The Book of Touch

Constance Classen, Constance Classen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book puts a finger on the nerve of culture by delving into the social life of touch, our most elusive yet most vital sense. From the tortures of the Inquisition to the corporeal comforts of modernity, and from the tactile therapies of Asian medicine to the virtual tactility of cyberspace, The Book of Touch offers excursions into a sensory territory both foreign and familiar. How are masculine and feminine identities shaped by touch? What are the tactile experiences of the blind, or the autistic? How is touch developed differently across cultures? What are the boundaries of pain and pleasure? Is there a politics of touch? Bringing together classic writings and new work, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the body, the senses and the experiential world.

Part I
Contact

Contact

Constance Classen

Do we learn a “mother touch” along with a mother tongue? A tactile code of communication that underpins the ways in which we engage with other people and the world? No doubt we do. Our hands and bodies learn to “speak” a certain language of touch, a language shaped by culture and inflected by individuals. We learn what to touch, how to touch, and what significance to give different kinds of touch. Laden with meaning and bound by rules, touch has what could be called a vocabulary and a grammar. When one thinks of the immediacy of touch, however, language seems too formal and linear a model for tactile communication. Caresses and blows express profoundly and instantly what language labors over at length. A kiss is worth a thousand words. Touch precedes, informs and overwhelms language.

In the first chapter of this section, the eminent British anthropologist Ruth Finnegan skillfully guides the reader through the labyrinth of tactile culture. The chapter begins by exploring the social conventions governing who can touch whom. When does touch confirm a social bond? When is it an intrusion? Ruth Finnegan’s piece ends with a description of an actual tactile language – Braille – an embossed code that obviates sight and allows the fingertips to delicately stroke meaning out of textures (see further Millar 1997).

It is not only on paper that tactile codes may be imprinted and read, but on the skin itself. Among the Nuba of Sudan, a woman’s back is traditionally covered with patterns of raised scars incised to mark important events in her life. For the Nuba this “Braille” of the flesh constitutes an exquisitely sensitive corporeal record of personal development and social adherence. In “Skinscapes” David Howes investigates how environmental perceptions and social values are imprinted on the skin in indigenous and Western cultures. Contrasting two peoples of Papua New Guinea, he finds that the Kwoma’s cultivation of a hard skin through scarification corresponds to a desire to maintain their social integrity in a hostile physical and political environment. The Trobriand Islanders, on the other hand, who wish to expand their connections with people on neighboring islands, value a smooth supple skin that invites touching. The essay concludes with a consideration of the urban and electronic “skinscapes” of the contemporary West.

One of the basic concerns of “Skinscapes” is to bring out how different peoples understand and order the world through touch. Among the Tzotzil of Mexico, for example, embracing is a key concept which encompasses the parental embrace of a child and the embracing of the universe by the Sun and the Moon (Vogt 1976: 205–6). Such tactile ordering of the cosmos is not as alien to Western culture as might seem. While the modern era has been dominated by eye-minded “world views”, the notion of the basic tactility of life has a long history. According to the humoral theory of premodernity, everything in the universe could be classified as hot, cold, wet or dry. Even within the modern West the sensory image of the cosmos is not just a silent movie of ambulating astral bodies, but a thermal theatrics of fiery stars and frozen planets. When tactile qualities are employed to characterize the nature of the cosmos, the domain of touch symbolically extends from the intimacy of one’s body to the farthest reaches of the universe.

It may be that, whatever new ways of touching we adopt later in life, the “mother touch” we learnt as children will always exert an influence on our relationships. In “Handling Children” Anthony Synnott reveals the distinct sociologies of touch embedded within modern philosophies of childcare. While members of other cultures and eras might have taken the tactile techniques of childcare as a cultural given, modern parents and caregivers puzzle over them a great deal. How much should we touch our children? Should they be smothered in kisses (as a warm-hearted nurse advised when I left the hospital with my newborn son)? Should they be kept at arms-length (as many early twentieth-century authorities maintained)? How do we mold our children, and by extension, our society, through our touch?

