Reflecting on Words and Letters from the Perspective of

Embodiment, with Commentary on Essays by Daphne Lei, Susan

Phillips, and Sohini Ray

Deidre Sklar

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 1, Winter 2009, pp.

155-171 (Article)

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic

Research
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0050

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/262445

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FROM INSCRIPTION TO INCORPORATION:
THE BODY IN LITERACY STUDIES

Reflecting on Words and Letters

from the Perspective of
Embodiment, with Commentary
on Essays by Daphne Lei, Susan
Phillips, and Sohini Ray
Deidre Sklar
Independent Scholar

I.
A dance ethnographer inevitably raises her hand to speak up for move-
ment as the mediating factor in the relationship between writing and
embodiment. Human movement creates inscriptions, whether with stone
tools, pens and pencils, linotype machines, or computers. Orthographic
systems travel through our bodies not only as symbols but as physical
impulses like muscle contractions and extensions, creating complex
movements and kinesthetic sensations. While European and American
philosophers have long been concerned with the visual perception of
movement, they have largely ignored awareness of movement sensation,
or kinesthesia, as an epistemological mode. Omitted from the sensorium,

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 155–172, ISSN 0003-549. © 2009 by the Institute for Ethnographic
Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

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Reflecting on Words and Letters from the Perspective of Embodiment,
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kinesthesia is nonetheless a primary means by which we know, engage

with, and make sense of the world. My discussion of orthography and
embodiment builds upon this premise to suggest ways that language
implicates kinesthesia, thereby troubling the notion of a disconnect
between disembodied sign and sensate body.
I take as point of departure Elliot R. Wolfson’s exegesis of kabbala in
terms of “textual embodiment,” originally presented along with several
of this volume’s essays at a University of California Humanities Research
Institute seminar on “Gesture and Inscription” in 2002. 1 This will launch
my consideration of the essays by Daphne Lei, Susan Phillips and Sohini
Ray in this volume. According to Wolfson, in kabbalah, “The three books
by which God created the world allude to the congruence of thought,
speech and writing” (2005:204). Whereas for God, words, whether
thought, spoken, or written, “constitute the very essence of things they
name, whence derives the creative potency of language,” for humans,
“words at best are ‘signs’ or ‘symbols’ that point to the things they name
but not to their essence” (204). Thus Wolfson considers that in kabbala,
humans are distinguished from God on the basis of the conventionality of
language. Humans do not create the world in their use of language; they
reiterate, by convention, what has already been created.
Where do we humans get the idea that God has the capacity, in converg-
ing a sound, a mark, and a thought, to create the phenomenon to which
that convergence refers, except that we, too, can sample this experience?
I suggest that, in terms of human capacity, what is being brought out here
is the difference between the conventional, iterative, and automatic use of
language and an awareness, while speaking or writing, that we are bring-
ing to life—at least in somato-mental consciousness—the thought repre-
sented by the sounding and marking of speech and orthography. It is not
just that in internally hearing or picturing the combination of sound or let-
ter symbols that constitute words we conjure up and imbue with vitality a
somato-mental experience of a thought, though that in itself is wondrous;
we also bring to life the full and changing load of associations that accu-
mulate in the confluence of symbolic sound, mark, and thought. In short,
we evoke a world. To be aware of this peira, or sampling, of the creativity
inherent in language is to be aware of a miracle inherent in our natures,
an “I can,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, of being human. In kabbalah, God
creates the world through the confluence of sound (speech), image (writ-
ing) and thought; phenomenologically, we humans have the capacity to

