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Talking Minds: The Scholastic

Construction of Incorporeal Discourse

MARÍA JULIA CAROZZI

Bourdieu (1999) has pointed out the relationship between our scholastic
formation and the assumptions we usually take uncritically. He asserts that
academics leave unconscious propositions – which generate unconscious theses –
acquired through scholastic experience in an unthought state. I will argue here
that one of those assumptions derived from academic life is the extra-corporeal
character of discourse. This presumption continues to inform the thought of
social sciences in relation to the body, even though it has been over three decades
since the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1964), interactional socio-
linguistics (Gumperz, 1982), the anthropology (Bauman, 1986) and sociology of
performance (Carlson, 1996) began to cooperate in the criticism and replacement
of practices of research and analysis that separate discourse from the actions that
produce and surround it, and make it possible.
Several authors who have played a key role in calling our attention to the fact
that, when the body does not speak, read or write, it still retains and reproduces
a social and cultural memory, sometimes seem to leave the acts of writing and of
reading subtly out of the body. Bourdieu, for instance, wrote:

Body & Society © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 11(2): 25–39
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05052460

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. . . the body is thus constantly mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces and this
knowledge never has the objectivity it derives from objectification in writing and the conse-
quent freedom with respect to the body. (1993: 73)

This assertion appears as intuitively true, as it agrees with our educated common
sense. Obviously a written document, once completed and published, and as long
as it has not been read by anybody, is independent from the body of the author
who produced it and from the reader who will read it. However, we wonder why
it is so difficult to conceive of the specific forms we read and write in the same
way the author conceives of other corporeal actions, that is, as the result of a
mimesis involving the absolute immersion of our bodies in the compulsive repro-
duction of repetitive actions. To affirm that there is an embodied knowledge that
is radically different from another objective knowledge – the knowledge of
writers and readers – seems to reproduce the disembodiment of the discursive
activity in which we, as academics, are involved and which continues to appear
as extra-corporeal.
A similar differentiation between written and corporeal discourse is made by
Paul Connerton when analyzing incorporation practices and inscribing practices
in preserving cultural memories. The author writes:
In suggesting more particularly how memory is sedimented, or amassed, in the body, I want
to distinguish between two fundamentally different types of social practice. The first type of
action I shall call an incorporating practice. Thus a smile or a handshake or words spoken in
the presence of someone we address, are all messages that a sender or senders impart by means
of their own current bodily activity, the transmission occurring only during the time that their
bodies are present to sustain that particular activity. . . . The second type of action I shall call
an inscribing practice. Thus our modern devices for storing and retrieving information, print,
encyclopedias, indexes, photographs, sound tapes, computers, all require that we do something
that traps and holds information, long after the human organism has stopped informing. (1999:
72–3)

It should be said that the author admits that inscribing practices are not conceiv-
able without an aspect of incorporation. However, he says that ‘writing is a
habitual exercise of intelligence and will’ that is beyond the notice of the indi-
vidual who practices it ‘because of his/her familiarity with the procedure method’
(Connerton, 1999: 76–7). Thus, the lack of attention to body involvement in the
writing act remains naturalized instead of being analyzed as the product of the
habituation of specific reading and writing practices – acquired at school and
university – that construct selectively conscious bodies.
Immersed in this academic habit, we rarely consider writing and reading,
neither do we think about the conference, the seminar, and the college or school
class as physical activities. We often define the body precisely as something
human that does not produce nor perceive discourses. Thus, in the preface of a

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book intended to incorporate the materiality of the body to feminist thought,

