Body Discipline: The Mechanics of Reform

Recently the body has become a subject of interest in anthropology and the other human sciences (cf. Blacking 1977; Comaroff 1985; Kunzel 1981; Scarry 1985; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987; B. Turner 1984). While much of this literature is in the area of medical anthropology, there is also an extensive literature on embodiment and sport (cf. Morgan and Klaus 1988). The literature on “things somatic” is, ofcourse, voluminous and incorporates a host of perspectives. Recent work has been most successful, however, in demonstrating that the body is not only “good to think with” as Lévi-Strauss (1966), Leach (1958, 1976), Douglas (1970) and V. Turner (1969) might have it, but is also acted upon through what Foucault has termed a “political anatomy.” (cf. Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). In this political anatomy the body is broken down into elemental units and physiological processes. It is made docile and subject, drained of any “natural” process so that all processes reflect neither pure biology nor pure culture but a history of power relations (Foucault 1984b: 182). Foucault has referred to various disciplinary regimens as “projects of docility” wherein the biomechanics of control are located in the regulation of movement—balance, precision, gesture, posture—rather than in the interpretation of signs (1979: 136).

Everyone who has studied Hindu life has to some extent noted the importance of the body in ritual, health, cosmology, and everyday life. The institution of caste rules and regulations is but one arena in which the Hindu body is made the docile subject of a pervasive political anatomy. Dumont (1970) and others have noted that Hindu society may be seen in terms of the largely somatic principles of purity and pollution. More recently Daniel, drawing in part on Marriott and Inden’s theory of coded substance (1977), has suggested that caste is but one manifestation of a more basic scheme of “differentially valued and ranked substances”: blood, food properties, earth qualities, spatial aesthetics, and sexual fluids (1984: 2). What is at issue in this matrix of coded substance, I think, is the relationship between identity, culture, and the political anatomy to which the body is subject. To what extent, under what circumstances, in what shape, and with what qualifications does a person emerge from the intersection of these forces?

It is against this backdrop of coded substance, rules of caste propriety, and somatic aesthetics that the body of the wrestler may be seen, not simply as a signifier of meaning, but as a subject actor in a larger drama of culture and power. Since wrestling is so meticulously concerned with a unique form of body discipline—which in Foucault’s sense is more a function of mechanics than meaning—one is led to ask how this discipline affects identity. Who does the physically fit wrestler think he is, and how, by virtue of what he does, is he different from the average man on the street?

These issues revolve, I think, around the nature of the person in Hindu South Asia. Dumont was perhaps the first to clearly show how the ideology of caste structures identity. Where Dumont saw caste structure as the overarching rubric of culture and identity, others have posited a more elemental structure based on coded substance (Marriott and Inden 1977; Daniel 1984). Although Daniel has criticized the extreme ethnosociology Marriott advocates (ibid: 54), his own work is aimed, it seems to me, at the same level of analysis, even though it gets there by a different, more fluid route. Regardless, in most instances there is a good “fit” between these two modes of interpretation—caste-based principles or ethnosociologically defined codes of substance—if only because many codes are keyed to an ideology of caste. However, this is by no means always the case. As Daniel’s work in particular has suggested, there are many arenas where the fit is neither good nor complete, and so the person must negotiate the rough terrain of an uncharted course. It is along these lines that the world of wrestling provides an interesting case in point.

Wrestling is unique in one respect, however. It takes direct issue with the lack of “fit” between a caste-based interpretation of the body and a distinct wrestling interpretation of the body. The exigency of close physical contact can not be ignored. That is, the wrestler does not pander to the inconsistencies of forced rationalization—he takes the bull by the horns, so to speak, and marks off, in bold steps, the terms of his own identity. He refuses to say that his world is of marginal, contingent significance. Unlike Barthes’s French wrestler, the Indian wrestler does not raise moral questions only for the sake of spectacle. He cannot simply leave the akhara and safely say, this is this and that is that, for he embodies the contradictions his actions engender. In embodying moral questions the wrestler does not directly challenge caste values, but he does restructure some of the codes to such an extent as to throw into question the logic, and thereby the power, of the dominant ideology.