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realize, indeed, repeat, that creative act by piercing through the conven-
tionality of language to an awareness of the multi-sensory and world-
building miraculousness of the language process itself.
We know from recent studies in child development that we are born
with the capacity for what child psychologist Daniel Stern calls “amodal
perception” (1985:51), the ability to translate information between senso-
ry modalities. Infants can recognize visually an object they previously
knew only through touch, translate sound intensities (loudness) to visual
intensities (brightness) and temporal patterns (beat, rhythm, duration)
between visual and auditory modes. Infants do this before they can rec-
ognize or identify objects, including themselves as objects, or “selves.”
The capacity for amodal recognition of qualities precedes language.
Philosopher Mark Johnson (1987) argues that we form pre-linguistic
“embodied schema” or “image schema” by grouping together intersenso-
ry extrapolations—of shape, directionality, temporal pattern, or force, for
example—into pre-linguistic schemata such as roundness, up-and-down
direction, or forcefulness. Embodied schemata are “mediating represen-
tations” drawn from bodily experience (152). Whereas Kant hypothesized
that the mediating factor between sensation and conceptualization was
imagination, he “couldn’t draw the reasonable conclusion that imagina-
tion is both bodily and rational” (xxvii-xxviii) and that imagination, not
reason, is the essential meaning-making operation. Neither conceptual
nor perceptual, imagination lies between the two, a sensory/cognitive
process that works productively and creatively to configure experience.
As anthropologist Tom Csordas (1993) points out, however, our bodies
are, from the beginning, in the world, and in sociocultural space, “part of
an intersubjective milieu” that includes others’ bodies; thus, it is not sub-
jectivity but intersubjectivity that “gives rise to sensation” (138). Cultural
processes and environments are at work from the moment of human
inception so that in different social and historical circumstances, we learn
to value different elements within the flux of perception, emphasize dif-
ferent sensory media (sight, sound, touch, etc.), and develop different
epistemologies for processing information. Thus, while the capacity to
abstract patterns from bodily experience, via amodal perception, is
innate, the metaphoric process of schema-building is creative, indetermi-
nate, open-ended, and continuously active. Innate perceptual/conceptual
capacities and cultural processes work in tandem at every level: embodi-
ment, imagination, abstraction.

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Amodal perception and embodied schema prepare the ground for

objectification and naming. Language depends on the capacity to recog-
nize patterns across sensory modalities. Most important, for the purposes
of this discussion, the association of a name with an embodied schema
“fixes,” or objectifies, that schema’s territory—though only temporarily,
since experience will refine, expand, and complicate its parameters.
Naming would include, for example, children both inventing name-sounds
and learning conventional name-sounds for objects, qualities, or states.
The name-sound, now a “word,” then participates in the schema to which
it refers. We come to associate the sound to the schema so that the word
at once stands for, calls up, and becomes part of that schema. Calling up
the cross-modal somatic associations of a word-sound, such that its
schematic constituents “come alive” is at the heart of meaningfulness, as
Johnson points out, an event of understanding (175). We can imagine God-
made signs, where words, whether thought, spoken, or written, “constitute
the very essence of things they name,” in terms of Stern’s unveiling of
cross-modal perceptual processes combined with Johnson’s elaboration of
embodied schema. The process may be compared to the hypothetical
moment a child apprehends that the sound “mama” refers to an object,
mother. At this moment, of course, the thought of the object is created, out
of the pre-linguistic and synaesthetic extrapolations of qualities already
familiar to the child. In this way, it is as if mama herself is created. For us
humans, naming, differentiation and objectification are social processes
that create the world as we know it. There is no other world we can know
but this one, a world of differentiation, mediated through language.
The kabbalistic name, however, is not so much a word as it is a combi-
nation of letters (sounded and written), YHWH. Letters, for the kabbalists,
even more than words, are the vehicles of semiotic potency; they are “the
mystical body of God” (Wolfson 2005:243). Letters create the world,
including our bodies; they are both the means for creation and the sub-
stance of creation. But what is a letter? Grappling with Wolfson’s writing,
I had a moment of disorientation when I realized I had no idea what “a
letter” was. I had never given letters thought other than to use them, first
practicing shaping them in composition books in grade school and learn-
ing to recognize them in early readers, soon able to “write” and “read”
without questioning or examining the whole process.
The how of sounding or inscribing letters involves bodily gestures of teeth
and tongue or fingers and wrists; the shape, intensity, rhythm, and weight of