Judith Butler (1993: ix) makes reference to the difficulties of those who, having
received philosophy training, always keep ‘a certain distance from body matters’
and try in such ‘a disembodied way to delimit body terrains’, concluding that
‘they invariably lose the body or, worse, write against it’.
Taken as a whole, Butler’s assertion that philosophers write against the body
– and not from the body – Bourdieu’s assertion that writing guarantees freedom
from the body and Connerton’s assertion that writing and reading are practices
where the role of incorporation is secondary since they are a product of intelli-
gence and will, reveal a common academic assumption: namely, that what we
academics do in our jobs – perceive, elicit, analyze, read and produce oral, written
and silent discourses (Howell, 1994) – is not considered a body activity.
We wonder then, what are the practices that condition our perception that
what we do as academics is not a product of the body but of the ‘mind’, the ‘intel-
ligence’ or the ‘will’: agents that appear simultaneously human but not corporeal,
and therefore carry a certain supernatural character. In answering this question,
I will analyze the construction of the production and reception of oral, written
or silent discourse as non-corporeal acts by those of us who have been intensely
educated in the Western system and work in academic institutions. I will first
refer to certain indications that suggest a continuity between Christian rituals
that construct a spirit that is different from, and higher than, the body, and
academic rituals that train us to locate the source of discourse in a place that is
both extra-corporeal and internal (Foucault, 1996). Then, I will explore certain
forms where the separation of discourse from the body of whoever produces it
is constructed and reproduced by means of school, university and academic
rituals. After that, I will argue that repeated participation in scholastic rituals
installs the habit of producing discourses in our bodies, and that this is a habit
we end up identifying ourselves with (Connerton, 1999). Finally, I will suggest
that the fact that attempts to re-incorporate body to social life are performed by
academics who have been trained in disembodying their discourses affects the
results of such attempts.
The first assumption underlying my analysis is that corporeal schemes –
including body consciousness, unconsciousness and partial identifications – are
the product of repeated participation in social situations that have certain
common characteristics and whose organization precedes that of individuals who
take part in them (Goffman, 1974). I will also assume that such corporeal schemes
condition what we perceive as a part of our body and what we conceive as inde-
pendent from it, and that such perception conditions discourses about the body
produced in similar situations. Under the specific terms of this article, I assume

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that habitual academic practices contribute to the construction of specific corpo-

real schemes, and that such corporeal schemes prompt us to make certain
assumptions about the body that we tend to leave in an unthought state when we
lecture, write or read about it.

From Spirit to Mind: Inheriting Practices of Disembodiment

According to several historical studies, there is a continuity between medieval
Christian practices that constructed a spirit as different from the body, and
academic practices that construct a discursive mind also different from the latter.
Examining this continuity, Don Hanlon Johnson (2000) calls our attention to the
survival of disciplines for the cultivation of the spirit developed in Christian
monasteries in the current practices performed in Western universities. Accord-
ing to his analysis, academic styles of sitting, listening, looking, talking and
gesticulating had their origin in medieval European universities. These, in turn,
grew out of monastic practices that generated Christian notions of consciousness
and body. Monastic orders practiced highly articulated body techniques,
intended to channel the passionate tendencies of the devil-prone flesh towards
the superior knowledge of spirit. Such knowledge was embodied in absolute
religious authorities: the abbot, the bishop and the pope. An interesting process
occurred when the original universities – Bologna, Padova, Paris, Cambridge and
Oxford – became more secularized with the multiplication of disciplines. The
role of dogmatic content in the curricula was increasingly challenged by the
scientific members of the schools in an attempt to reduce the impact of religion
on emerging disciplines like physics, chemistry, biology and the humanities.
However, immersed as they were in a scholastic habitus that prioritized discourse
over action and separated one from the other, scholars do not seem to have
noticed or to have changed university body practices based on the old religious
notions of consciousness. The author concludes that, despite secularization in
universities during the 19th and 20th centuries, the traces of monastic body prac-
tices, hidden under the layers of industrial and electronic culture, have not been
questioned, except among a few marginal theoreticians of pedagogy (Johnson,
2000: 43–4). Consequently, those of us who take part in academic life are still
subject to practices that generate body schemes where the spirit, incarnated in an
authorized word, is separated from the flesh, even when denominations of one
and the other have changed.
Continuity between monastic rituals and school/university rituals in relation
to the uses of the body they condition suggests that academic mind and reason,
as discourse-producing agents different from the body, would be the product of

