition of ‘classical’ culture: hence there were papers which dealt with Bronze Age Egypt and Africa in Late Antiquity. The source material was analysed using very different theoretical perspectives, ranging from Lacanian psychoanalysis to post-processual archaeology. Yet out of this diversity came a cohesion, which is reflected in the arrangement of this book.

In the first two chapters, discussions of ideal and aberrant bodies set the scene for the more general construction of somatotypes in the ancient world. Nicholas Vlahogiannis and Richard Hawley both address links between culturally specific notions of physical beauty and manifestations of power in the ancient world. Taking aberrant bodies as his starting point, Vlahogiannis shows how disabling also usually meant disempowerment, but points out that disabled people were not automatically marginalised, and that social integration was still a possibility even in non-élite groups. Obviously, this may depend on all kinds of emotional and familial scenarios that are now irrecoverable. Most relevant here are ancient burials of handicapped children from ordinary, non-élite families.⁸ What were the concatenations of personal circumstances that led parents to bring them up, perhaps in the face of societal abhorrence? A handicapped child might have been the sole survivor of many births, or the late only child of a middle-aged couple. These burials poignantly illustrate the inappropriateness of making generalisations about the ancient world, and the importance of acknowledging human intentionality and personal response to particular sets of circumstances within a given culture. Hawley provides a corollary to Vlahogiannis’ data, demonstrating that in fifth-century BCE Athens the discourse of physical beauty was something malleable, which could be manipulated to enforce social distinctions of importance to maintaining the Athenian state. The modified bodies of prostitutes are an important focus here. Beauty, commodified via cosmetic aids, is one of the ways in which disreputable hetairai can be differentiated from respectable gûnai. The texts suggest that bodily alteration can be utilised to index and monitor acceptable sexual protocols—even though, as Hawley suggests, this ideology may not have operated in reality.

These chapters are followed by two case studies on the changing body using sources from very different parts of the ancient world: the Latin high literature of Augustan Rome, and the hagiographies of Late Antiquity. Using a Lacanian perspective, Angus Bowie argues that the human body lies at the centre of the narrative of the Aeneid. Bodies in the Aeneid are a metaphor for decoding the text itself: the readers’ desire to explore Virgil’s bodies parallels their desire to master the text’s symbolic system. Bowie concentrates on the somatic experience of Dido, both of her own body and the bodies of those she desires or desired in the past: Aeneas, Ascanius and Sychaeus. Here Virgil pays much attention to the incorporeal body, often a body that has undergone a transition, such as that of the dead Sychaeus who appears to Dido in an insubstantial, unbodily form as an imago. The Latin word imago is replete with nuances of physical change: a ghost, an ancestor-figure, a reversed image cut into a gemstone, even the pupate state of an insect. Dido’s bodily desire is doomed to frustration in her relationships with Aeneas and Ascanius, when what seems to be possession turns out to be as illusory as an imago. Apart from suggesting new ways of reading the Aeneid through the medium of the body, Bowie’s chapter raises many questions about bodily experience in antiquity, especially about experiencing the body as an integer, an idea discussed later in the book by Terry Wilfong. Developing from this, the status of humanity within the changing body forms the theme of Penelope Murray’s treatment of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Murray points out how Ovid places the mental suffering of Io after she is transformed into a cow at the centre of the story. Ovid even plays around with her name as a sort of mnemonic for her altered state: Io is one of the standard exclamations of desperation in Greek tragedy. The dehumanised Io thus becomes reduced to a cry of pain and grief. Like the man who turns into a beetle in Kafka’s Die Verwandtlung, Io finds out the hard way that human identity is bound up with the way in which others see us, and that one’s external appearance, especially when it changes, does not necessarily correlate to how one feels oneself to be.

In the next two chapters, Gillian Clark and Terry Wilfong consider perhaps the best known modified bodies from the ancient world— Christian martyrs. Early Christian body practices, particularly those of the martyrs and ascetics, exemplify important shifts of thought about the human body, both as a vehicle for the soul and as a lived entity. The mutilation of the martyr’s body renders it more perfect, a conduit for the spirit which brings the heavenly down to earth. While the rhetoric of martyrdom was often sexual, the martyr’s body would remain inviolate as it was plundered and penetrated. Clark addresses the complex relationships between medicine and religious cult, and martyrdom and changing bodies. She examines how the body of the martyr, through mutilation and the shedding of blood, became imbued with a spiritual power that was communicable via relics. Wilfong uses the rich (and often neglected) corpus of Coptic texts as his starting point, juxtaposing literary accounts with documents to reconstruct a holistic picture of the body in the changing social milieux of Late Antique Egypt. He demonstrates how the Coptic language sources often present the human body as a series of parts rather than a whole unit. This ‘textual fragmentation’ raises questions about how the total body was inhabited and experienced. What idea did people have of how they looked as a body in a world without photography and only small, indistinct mirrors, a world where one could only see one’s body in parts?

The last three chapters analyse the Nachlass of the ancient body and different ways in which subsequent cultures have received the bodies of their ancestors. Lynn Meskell examines how the body has become the bone of contention in the debate between opposing theoretical camps. From an archaeologist’s viewpoint, she argues for the ultimate inadequacy of adopting such inflexible positions in dealing with the ancient body. The growing willingness of archaeology to consider ideas from other social sciences offers new avenues for accessing individuals in the past, via the embodied individual. My own chapter concentrates on Egyptian mummies, the changed body of antiquity par excellence. The trajectory of mummies through time in some ways mirrors that of the victims of Vesuvius: they are fetishised to recreate an ancient world which is totally sexual. An important part of this sexualisation is the creation of biographies around the bodies. Finally, Jane Stevenson provides a coda with her analysis of the uses of ‘Greek’ nudity in Victorian culture. Her witty and allusive chapter is a reminder that although modern studies of sexuality, the body and gender in the ancient world oft...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PLATES
• FIGURES
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• PART I: PERFECT BODIES, IMPERFECT BODIES
• PART II: BODIES AND SIGNS IN LATIN LITERATURE
• PART III: MODIFYING THE EARLY CHRISTIAN BODY
• PART IV: THE ANCIENT BODY’S TRAJECTORY THROUGH TIME
• BIBLIOGRAPHY