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sound or mark participates in the letter. As sounds, letters are differentiated

by how they are produced in our bodies, vowels and consonants made by
breath and body part against body part. They have somatic reverberations,
acting upon the maker in a particular way, a smooth long “o” different from
a sharp short “k.” The sonic dimension of letters can be thought of as a kind
of music, with unique qualitative dynamics, different for different languages
and sociocultural contexts. Likewise for writing: letters are combinations of
marks—lines, circles, dots, curves, upstrokes, downstrokes, cross strokes,
involving light pressure, strong pressure, swinging, puncturing, slashing,
flowing motions. Different orthographic systems emphasize different visual
and gestural elements, whether dots or lines, linearity or curvature, fluidity
or discontinuity. What kinds of concepts, bodily states, and aesthetic values
are enacted in these sounds and marks? The sensory and social schemata
remain hidden beneath the symbol.
It is likely that the first inscriptions were iconic, marks imitating or rep-
resenting aspects of the phenomenal world. As David Abram (1996) writes,
orthographic letters have not always been without semantic meaning;
rather, they were pictorial, conjoined with the events or experiences they
inscribed. These connections are severed when those marks are conven-
tionalized and dissociated from the phenomenal. Thus, Abram states, the
major transformation in writing was not from orality to literacy but from
writing that reverberated with the environment to writing that had con-
ventionally assigned meanings. Conventionalized letters no longer refer
directly and iconically to the world and to human embodiment in that
world, but to other letters, to the language system that unites them and
to the human capacity for symbolic thought. Similarly, only long after a
child’s first naming and objectifying does she learn to split words off from
embodied schema and work them, sounded or written, as abstractions in
relation to each other.
Nonetheless, letters continue to carry traces of their bodily production
and reception, their contours in writing, reading, or imagining reverber-
ating with their kinetic shapings. They also continue to be embodied
schemata, retaining metaphoric and sensory associations across all occur-
rences of the letter and of the sound of the letter, hinting at a world of
complex phenomenal linkages. Letters thus both conceal and reveal their
sensuality, vitality, and meaningfulness. I am suggesting that the secret
property of the letters that Wolfson discusses in kabbalistic terms is, in
phenomenological terms, these hidden sensual, vital, and meaningful

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dimensions as revealed by ontology and concealed by conventionality.

What was previously stated about words—that, as sounds, they first objec-
tify and “name,” participate in and evoke prelinguistic cross-modal and
sensorially rich embodied schema and then are split off to be worked as
abstractions in relation to each other—is amplified in letters because
individual letters, like musical notes, are non-semantic, yet, unlike musi-
cal notes, in combination they become semantic.
Letters are more suitable than words for filling the intermediary role
between the metaphysical and the corporeal. Abstraction and concretiza-
tion meet in the letter. As symbols without semantic meaning, they are
inherently abstract; as marks or sounds that must be produced via corpo-
reality and that also leave visual, tactile, or sonic traces, they are
inevitably sensual. Both abstract and concrete, letters enact the slippage
between the symbolic and the sensual, the semiotic and phenomenologi-
cal, as well as between God and the world. To preserve the “veil of the let-
ter” (Wolfson 2005:206) is in part, then, an instruction to attend to lan-
guage while not being blinded by its conventionality; language, or “the
name,” must continue to vibrate, if you will, with its full sensory, somat-
ic, phenomenological, vital, and schematic load. The human capacity for
language must continue to be mysterious and ineffable.
Anthropologically, humans are both embodied and capable of transcend-
ing embodiment through abstraction and symbolization. Transcendence of
the body depends upon the innate human potentials inherent in embodi-
ment, and embodiment is configured through the symbolic language of let-
ters and words; the symbol works upon our experience of body. Naming cre-
ates the world as we know it, a world we can only know through our
particular sociocultural and historical circumstances. The understanding
that letters, as marks or sounds that configure, indeed, as sociocultural sys-
tems, create our experience of the vital, ever-changing flow of phenomena
is equivalent to an understanding of creative potency itself.
Potency is not mentioned in Wolfson’s tripartite schema of speech, writ-
ing, and thought, but it is implicitly represented by the idea of “creation,”
or even of YHWH. Kabbalistically, the creative potency of language derives
from God’s use of words as constituting the essence of what they name.
Linguistic potency represents, or, is equivalent to, God’s potency. I under-
stand potency to include awareness, not only of life force, or vitality, but
also of the startling process of languaging itself. While a conventional
semiotic understanding of language recognizes signifier, signified and ref-