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practices similar to those that built the monastic spirit as an agent different from
the flesh. These similarities, which merit a more detailed analysis, include, in the
first place, seclusion, that is, the isolation of bodies in a closed place, differenti-
ated from the general environment (Foucault, 1993: 145). Second, they would
include the monastic cell, the legacy of which consists of a distribution where
each body is assigned an office and each desk is assigned a body, thus preventing
the formation of groups and undifferentiated masses. Seclusion and isolation that
in monasteries placed the soul, alone, to face temptation as well as to concentrate
on divine contemplation (Foucault, 1993: 147), in universities seem to favor
isolated bodies to face the obligation to read and write, while interpersonal
contact not focused on such activities is constructed as distraction. Finally, rituals
in which whoever had the word – the abbot, bishop or priest – also had the auth-
ority and the highest place in the divine power hierarchy (Johnson, 2000) are
reproduced in college lectures and school classes (Wells, 1988) characterized by
a similar hierarchical distribution in relation to the right to introduce topics,
speak, ask questions and evaluate answers. Repeated exposure to rituals organ-
ized in this way seems to separate discourse from routine activities and invest it
with authority in the interior of the individual – an authority that is exercised
over other body activities. In other words, it helps to build a hierarchic body
scheme for which discourse is both separated from the body – as the university
campus is physically separated from city daily life – and is a locus of authority
and power. Such a body scheme may predispose academics to conceive of
discourse as the product of higher agents inhabiting the body but not belonging
to it: mind, intelligence or will.

Academic Rituals: Constructing the Disembodiment of Discourse

Academic rituals have a number of common features that we may assume will
produce similar bodies: quiet, sitting bodies, separated from each other, concen-
trated on producing and perceiving discourses, not paying attention to other
sensations and activities in themselves as in other bodies. Such common charac-
teristics consistently include sitting for hours at a time on chairs or benches, with
the body subject to an immobility resembling that of a Zen meditator, while we
listen, read or write. Chair arrangement makes eyes focus on the speaking indi-
vidual, on a piece of paper or a book rather than on anything else in the environ-
ment. The distance between individual seats discourages physical contact with
other attending colleagues (Mehan, 1979). Clothes – suits of a dark or neutral
color – seem to be designed not to call attention to themselves (Traversa, 1997:
206–7). Closed rooms keep a constant temperature where no cold or heat is felt.

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Windows, if any, are opened to static views, thus avoiding visual stimulation
caused by living, moving creatures. Classrooms and halls are generally far from
kitchens or rest-rooms to avoid smells. Also, ideally, they are far from places
where loud voices or singing can be heard, or where music is being played, to
avoid the distraction of extraneous sounds. Immobility, lack of physical contact,
uniform clothes, the exclusion of meals and drinks, a limited number of visible
objects – everything seems to call attention to the word, to create selectively
conscious bodies that are attentive only to discourse, which thus becomes prac-
tically separated from every other perception.
Evaluation and editing rituals condition text writing and, indirectly, text
reading. Editing standards in journals reduce to a minimum the use of first- and
second-person pronouns, underlining, italics, exclamation marks, imperatives,
rhetorical questions and ironic interrogation marks. Thus, as suggested by
Tedlock (1982), the forms of discourse that we produce for publication, or that
we read or make others read within the academic environment, eliminate any
reference to a corporeal I, you or we, excluding any expression of intensity,
surprise, irony, urgency or emotion. Application of these rules makes texts look
like the products of a disembodied voice. This style is extended to the produc-
tion of verbal discourses in classes, lectures and scientific congresses. Here, oral,
monotonous exposition prevails, while gestures, body movement, changes in the
tone of voice and the use of first- and second-person pronouns is considered
exceptional.1 Furthermore, reading a written text that follows the conventions of
a scientific journal is an increasingly popular practice in lectures and congresses.
The incorporation by academics of such a disposition to produce and listen to
separate discourses is evident when something interferes with usual practices.
When, for instance, during a lecture somebody opens a window and a draught
of cold air comes in, or voices or music can be heard from the next room, or food
can be smelled, or when in the middle of an academic text there is a direct refer-
ence to the author or to the audience – all this is immediately experienced by
participants who have been trained in the ritual as a surprise, a nuisance or an
interference that must be suppressed. Under such circumstances, participants
shush, impose silence, get up to close doors and windows, or, when editing
written texts, suggest changes in wording.
The ability to separate discourses from the rest of the bodily sensations that
all these academic practices entail, and that university students have already
incorporated, is acquired in school through a painful training. Certain regular
school practices exercise the habit of producing discourses related to other
discourses, eliminating perception of all other elements in the surrounding
environment (Simons and Murphy, 1988). In the first place, school education

