Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Trevor H. J. Marchand is Professor of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. As a trained architect and qualified furniture maker, he has conducted fieldwork with craftspeople in Arabia, West Africa and the United Kingdom. His research focuses on apprenticeship, cognition and communication. Marchand is the author of Minaret Building & Apprenticeship in Yemen (2001) and The Masons of Djenné (2009), and co-producer of the documentary film Future of Mud (2007).

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As a species, we are composed, in part, of innate capacities – biological, perceptual, cognitive and motor – that engage us with the world of which we are a part, and thereby enable us to survive, adapt and thrive. By contrast, arts and virtues are not innate, but realised and reinforced in social and cultural practice. The contributions to this volume progress our thinking about human knowledge through explorations of the interdependence of nurture with nature: and more specifically the interdependence of mind, body and environment. While emphases on the roles played by environment and context in the processes of knowledge-making vary between the authors, all situate the sentient, practicing body at the core of their work. Investigations are guided by the eternal questions of ‘How we know?’ and ‘How we come to know?’ The acute observations and ground-breaking theory that arise from the ethnography promote deeper, better-informed questioning about knowledge, and stimulate interdisciplinary approaches to the study of human learning, thinking and practice.

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As a species, we are composed, in part, of innate capacities – biological, perceptual, cognitive and motor – that engage us with the world of which we are a part, and thereby enable us to survive, adapt and thrive. By contrast, arts and virtues are not innate, but realised and reinforced in social and cultural practice. The contributions to this volume progress our thinking about human knowledge through explorations of the interdependence of nurture with nature: and more specifically the interdependence of mind, body and environment. While emphases on the roles played by environment and context in the processes of knowledge-making vary between the authors, all situate the sentient, practicing body at the core of their work. Investigations are guided by the eternal questions of ‘How we know?’ and ‘How we come to know?’ The acute observations and ground-breaking theory that arise from the ethnography promote deeper, better-informed questioning about knowledge, and stimulate interdisciplinary approaches to the study of human learning, thinking and practice.

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Making Knowledge

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Greg Downey Macquarie University

Apprentices of the Afro-Brazilian danced martial art capoeira — an art said also to develop practitioners' cunning and savvy — learn primarily through imitation, along with bodily exercises and physical experimentation. They copy the movements of veteran players, haltingly at first, but with increasing animation and integrity. Teaching is primarily mimetic rather than analytic or explicit. If a novice asks too many questions, more than an instructor believes helpful (the threshold is usually quite low), a teacher will remind the student to be silent, watch closely, and imitate. During my field research in Brazil, if we interrupted Mestre ('Teacher') Moraes with too much questioning, he shouted, Embora! ('Get on with it!'); or, if feeling generous, he might stop us: Olhe ('Look here'). He demonstrated more slowly for those who had failed to catch a technique, punctuating his motions for emphasis at crucial moments with meaningless syllables, Au ... au ... au ...

With its acrobatic kicks, sly headbutts, low-to-the-ground dodges, and flamboyant ornamental moves, or floreios, capoeira stands out as an especially demanding form of embodied knowledge, apprenticeship necessitating not simply the acquiring of techniques or skills but a whole body transformation in strength, flexibility, mobility, perhaps even personality. Pursued intentionally through specialized training in adolescence or adulthood, the art contrasts in many ways with the (to the practitioner, at least) unremarkable daily habits and gestures that make up the habitus, as discussed by Pierre Bourdieu. Nevertheless, the shared mimetic forms of learning in both capoeira and more mundane corporeal techniques, and the influence of bodily training on capoeiristas' perceptions, suggest that the confrontation between the style of movement taught in capoeira and the everyday habitus might highlight how embodied knowledge shapes the subject. Practitioners repeatedly asserted that learning capoeira movements affected a person's kinaesthetic style, social interactions, and perceptions outside of the game (see Downey 2005b).

This chapter specifically explores how imitative learning occurs in capoeira, and sports, dance, and bodily practice more generally, and the psychological, neurological, and physical consequences of acquiring bodily knowledge. Although capoeira may be an extreme example, the art illustrates how enculturation entails biological development, and demonstrates the neurological complexity of imitative learning. Recent research in psychology and neurosciences allows us to attempt a neuroanthropological account of the cultural tuning of imitative learning. This biocultural study of corporeal mimesis helps to place anthropological accounts of enculturation on a more certain footing, but it also demands that we modify our portrayal of habitus or embodied knowledge (or whatever we call the product of bodily enculturation), allowing that the habitus might not be as consistent, simple, or transferable as some accounts, including Bourdieu's own, might suggest. A neuroanthropological account of mimesis, however, opens up an opportunity to converse across boundaries between anthropology and such disciplines as psychology, cognitive science, and neurology, both to integrate new findings and to assert our interest in cultural particularity and diversity.

Bourdieu argued that practical, bodily action instilled, and was guided by, a socially generated habitus, a 'structuring structure' internalized through interaction with people and the physical environment. In The logic of practice, Bourdieu writes: 'The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce the habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations' (1990a: 53; see also 1977). The habitus, in Bourdieu's model, is history made flesh, a corporeal enculturation that assures social and symbolic continuity while underwriting an individual's sense of autonomy.

With the habitus, Bourdieu attempts to overcome the dichotomy between objectivism and subjectivism in social theory, 'the scholastic dilemma of determinism and freedom' (2000: 131). For anthropologists struggling to reconcile a tradition of conceptualizing both society and culture as structure with a growing disciplinary interest in individual agency, the habitus has offered an attractive way to operationalize structure, to suggest that everyday action is both strategic and yet imprinted with the actor's past, and thus society's history (see Ortner 1984). The habitus offers an alternative to concepts like 'culture', 'ideology', 'hegemony', or 'cognitive structure', an alternative grounded more in corporeality and quotidian activity.

Yet, when we look more closely, the habitus concept as articulated by Bourdieu leaves certain key questions about embodied knowledge unexplored. Whereas Bourdieu was primarily concerned with bridging problems of scale — between the individual and social structures, history, or culture — the close analysis of bodily enculturation requires that we also consider the gap between biology and culture, to explore links between experience and our organic nature. Joseph Margolis (1999: 69), for example, criticizes Bourdieu for failing to identify the 'microstructure' of habitus. Margolis warns that there is 'a certain slackness' in Bourdieu's discussion (1999: 68): 'But if we ask what the habitus is, what the telling features of its functioning structures are, what we get from Bourdieu is a kind of holist characterization that never comes to terms with its operative substructures'(1999: 69, original emphasis). A vague psychology at the centre of the subject may unnecessarily undermine a practice-based account of socialization; as Anthony King describes, '[T]he overwhelming bulk of Bourdieu's work is informed directly by the habitus' (2000: 418).

On closer examination, everyday practices, dispositions, skills, and perceptual systems do not behave precisely like some of the more simplistic models of the habitus, specifically those that assume bodily activities arise from a set of structural oppositions or are coherent across a range of activities. Ironically, one obstacle to the study of embodied knowledge can be an overarching concept like the habitus, if it leads researchers to consider corporeality only as a theoretical solution to other social and political questions rather than as a site for close examination. The advantage to close biocultural study, however, is that it also tends to buttress the concept of the habitus against the criticism that it is overly deterministic, fails to explain change, or cannot account for variation.

I begin by discussing virtuoso imitation in my field research on capoeira. The example suggests that to ground the habitus psychologically and biologically, we must not just describe what the embodied knowledge does but seek to understand how it comes to be through an apprenticeship in bodily practices....