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erent, the kabbalistic understanding of God’s language, in Wolfson’s

account, implies awareness during enactment. This awareness includes,
first, that word-thinking is an unfolding of both sound-units, internally
either heard or voiced, and marks, or visual-units, internally either drawn
or seen; these sounded and seen versions are mutually representing.
Second, it involves awareness that “thinking” via sounds or visual marks is
symbolic activity in two senses: marks stand for sounds and vice versa, and
marks and sounds, as words, have linguistic meaning; they conjure and are
conjured by thoughts. Finally, it includes awareness that these thoughts-
made-of-sounds-and-marks (i.e. “the word”) evoke, one might even say cre-
ate, referents, in short, a world. Holding all these awarenesses at the same
time, one can’t fail to notice that “thinking” imbues both thought and the
objects of thought with semiotic vitality; thinking participates in, even
manipulates, a world. Phenomenologically, then, the human sampling of
God’s creative potency occurs as an experiential understanding of the lan-
guaging process as one of creative potency.
The human capacity for making meaningful letters and words is the eso-
teric secret behind the everyday, taken-for-granted conventionality of lan-
guage. Kabbalah reverses, with consciousness, the ontological language-
learning process that I have described for infants, from cross-modal schema
building to differentiating and objectifying through naming. It begins with,
and assumes, conventional language usage and chips away at conventional-
ity to reveal meaning as a potent “event” grounded in the “I can” of embod-
iment. From a phenomenological perspective, when the kabbalists discover,
or uncover, letters, they re-join in consciousness the marks of orthography,
the sounds of speaking, the process of thinking these symbols, and the vital
phenomenological body-in-the-world on which all these depend. Kabbalah
is thus, in Wolfson’s term, reconstitutive work, restoring the semiotic-phe-
nomenological braid. One might say it thus heals the “mind-body split.” Our
corporeal bodies that are transcended through language are necessary to the
process of transcendence. Language separates and joins mind and body and
is itself the joiner; language, the go-between, is itself the miracle.

II.
Like Wolfson’s kabbalists, the Los Angeles Crips that Susan Phillips
describes must deal with the problem of embodiment. For the kabbalists,
embodiment presents a metaphysical dilemma: how can an incorporeal

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deity be represented in anthropomorphic form, or, in reverse, how can