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contributes to the separation of discourse from the rest of the body by training
attention. In school rituals, the teacher’s instructions and questions call the atten-
tion towards what he/she is saying or is writing on the board. Students show the
‘correct’ direction of their attention by answering the teacher’s questions using a
discourse that should be different in form – but identical in meaning – to that
which he/she used before (Tusón and Unamuno, 1999). ‘Tell me what I have just
said in your own words,’ the teacher asks the student who seems to have become
‘distracted’ from the lecture by some element in the environment. On other
occasions, the student is expected to reproduce a discourse equivalent to what
he/she has read previously in a book. In post-1960s schools, discourses will not
necessarily be equivalent to those that have been heard or read, but related or
opposed to them. However, the practice of constructing a discourse based on
another discourse, without interference from or connection to other aspects of
the immediate environment, will continue to reproduce itself (Simons and
Murphy, 1988).2
Additionally, the school trains the body both not to pay attention to the quality
of the sound of the voice produced or listened to during an oral lecture, as well as
not to pay attention to the body movement involved in writing and speaking, but
to address the attention to understanding and allowing understanding, that is, to
producing and allowing production of equivalent discourses. The experience
resulting from training this selective inattention is that of a silent discourse that
guides the pen or the keyboard to write a sentence, without consciousness of the
involvement of body movement. The body movement that implies moving a pen
is thrown out of consciousness by leading attention to the ‘meaning’ of discourse.
Such lack of attention to the body movement involved in talking and writing
becomes evident when we compare it to the attention paid to their own movements
by followers of certain New Age techniques, such as conscious gymnastics or
sumi-e painting (Carozzi, 2000). Moreover, this inattentiveness to the body in
education practices has increased over the years. Half a century ago, in Buenos
Aires schools, for instance, students learned poems by heart, to reproduce the same
words they had read. Declamation, the proper way of modulating the sound of the
voice when pronouncing a discourse, was taught, as well as calligraphy, the proper
way to draw written words. These practices, which called the attention to the form
of saying or writing, have gradually been banished in the second half of the 20th
century, to focus attention on the content of discourse.
Academic forms of writing, reading and silent production of discourses seem
then to be imprinted on the body through the repeated participation in similar
school and academic ritual situations. These rituals generate definite areas of
consciousness and unconsciousness, constructing subjective body schemes

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different from those produced by other rituals. Among their main characteristics
are: the separation of discourse from the ‘rest’ of the body; the focusing of atten-
tion on words and the suppression of consciousness of all other bodily sensations
while reading, writing, listening or speaking. Studies of the hidden curriculum of
the classroom (Jackson, 1991) argue that schools control learning and literacy,
while maintaining and enforcing social order (Bernstein, 1973); they separate the
respectable poor from the non-respectable poor and classify children with a view
to the labor market, promulgating the ideology that whoever is not successful at
school is less worthy and unable of making an effort (Cook-Gumperz, 1988).
The fact that a higher education is valued by virtually everybody in Western
countries, that it helps people to obtain better-paid or more prestigious jobs, and
that it is culturally associated with moral and intellectual values, adds value to the
disembodied discourse it encourages and helps to reproduce. An educated body,
having the competence to produce discourses about discourses, is not
constructed as just another body, but as a qualified body. Such a body is valued
in the labor market, is perceived as prestigious and is judged as morally superior.
Such distinction resonates with the fact that its products – discourses susceptible
of being written or pronounced on a dais – as opposed to other bodily products,
are considered as originating in the mind, which is the heir of the spirit in that it
is experienced as reigning over the body.

