Bodies and Things

      Hola mis amigas! I am Crystene B. Villamor, Bachelor of Arts Major in Literature. Think of me as your trusty navigator through the realms of knowledge and wisdom, always ready to lend a hand or a virtual high-five. Today, we will go deeper into the study of bodies and things in cultural theory, which examines how physical objects, bodies, and material culture are understood, represented, and used within different cultural and social contexts.

    Culture also happens in bodies and to bodies. Body culture takes the form of how we walk and talk, how we bear or carry ourselves, and what “ image ” we project.

    Physical cultural studies are concerned with bodily life – everything from body shape and its significance to dance and the different meanings it has in different cultural contexts. Bodies change meaning depending on the context in which they are found.

    The cultural significance of bodies resides not only in what they mean but also in how they are inhabited, used, and experienced. One’s experience of one's body can be affected by one’s cultural surroundings and by the media. The meaning they have for us can change as a result. Consider the female breast. It has a biological function in that it is used to feed infants. But it is assigned a sexual or erotic meaning in certain cultures that it is not assigned in others.

    When Janet Jackson allowed a breast to be exposed at a nationally televised event, it provoked a scandal in the United States. But in parts of Africa, women live with exposed breasts and do not use clothing such as brassieres to cover and support them.

  In the Western media, women’s breasts are highly eroticized and considered an important feature of female sexual attractiveness. As a result, women in Africa have had to change their assumptions about their own bodies.

    

    Girls are especially prone to influence regarding body shape and weight. Cultural ideals of “ beauty ” get identified with certain shapes and sizes, often to the psychological and emotional detriment of those whose bodies do not conform to the standard.

    However, the role of culture in our physical and material lives is far more pervasive than the codes and conventions of appearance and attractiveness.

    The medical care of the body is cultural as well, when the swine flu erupted in Mexico in the spring of 2009, culture played a role in making the attack more deadly than it had to be. Nearly a hundred people – many more women than men – died because the culture of sickness and medicine in Mexico, especially among the poor, is such that people go to doctors only when illness becomes very grave.

    Culture affects the treatment of severe illness even when one enters the professional medical community; it is not only poor people who allow cultural attitudes to affect how they behave.

    The US culture of healthcare is different because conservatives were more successful in the US at preventing government-funded healthcare from coming into existence. Such healthcare would have prevented conservatives in business from profiting, through the sale of expensive health insurance, for other people’s needs. The more liberal and socialist European culture of healthcare assures that people’s needs are met by pooling the resources of the community through taxes for government-funded care.

    We also live in constant interaction with the world of things around us. Our lives are sustained by everything from toaster ovens to cars. Contact with things places us in certain kinds of social relations and gives us access to certain forms of cultural meaning.

    Things can be distillates of meaning for communities that bind the people of the community together. All bind different people together in a common shared understanding of the world. Common everyday objects can also have more personal meanings.

    We are also what we eat, of course. When we eat food, we literally take in things from the world and make them part of ourselves. Cuisines are often specific to particular ethnic or geographic cultures – soul food or Italian pizza, for example. Some foods are significant of a culture of educated healthy eating or of a high level of awareness of the varied cultures of the world, while some reflect economic status more negatively – cheap fast food that is easy to come by but dangerous to one’s health.

    The study of material culture in Cultural Studies is concerned with the meaning of objects in our lives. Some objects are closely connected to our bodily lives and to our internal emotional lives. For example, the sarong is a colorful garment worn by both men and women in Indonesia that has numerous functions. It is clothing; it communicates social messages; it operates emotionally; it is a token of exchange in rituals such as marriage; it swaddles children and covers corpses.

    Something as simple as light is also an important material thing in our lives that has cultural meaning. Light is associated with clarity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and good knowledge, while darkness or the lack of light often has the cultural meaning of evil or danger. Light alters our sense of space and has a psychological effect on us. It penetrates our being in both positive and negative ways. Light makes spaces seem larger, and its presence can be reassuring. But it can also be used to the point of excess and harm, as when the German government interred radical opponents of capitalism in rooms in which the light was intense and never turned off.

    The effect was to disorient them and to drive them to suicide. The absence of light, on the other hand, need not always signal danger. It can also be conducive to a sense of safety, comfort, and hominess. In Jordan, in the Bedouin community, tents are dark, but that darkness is associated with safety. Guests are invited into the dark in order to protect them from dangers that might lie outside.

    Another interesting “ thing ” in our cultural lives is kitsch. If you don’t know what kitsch is, think of “ knock-offs ” and cheap imitations, such as furniture with gilt that seems expensive but is in fact cheap. Kitsch consists of things that embody an aspiration to have the goods of the wealthy without having the wealth. So kitschy products such as gilt-edged furniture made cheaply allow those with champagne tastes and Budweiser budgets to have what they cannot really have. A sign of kitsch in furniture would be detailed molding work that lacks the kind of fine detail that genuine handcrafted work possesses. Instead, this furniture is usually turned by machines that are incapable of that level of refinement of detail. It looked cheap and clumsy to anyone familiar with “ the real thing, ” but not to those who merely wanted the appearance of the real thing.

How should we interpret something like kitsch?

Sociologists associate it with social groups that have less income and less education. Cultural scholars see kitsch as a way for such people to deal with modern life, which uproots old systems of belief and replaces them with commercialism.

In traditional culture, religious messages and cultural wisdom are passed on through routine daily communication and rituals, but in modern commercial culture, such cultural processes and institutions are less central; more central are commerce and the advertising messages that turn everyone into potential consumers.

Kitsch responds to this situation by using it to gain a traditional sense of the world; we buy cheap things that have exalted value and that provide us with a sense of routine security.

Kitsch provides “ cosmic coherence in an unstable world. ” Kitsch is repetitive rather than creative and unique. It provides a sense of familiarity because it is so routine.