humans be both corporeal and divine? For the Crips, however, embodi-
ment presents a crisis of physical and sociopolitical survival: how is it pos-
sible to both assert and disguise an identifying corporeality in the context
of racial oppression and inter-gang violence? The major concerns of gang
life, Phillips writes, are identity, violence, death, and remembrance.
The body is central in gang life because it needs to be hidden in the
face of danger, both from rival gangs and from law enforcers. Crips must
“communicate identity in absentia” relying on messages “communicated
by bodies, separated from bodies, as well as placed upon them perma-
nently” (92). Both kabbalists and gang member play on the seesaw of pres-
ence and absence, and for both kabbalists and gang members, letters are
intermediaries. In the first case letters mediate between an incorporeal
deity and a material world, in the second between human visibility and
disguise. Among gang members, the body both disappears and is brought
back through letters—in graffiti, tattooing, signing, and dancing.
Through letters, gang members can be present without putting their bod-
ies in danger; through letters, those who have died can be brought back.
Among the essays presented here, Phillips most forcefully reveals the
interdependence of writing systems and larger sociopolitical contexts.
Examining gang literacy in relation to the Eurocentric literacy system that
is taken for granted in the US enables her to bring into relief both the pol-
itics of race relations and the alternative epistemologies implicit in the
two literacies. Writing is analyzed in terms of social struggle, sociopoliti-
cal hegemony and racist colonization, and gang writing is understood to
be an orthographic, linguistic, and, indeed, epistemological response to
writing as a tool of the oppressor. As Phillips writes, gang members offer
a “counterliteracy” that poses challenges to hegemonic assumptions
about what writing is (72;75).
Phillips also most directly addresses the multisensory implications of writ-
ing as a symbol system, drawing out the intentional interplay between ver-
bal, kinesthetic, and pictographic media, as well as between oral and writ-
ten modes in gang literacy. Phillips’ stories point to the body’s trace in
inscribed letters, created by the movements used to form them and also by
implicit references to others’ often missing bodies. Descriptions of gang
members’ foot movements bring out the aesthetic, indeed, kinetic, dimen-
sion of letters, as combinations of points, lines, curves, circles, and the move-
ment transitions that occur between them. Phillips reveals her subjects’

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appreciation for the active creative relationship between corporeality and

writing, as when, for example, she describes writing RIPs “as if the dead con-
tinued to reside in the hands of those that remained” (70).
Phillips suggests that sensory crossovers have been a necessary strategy
for maintaining African-American identity since slavery. I would add that
these crossovers refer beyond the US to West African antecedents and to
Afrocentric aesthetics and epistemologies. That Crips members encode
narrative messages by translating orthographic symbols (letters) into bodi-
ly gestures (handsigns), and bodily gestures into pictographs echoes the
kinds of sonic to imagistic to kinesthetic translations familiar in West
African arts. R.F. Thompson (1974), among other scholars, illuminates
those aesthetics, in particular the way socioaesthetic principles are embod-
ied and crossover in drumming, dancing, abstract visual design, masking,
and sculpture. West African performance embodies a complex aesthetics of
panache, display, the concept of cool, rhythmic interplay, syncopation,
bodily posture, call and response patterns, coding of verbal messages in
drum patterns and cloth patterns, imitation of environmental elements, as
well as hierarchies of excellence, competition, and power. Danced,
drummed, sculpted, inscribed, and verbalized messages concern all
aspects of social life, from cosmological and religious ideas, to historical
record-keeping, to proper relations among kin, ancestors, and community,
to what is good to eat, to what constitutes beauty and how to make objects.
Gang counterliteracy carries forward many of the techniques and ideas of
West African aesthetics, and it is in part through this alternative to
Eurocentric aesthetics that gang literacy exposes, by contrast, the princi-
ples and politics implicit in the Eurocentric system. One might say that
gang arts pose a counteraesthetic as well as a counterliteracy.
Where Wolfson treats the problem of embodiment as a metaphysical
one, and Phillips as a sociopolitical one, Daphne Lei addresses embodi-
ment as a literary and dramatic problem. She plays, in particular, with the
ambiguities in the terms “body” and “writing,” and especially, “bodily
writing” in stories of Chinese Han tattooing and body mutilation. I want
to follow Phillips’ point that writing and embodiment are never discon-
nected from each other or from larger sociocultural schema to draw out
the ideological implications implicit in Lei’s literature-based stories.
Among the authors, Lei takes the broadest view of “the body”; here, it
can be at one moment object, thing acted upon, and at another subject,
agent acting. As a material object acted upon, the term “body” can also