The Disembodied Discourse as an Academic Habit

One of the effects of the scholastic practice of selective and sustained exposure
to discourse is to acquire a disposition to produce a discourse about almost
anything. Thus, in a comparative study of the effects of school education and the
acquisition of literacy in other environments, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole
concluded that the biggest difference between schooled and unschooled popu-
lations lay precisely in the ability of the former to ‘talk about’ or ‘expose
verbally’. They wrote:
A convenient way of grasping the role of school is to consider first those tasks on which it was
the highest ranking determinant of performance. These were: explanation of sorting, logic
explanation, explanation of grammatical rules, game instructions (communication), and
answers to hypothetical questions about name switching. All of these are ‘talking about’ tasks.
Topics being talked about are quite diversified – from rules of language to the person’s own
cognitive operations – but it is a reasonable assumption that they all require some common set
of component skills in verbal exposition or, borrowing Olson’s terminology for the moment,
skills involved in the logical functions of language. (1981: 242–3)

The results of the study allowed them to assert that what generated the
disposition to produce discourses was repeated participation in Western school

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activities, and not reading and writing learned in other environments. However,
such a disposition, constructed by scholastic rituals, is rarely conceived of in the
sociology, history and anthropology of the body as a bodily habit involving
impulse, affective disposition, identification and power over us, in the same way
as ‘body’ habits do. Let us see, for instance, how Connerton, in the following
paragraph, distinguishes the force of bodily habit from the acts of telling things
to ourselves and making formal decisions:
. . . what we can observe clearly in the case of bad habits is the hold they exert over us, the way
in which they impel us toward certain courses of action. These habits entail an inherent
tendency to act in a certain way, an impulsion strong enough to lead us habitually to do things
which we tell ourselves we should prefer not to do, and to act in ways that belie or override
our conscious decisions and formal resolutions. Dewey’s point is that this feature is not specific
to a particular class of bad habits; these characteristics of bad habits are precisely the features
which are most instructive about all habits. They remind us . . . that a predisposition formed
through the frequent repetition of a number of specific acts is an intimate and fundamental part
of ourselves, that such habits have power because they are so intimately a part of ourselves.
(1999: 93–4)

If we can appreciate the force of habit in both bad habits and in practicing skills
like knitting, dancing or playing soccer, it is because none of these have for us,
academics, the same force and power of identification as the acts of ‘telling things
to ourselves’ and ‘making conscious decisions’. We can perceive that the body
repeats certain non-discursive acts, but we cannot perceive the habit that prompts
us to produce discourses about what we perceive or do, precisely because we are
much more immersed in it. Indeed, our identification with this discursive dispo-
sition is so intense that we represent it with the pronoun ‘we’ in such assertions
as ‘we are possessed by habits’ and ‘we find ourselves trapped in habits’. The silent
discourse reproduction when ‘we tell ourselves what it is that we would prefer’
or talk about ‘our conscious decisions’ and ‘our formal resolutions’, is distin-
guished in our academic products from the force of the habit precisely because it
is the core habit we are immersed in and identify with when we talk or write.
If we consider that part of the effectiveness of rituals resides in their power to
install verbo-motor schemes able to generate certain states by merely adopting a
given body posture (Bourdieu, 1993), we may foresee that scholastic rituals – in
which all of us who produce discourses have taken part countless times – will
have as an effect that each time we sit quietly we will feel compelled to produce
a discourse, whether we pronounce it, write it or simply imagine it. This seems
to be indicated in the following text, produced by a Spanish philosopher as a
reaction in the face of the large number of articles published after the global TV
transmission of the Twin Towers’ collapse and the attack on the Pentagon,
extending the force of the scholastic habit to all human beings:

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In the face of horror when everything is beyond control, in the face of a violent eruption we
can hardly understand, human beings cannot refrain from chattering analyses like children
whistle in the dark to drive fear away. (Savater, 2001)

