AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE MIND/BODY DICHOTOMY ROOTED IN THE HISTORICAL SUPPRESSION OF THE BODY

The research undertaken in this study seeks to survey and identify a type of anthropological hermeneutic on the significance of the body. The development of that hermeneutic stems from the cultural process within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The question of the transformation of the body from the primitive to western consciousness indicates the historicity of the project, bringing to attention the political ramifications of the institutionalization of the mind/body dichotomy in religion, medicine and psychology.;Since an anthropology of the body indicates a cultural contingency based on the appropriation of the power of reality, the mind/body dichotomy is understood both as historical construct as well as theoretical proposition.;The question of the body has rarely been raised as an historical construct. The hermeneutic on the body which contemporary thinkers have taken might very well be a confirmation of the interpretative principle which western consciousness already knows. Hence, it is suggested that the structuralist thought of Claude Levi-Strauss precludes any investigation of the body as an historical event, because it absorbed the western hermeneutic on the body, that is, a reduction of the body to its instrumental value in the appropriation of unlimited social or religious power.;In reviewing the tendency of anthropological literature in its treatment of the body, one can note the reduction of the body to the logical and literate categories of the western mind. Because of this anthropological approach to the body, Structuralism could conclude that the obvious corporeality of the primitive in mutilation, sacrifice, and so on, was but a manifestation of the western science of the concrete. By science of the concrete, of course, Levi-Strauss meant that type of analytical and objectifying consciousness which has been identified as part of the positivistic and scientific tradition. This is so, only if the sensuousness of the body were not addressed as a dynamic which has been historically manipulated and transformed through institutional aggrandizement.;A difference in the hermeneutical appropriation of the body vis-a-vis personality in state and non-state societies can be detected when the contours of the body's historicity are explored through a self-critique of its western sedimentations.;Further, the western anthropologist looks for analogies and contrasts as a key to disclose primitive sensuousness. In its search for analogies the attention of the western anthropologist focuses on the states of ancient Peru. There the gradual transformation of the primitive appropriation of reality through the body is noted. The singular image of the jaguar serves as the root metaphor of the political transformation of the body which culminated in the Incaic state.;Thus, sensuousness is viewed as a dialectic in the western consciousness whose cultural contours emerge from the opposition between the two modes of knowing and acquiring the power of reality: the one from a primitive, sensuous activity, self-limiting in its attainment of power; and the other, from a science of the concrete, self-aggrandizing in its greed for power.