by Sean Carey

Until I found a copy online, it had been some years since I had read Marcel Mauss’s seminal 1934 essay, Les Techniques du Corps. He focused on how membership of a particular society obliges people to use their bodies appropriately in activities like walking, running, sitting, eating, climbing, jumping, swimming, and marching.

I had forgotten a lot of the basic argument. But I did remember a few things. Firstly, Mauss’s observations and analysis of the body – “man’s first and most natural instrument” – reinforced something that I had already learned from cultural anthropology:  what is deemed as acceptable and unacceptable customary behavior often varies according to differences in gender, social class, geographical area, and social occasion.

Secondly, I could recall that Mauss’s powerful concept of “prestigious imitation” was literally an eye-opener for a field worker in terms of observing customary use of the body and how it can change. It highlights, for example, the way in which people of a lower status (belonging to subordinate social groups) l tend to imitate the body techniques of those of higher status (belonging to dominant social groups) in order to acquire  improve their relative position in the social order.

In the mid-1980s,  I was carrying out fieldwork  in London’s East End, an area of the U.K. which has served as a reception area for many migrant groups fleeing persecution or famine including Huguenots, Irish, Ashkenazi Jews, and Somalis, as well as those seeking economic betterment. I became aware of the difference between first generation, 1.5 generation, and second and third-generation male Bangladeshis, in terms of how they moved, especially how they walked. (Young Bangladeshi females took a different trajectory in terms of the control and use of their bodies, but I will not that address that topic here.) Continue reading “Walking the cockney walk” →