When dispossessed of its universality and superiority in relation to other

acquired dispositions, the act of producing discourses separated from action, as
well as those of writing, reading or listening to them, appear before us as the
product of a body habit incorporated through the frequent repetition of specific
acts (Gumperz, 1988). Additionally, as Connerton (1999) pointed out with
respect to other habits, producing discourses becomes an intimate and funda-
mental part of our sense of continuity, a central constituent of our identity. In
the following paragraph, Silvia Citro gives an example of such centrality:
In the case of [anthropologist Victor] Crapanzano for example, the conceptualization of field
work is seen as a ‘confrontation’ that implies for the ethnographer the dissolution or disruption
of the sense of continuity of the self. . . . It is worth noticing that, according to the author, the
ethnographer’s sense of identity could be reconstituted through the ‘act of writing’, and this
would be the resolution of the particular confrontation implied in the field work. (1998/9: 94)

The production of written discourses becomes a habit for the academic anthro-
pologist. As such, it forms a core part of his/her own sense of continuity, and a
privileged way to recover it if he/she has lost it while performing his/her field-
work. As for oral discourses, such identification is also visible in the feelings we,
academics, experience when giving a lecture or presenting a paper at a congress:
the fact that we feel exposed while speaking points to our identification with our
oral discursive action.
Identification with the discourse habit installed by repetition of scholastic
practices has certain visible consequences in academic production. In the first
place, it makes it difficult to assume a reflexive attitude about the differentiation
and hierarchization of discourse with respect to other corporeal activities. Such
reflexivity requires keeping a distance from the processes we academics are
involved in when developing our work (Myerhoff and Ruby, 1982). It is not
strange, then, that the first anthropologist who questioned the identification of
language with mental activity, and who conceptualized it as a kind of activity
among other socially cooperative ones – Bronislaw Malinowski – was also the
first to carry out fieldwork that kept him away for a long time from practice in
academic circles, where such identification is supported (Robins, 1976).
Some of the more common techniques in social sciences also seem to originate
in our identification with the discourse habit. Our academically informed bodies,
which separate words from the rest of experience and are identified with them as
their true being, construct the interview, the life history, the survey, the written
biography, as methods to explore the ‘beliefs’, ‘feelings’ and ‘experiences’ of

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people. From our scholarly habit we tend to assume that discourses people
produce, preferably sitting and isolated from non-discursive stimulus, represent
an inner, true world disclosed by their words (Carozzi, 2001). Research tech-
niques where discursive action is separated from the rest of behavior and invested
with a condition of truth can also be found in the anthropological production of
‘myth’ and ‘narrative’ as texts. Constructing myth and narrative as texts is some-
times the result of an interview, where the informant, sitting alone in front of the
investigator, is induced to tell stories. In other cases, discourse is separated from
the rest of bodily activity as the result of the work of the social scientist who
records what is said and then de-records it to build a text, leaving aside the
gestures, movements, tones, actions, interruptions and comments from other
people present.
Since the mid-1960s, the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1964),
interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982) and the anthropology (Bauman,
1986) and sociology of performance (Carlson, 1996) have contributed to a criti-
cism of some of these methodological practices that separate discourse from the
actions that produce, surround and make discourse possible (Carlson, 1996).
Meanwhile, such concepts as practical belief (Bourdieu, 1991) have helped to
overcome the identification of discourse production with inner commitment.
However, when we, social scientists, speak about the body, our identification
with the discourse habit continues so that we rarely consider the body as the
source of discourse. Our conception of the body as non-discursive and of
discourse as non-corporeal appears as the reflection of our own body schemes,
which in turn are the product of sustained participation in academic situations
where oral exposition, reading and writing are separated from the rest of our
activities. These schemes have crystallized in assumptions such as that discourse
production and perception are activities that do not originate in the body (Butler,
1993), that are radically distinguished from both bodily habits (Connerton, 1999)
and mimetic action, and that grant us freedom from our bodies (Bourdieu, 1993).