Since antiquity the belief has existed that Spartan handling will build a society of warriors, whereas mollycoddling will result in a society of wimps. “Soft lands breed soft men,” Herodotus reports King Cyrus of Persia stating (Herodotus 1961: 301). History seems replete with warnings of how “soft” peoples succumb to “tough” invaders – notably the ravaging of the dissolute Roman empire by hardened barbarians. During the Han Dynasty, a strategist convinced the Chinese emperor that “softening up” a warrior society on China’s borders would reduce the threat of invasion. When the warriors grew fond of silk, he argued, they would not wish to rip their finery riding through brush. When they grew accustomed to carriages they would cease carrying out raids on horseback. When they were encumbered with clinging courtesans they would stay at home. The strategy might have worked except that the pampered warriors developed such a taste for Chinese luxury goods that they raided China for more (Breslin 2002: 6–7).

The politics of touch, and its cross-cultural variations, is brought out below in the set of excerpts concerning handshakes. Far from being an empty formality, the political handshake is packed with social meaning. When the British Foreign Secretary recently shook the hand of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, it was hotly denounced in the press as manifesting political approval of an oppressive regime. When French president Jacques Chirac shook Mugabe’s hand, however, it was understood to be a sign of disapproval, for the traditional French greeting is a kiss on both cheeks. In the latter case the handshake signified political ostracism and carried a warning made explicit in Chirac’s declaration that perpetrators of violence will be punished at the hands of justice (Henley 2003).

The last paper in this section, “The American Touch,” returns to the theme of politics, as David Chidester explores the political and religious significance of tactile metaphors in the United States. In an innovative move, Chidester bases his analysis of American tactile symbols, such as burning and binding, on the rituals of popular culture, instead of on the rites of Church and State. Tantalizing rather than definitive, “The American Touch” suggests that the American way of life is encoded and enacted through a series of tactile motifs that provide an ideological as well as experiential ground for a shared system of public values.

I first heard David Chidester present his analysis in 1999 at a seminar on religion and the senses at Princeton University in which I also participated. Since then much has happened in the US to expand the potential relevance of his approach. The visceral shock of the terrorist attacks of 2001 and their related aftermath has given new meaning to the old tactile metaphors of burning and binding. Stringent security measures, warfare and economic uncertainty have given life in America a rough edge. The Clinton era discussed by Chidester might well appear a comfortably soft (or else dangerously lax) period of self indulgence in contrast to the hard times that would follow.

Bibliography

• Breslin, T.A. (2002), Beyond Pain: The Role of Pleasure and Culture in the Making of Foreign Affairs, Westport CT: Praeger.
• Henley, J. (2003), “Tension Surrounding Mugabe Visit,” www.guardian.co.uk, 21 February.
• H erodotus (1961), Herodotus, vol. 4, trans. A. D. Godley, London: William Heinemann.
• Millar, S. (1997), Readingby Touch, London: Routledge.
• Vogt, E.Z. (1976), Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Handshakes

There is nothing more characteristic than shakes of the hands. I have classified them … There is the high official – the body erect, and a rapid short shake, near the chin. There is the mortmain – the flat hand introduced into your palm and hardly conscious of its contiguity. The digital – one finger held out, much used by the high clergy. Then there is the shakus rusticus, where your hand is seized in an iron grasp, betokening rude health, warm heart, and a distance from the Metropolis; but producing a sense of relief on your part when you find your hand released and your fingers unbroken. The next to this is the retentive shake – one which, beginning with vigour, pauses as it were to take breath, but without relinquishing its prey, and before you are aware begins again, till you feel anxious as to the result, and have no shake left in you. There are other varieties, but this is enough for one lesson.

Sydney Smith 1856 (1972), Witand Wisdom ofthe Rev. Sydney Smith, E.A. Duyckinck (ed.), Freeport NY: Books for Libraries Press, p. 426.

Nixon’s instinct for the dramatic served him well. He knew that when his old friend John Foster Dulles had refused to shake the hand of Chou Enlai in Geneva in 1954, Chou had felt insulted. He knew too that American television cameras would be at the Peking airport to film his arrival. A dozen times on the way to Peking [in 1972], Nixon told Kissinger and Rogers that they were to stay on the plane until he had descended the gangway and shaken Chou’s hand. In the event a Secret Service agent blocked the aisle of Air Force One to make certain the President emerged alone… When Nixon reached the bottom step, he extended his hand as he walked towards Chou. As the handshake took place, Nixon later wrote, “one era ended and another began.”