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refer to a part of the body, in particular the skin or other surface feature.
Hair, for example, in the story of the woman who cuts hers off, stands in
for the body and is “written upon.” Thus, the surface of the body or its
features can stand in for the entire corporeal object. Whether as the
whole material body, its surface, or its features, the body-as-object is
acted upon and, most important, seen by others. (I’ll return to this later.)
Lei also allows “the body” to refer to the agent who writes or cuts, so that
“body” morphs into “person.” For example, Lei writes, “The body is the
object of desire for the viewer, but it is also the agent controlling the bodily
writing and directing the gaze of the viewer” (102). This conflation between
“person” and “body” echoes an ambivalence inherent to the problem of
embodiment, deriving from the Cartesian hierarchy that separates and ele-
vates mind over body, relegating body to the material realm and agency to
mind. Recent reversals of the hierarchy have tipped the scales to the oppo-
site extreme, equating body with experience or intentionality, equally prob-
lematic. Lei’s essay plays out the ambiguity in relation to “bodily writing”
which term itself covers production by human agents, independent existence
as object, and reception, both as visual object and as symbolic text.
As with “the body,” Lei treats the term “writing” broadly to include not
only orthographic inscriptions, but also, as in the example of hair cutting,
actions that work to change the appearance of the body’s surface and that
are “read” by others as meaningful. “Writing” here need not involve words
or letters at all. It may refer to people’s actions upon their own or others’
bodies, and also to the visible results of those actions. It may refer metaphor-
ically to actions not only that change the appearance of someone’s body, but
that work symbolically as transgressions of an idealized body image. The
composite term “bodily writing,” then, includes the agents and the perform-
ance of an action, the action itself, and the resulting visual object.
Lei’s brief discussion of performance and performativity clarifies her
intentions. I understand Lei’s use of these terms as follows: performance
refers to corporeal actions in time, while performativity refers, following
Austin’s (1962) concept of performative utterances, to any actions that
have performative force, enacting what they declare, as in “I now pro-
nounce you man and wife.” The letters that are tattooed on people’s bod-
ies, and also the haircutting, have this social force, publicly declaring the
bearer to be a barbarian, criminal, hero, or loyal or disloyal wife. For the
most part, Lei uses the term “writing” figuratively, as synonymous with
performative texts, to imply actions that pronounce something in social

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context. This sense of writing stands in opposition to “the body” as when

Lei writes that the “signification of the text surpasses the value of the
body” (109). Thus, the body versus text distinction seems to parallel the
differentiation Lei makes between performance and performativity. When
Lei says, early on, that both bodies and texts “perform” and are “perform-
ers” (101), the qualification seems to be that bodies are capable of per-
formance, texts of performativity.
As she makes clear, however, texts are more important than bodies.
The bodily experience, the performance, if you will, of undergoing tattoo-
ing or cutting, appears to be socially less significant. Indeed, the term
“body,” by comparison with “text,” seems to be equated with propriocep-
tive sensations such as pain. As Elaine Scarry (1985) points out, pain is an
invisible subjective state, not easily transmittable to others or expressed
in language. Writing, or text, on the other hand, is equated in the Han sto-
ries with sight and performative actions that can be transmitted at a dis-
tance. As Lei writes, “text is to be viewed by others, not by the self” (109).
The hierarchy in Han society is clear.
The body, as object, becomes a significant performative text when it
displays the tattoo, incision or other marks. The key is visibility as
opposed to somatic bodily experience. Visibility—seeing and being
seen—is the medium of Han cultural monitoring. For example, an unmu-
tilated body is a visual demonstration of filial piety, a criminal’s tattoo of
social transgression, a hero’s tattoo of loyalty. It is less the body and
embodiment that interests Lei than the opportunities they provide for
these kinds of performative texts or events. This emphasis seems to mir-
ror a Han cultural preference among the senses, devaluing the “close”
senses of somatic sensation and touch and valuing sight, the most “dis-
tanced” sense (See Howes 1991 on sensory ratios in different cultures).
What then can be drawn from these preferences? A key occurs in Lei’s
opening discussion of tattooing and its meanings, in particular the cultur-
al ideal of bodily integrity. In Han thinking, Lei writes, one’s body is a gift
from one’s parents; it is one’s filial duty to maintain the integrity of an
unmutilated body. Tattooing is used by the politically powerful to humil-
iate criminals by intentionally transgressing the ideal. However, it is also
used by individuals on themselves to demonstrate extreme loyalty beyond
filial piety, whether a man affirming loyalty to a political superior or a
woman to a husband. Lei brings out the paradox of this, that in one
instance tattooing is read as a sign of barbarism, in the other as one of