Conclusions
As other authors have pointed out, the renewed interest of social sciences in re-
incorporating our disciplines is related to changes produced during the second
half of the 20th century in the life conditions of members of educated urban
middle classes, to which most social scientists belong. These changes have
allowed us to experience new bodily schemes that compete for the hegemony of
the discursive body and consequently cannot be relegated to deviation or alterity.
In the first place, the development of specific technologies – gym machines,

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plastic surgery, sun-beds, skin treatments using a number of rejuvenating

substances, dental implants, etc. – turned into services and products for sale, have
made body appearance become a status symbol as never before (Melucci, 1996:
71). Consumption society inaugurates an unprecedented relationship between
purchasing power and body aesthetics, turning bodily features into visible class
symbols, which up to the first half of the 20th century were confined to skin
color, clothes, jewelry and accessories. At the same time, graphic reproduction of
photographs and television politics have turned body surface and gestures into
another power instrument over large audiences. Such power could only be
attained through discourses reproduced through loudspeakers in large concen-
trations, or printed in leaflets, books and newspapers in the previous era (Verón,
2001). Graphic and television advertising reproduce images of young, beautiful
bodies in order to turn any kind of good, not just those that are said to confer
youth and beauty, into something desirable (Cortese, 1999). As Featherstone
(1995) has pointed out, the visible surface of our own body acquires a central
place in consciousness as a result of comparing ourselves to the idealized images
of the human body that proliferate in advertisements and visual media. Bodies
constructed through these social practices have come to question the hegemony
of the body centered in the production and reception of discourses. Given these
new conditions for the construction of our bodies, we can now perceive and criti-
cize the absence of the body in the classical social sciences. However, even when
sometimes we experience the new middle-class bodies and are able to write about
them, they are not the bodies we write, read and talk from. Academic conditions
of production still facilitate the construction of discourses alienated from the
bodies that produce them, and bodies that focus their attention on words and
identify themselves with them. The consequences of this fact for social science
discourses on the body probably exceed those suggested in this article and
deserve deeper exploration.
Participation in scholastic rituals (Bourdieu, 1999) constructs educated bodies,
our academic bodies, which focus their attention on word production and percep-
tion, and separate discourse from action, movement, sensation and emotion. These
are Cartesian bodies, where the mere production of discourses is necessary to
know that they do exist, while all else apart from discourse is an outer shell, an
instrument of expression or a vehicle for the real discursive being (Grosz, 1994:
8–10). From these academically informed bodies, identified with the habit of
producing discourses, we tend to refer to verbal actions as products of our minds,
and to consider our body as a residual category, the source of the rest of our
actions, something we can identify ourselves with in other circumstances, but not
when writing, talking or reading, even when we do it about the body.

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From the discursive self – constructed and enthroned by education and

academic institutions – we tend to assume our body as something susceptible to
being qualified with terms that have a ‘pre’ prefix (as in pre-objective, pre-
conceptual, pre-conscious). We associate this body with popular, marginal,
medieval, private, mercantile, religious, productive or mediatic – but never
academic – practices. By taking into account the manner in which our discursive
bodies are constructed in academic rituals, and by considering our own
professional work as a product of the acquisition of a body scheme and of a
specific bodily habit, we hope to contribute to returning our oral, written and
silent discourses to the bodies that produce them, and to removing them from
the privileged, extra-corporeal and inner place where our training makes us ready
to place them.

Notes
I am grateful to three anonymous referees and to Alejandro Firgerio, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod and
participants in the Seminario General of the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology,
IDES/IDAES/UNSAM, for their comments on previous versions of this article.

1. An example of unusual body movement during a lecture is provided by Featherstone (1995: 51)
who, referring to Georg Simmel, quotes a paragraph illustrating how his gestures, the turns of his body
and the movements of his hands made his expositions extraordinary in the eyes of his contemporaries.
2. Simons and Murphy (1988) give the name ‘text-dependent language’ to the language developed
and demanded at schools and mention as its distinctive characteristic that it makes no reference to the
immediate social situation but that it is only related to text. The production of such language requires
removing the time and space context where students are situated.

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María Julia Carozzi is a research fellow of the National Council for Scientific Research, Argentina,
and Professor of Anthropology at the Argentine Catholic University. She received her PhD degree in
Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1988 and since then she has
conducted research on interaction in multi-ethnic classrooms, religious conversion processes, and the
construction of social movement frames through discourse and interaction. Her most recent books are
A Nova Era no Mercosul (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1999) and Nueva Era y Terapias Alternativas:
Construyendo significados en el Discurso y la Interacción (Buenos Aires: Educa, 2000). She is currently
researching the social construction of bodies in ritual contexts.

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