Stephen E. Ambrose (1999), Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 512–13.

Then there was the question of whether Rabin and Arafat would shake hands. I knew Arafat wanted to do it … I told Yitzhak [Rabin] that if he was really committed to peace, he’d have to shake Arafat’s hand to prove it, “The whole world will be watching, and the handshake is what they will be looking for.” Rabin sighed, and in his deep, world-weary voice, said, “I suppose one does not make peace with one’s friends.” “Then you’ll do it?” I asked. He almost snapped at me, “All right. All right. But no kissing.” The traditional Arab greeting was a kiss on the cheek, and he wanted no part of that.

Bill Clinton (2004), My Life, New York: Alfred Knopf, p. 543.

1
Tactile Communication

Ruth Finnegan

Touch is a powerful vehicle in the interactions between human beings, with conspicuous potential for aggression, sex and physical coercion. In the “bubble” of privacy that people maintain around themselves, touch perhaps represents the most direct invasion. It is scarcely surprising that its practice is regulated. In every group there are rules, if mostly unspoken ones, about who can touch whom, where and in what manner, and about the settings in which tactile contact may be legitimately employed. Thayer’s analysis of social touching reinforces the point:

Touch represents a confirm ation of our boundaries and separateness while perm itting a union or connection with others th at transcends physical limits. For this reason, of all the communication channels, touch is the most carefully guarded and monitored, the most infrequently used, yet the most powerful and immediate. (Thayer 1982: 298)

Thus we follow agreed (or relatively agreed) conventions when we accord certain people the right to touch us in specific ways and interpret their and our actions accordingly. An embrace from a stranger or non-intimate conveys something very different from one by a close friend or relative, and – depending also on how it is done – could communicate claims you might prefer to reject. Some people are allowed to pick up and tickle your young baby, others definitely not. There are culture-specific expectations for the tactile relations between categories of people such as men and women, employer and employee, patient and doctor, or those of different statuses, ages or affiliations. As was well illustrated in Routasalo and Isola’s “The right to touch and be touched” (1996), nurses have to take seriously the communicative meanings of their touches – the positive aspects of mutual touching between themselves and their patients but also their patients’ personal space and the appropriateness or otherwise of touching in particular situations. When people accidentally or unavoidably touch strangers or non-intimates, especially in public places, they often apologize verbally to make clear that the intrusive claim seemingly implied through this tactile pressure was not in fact intended.

Because people more-or-less understand the main rules of the group(s) in which they are interacting, touch is effective for marking particular relationships. Just as only certain people are accepted into the familiarity of, say, using first names or standing within close proxemic range, so too in the tactile sphere. The extent and form of touching can indicate the nature and stage of a relationship, and people suggest, impose, accept or reject relationships through touch. A rigid armor-like tactile response to someone’s unacceptable touch communicates unambiguously that the advances or assumptions conveyed in the other’s touch are being refused or qualified. And I still recall the moment when as a young teenager I moved to kiss a cousin’s cheek, in accordance with our elders” dragooning to kiss as children, and he avoided my touch. I realized even in my embarrassment that he was telling me he was now a young man, no longer another child.

Sometimes tactile conventions are stated quite explicitly. Seventeenth- century Dutch etiquette manuals laid down what distance different categories of people should keep from each other, who could touch whom, and how. When talking with a superior it was wrong to grab his sleeves and against the rules of etiquette to kiss a woman of higher rank without her permission; even if she offered her cheek, the kiss should be in the air without actually touching her face (Bremme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Fingerprints: Writing About Touch
• Part I: Contact
• Part II: Pleasure
• Part III: Pain
• Part IV: Male Bonding
• Part V: Women’s Touch
• Part VI: Control
• Part VII: Uncommon Touch
• Part VIII: Tactile Therapies
• Part IX: Touch and Technology
• Copyright Acknowledgments
• Index
• Series Page