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heroism. The principle lying behind the contradiction is that both exam-
ples, indeed all the examples in the essay, signal (and embody) the cultur-
al value of loyalty within hierarchy. Choosing to cut tattoos into one’s
flesh announces that loyalty to a political superior or gender superior
trumps both bodily integrity and filial piety.
Like the LA Crips, Han Chinese incise and inscribe information on the
surface of people’s bodies. Where gang members’ writing announces a
challenge and a counterliteracy to the larger US power structure and lit-
eracy system, Han self-inflicted body writing, though it may challenge the
filial tabu against body mutilation, nonetheless upholds the greater hier-
archical social system as well as the literacy system. Where gang mem-
bers, as Phillips suggests, turn notions of ‘civilized’ on its head, even the
most rebellious of the Han individuals in Lei’s stories act within the hier-
archies and values of the larger sociocultural system.
I am drawing here on Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of the habitus.
Bourdieu argues that people are not conscious of the organizing princi-
ples or structures (modus operandi) informing and motivating their
thoughts and actions; these lasting social dispositions are instilled
through upbringing and education. While we improvise on the habitus
through our actions (modus operatum), these improvisations do not alter
the modus operandi; rather, they reveal it. Bourdieu thus separates
agents’ intentions from the underlying social principles and structures
informing those intentions. One might say, then, that the Crips, in posing
a counter-system to the practices of literacy and racial politics in the US,
expose the principles and structures (modus operandi) of that system,
while Han heroes and heroines do not. Rather, in their choice of actions
as agents, they implicitly accept Han social principles and structures,
improvising within the system’s norms of class and gender relations.
Another difference concerning the relation between writing and
embodiment is exposed when the Crips, Han, and kabbalah examples are
juxtaposed. Where the letters of tattooing and dance writing among Crips
are “a flagrantly sensuous sign of gang presence” (75, Phillips, quoting
Conquergood 1997:357; emphasis in original), among the Han, tattooing
divests letters, and the bodies on which they are inscribed, of their sensu-
ality in favor of separating the semiotic from the phenomenological.
Among kabbalists, a mystical understanding of letters preserves the phe-
nomenological body even while it textualizes that body; among Han that
body is subsumed and erased by letters as the body itself becomes text to

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be seen. Both Crips and kabbalists turn conventional language usage

inside out to reveal a phenomenological vitality that is concealed by con-
ventionality. Han literary heroes and heroines enforce conventionality,
separating signs from the phenomenological body. The Han stories in
effect create textual conventions, giving instruction on appropriate atti-
tudes toward the body vis-à-vis writing.
Still, concerning ideologies of embodiment in Lei’s Han study, there are
hints that subversion is alive in the pain that is both concealed and
revealed in bodily writing. In the progression from incising the body’s sur-
face and drawing blood, to sending blood letters, to viewing a person’s
healed incisions, to receiving letters that have been written in blood, the
experience of pain may be suppressed rather than absent. That experience
emerges, as a kind of catharsis, in the version of the literary stories that is
most distanced from the originary event, that is, in theatrical presentation.
The significance of sensation is brought out in theatrical corporeal per-
formance, where the phenomenological body is brought back. One might
say that in performance, performativity is reversed and text re-unites with
sensing bodies. Is sensation, especially pain, the subtext or ghost here, the
hidden potency that gives meaning to bodily writing?
The phenomenological body is also the ghost in Sohini Ray’s essay on
Meitei writing systems. God’s body, the human body, the landscape, and
house designs are united schematically through a template of “the body.”
An anthropomorphic deity, God is considered to be the original body and
source of the schema for all other manifestations. Ray writes that in pre-
Hindu Manipuri Meitei culture, the relation between letters and embodied
knowledge comprised a braid; words apparently associated to understand-
ings about what it was to be an embodied being. Letters connected people
to their immediate environment, to beings of the invisible world, and to
their own bodies, but Meitei narratives elaborating world creation and the
connection between God, humans, and world were then lost. Traces persist
in activities like the martial art of Thang-ta, the ritual dance done in the Lai-
haraoba festival, and visual designs inscribed on floor surfaces. That these
practices hold esoteric meanings is evidenced by Ray’s comment that “The
mystic traditions around Thang-ta are completely hidden from non-practi-
tioners” (145). This suggests that the schematized body has more than sym-
bolic meaning and might refer to transformational bodily practices that
reveal, as in kabbalah, hidden somatic, cosmological, and epistemological
dimensions. Thus, while Ray treats “the body” as an objectified and

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with Commentary on Essays by Daphne Lei, Susan Phillips, and Sohini Ray

abstracted cultural schema in the Meitei writing system and cosmology, she
hints at phenomenological correspondences in embodied practice.
We also have a hint of the somatic dimension of the bodily schema when
Ray’s elderly informant tells her that she cannot understand the religion
without learning writing, martial arts, and chingkheirol exercises. I cannot
help but think of the South Indian martial art of kalaripayattu, and wonder
if Meitei cosmology and embodied practice shares any of its characteristics
(see, for example, Zarrilli 1984). Kalaripayattu encodes a complex
Brahmanic (Hindu) system of correspondences between religious narratives,
cosmological beliefs, cultural epistemologies, and social systems, which are
experienced in a detailed transformative bodily practice emphasizing coor-
dination between breath, mind, and movement. The practice is intended to
change the practitioner’s somatic, emotional, and mental state as well as to
e instruct on relationships in the universe. Do the Meitei martial arts bear a
resemblance to kalaripayattu in either their practice or in the way embod-
iment is understood? In Brahmanic cosmology, the universe is created and
t destroyed through dance, Shiva’s dance. Does the Meitei creation of the first
body resemble this Brahmanic world originating moment?
Concerning the dance done at the Lai-haraoba festival which celebrates
“the replication of life and thus of the process by which life is created,” Ray
learned that the gestures of the dance imitate both the making of the first
body in the universe and the gestation of a baby. Most important, the dance
“signifies the making of the body of the Supreme Being, the same body from
which the letters of the 27-letter alphabet are derived” (144, emphasis added).
Was the Meitei universe not created through words and letters, then, as in
the Hebrew model, but through dance? Is dance the matrix of creation? This
suggests the possibility of a universe modeled on the creation of a human
body, an epistemology founded not on “the word” and languages made of
letterings but on a paradigm of embodiment made of doings.
It also raises the point that, in different sociocultural systems, concep-
tualization itself may be structured with different orders of sensory pref-
erences. 2 We know from the Stern and Johnson models outlined above
that organizations of perceptual information occur across sensory modal-
ities prior to the acquisition of verbal language. If we consider language,
not as a system of either sounds or orthographic symbols, but, in Walter
Ong’s words, as “an attunement between humans” (1991:26), it is
inevitable that in different cultural contexts that attunement would
develop with varying sensory emphases. For example, while a visualist

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bias permeates European systems of perception and knowledge, hearing

and proprioception shape the social body in West Africa (see Bull 1997,
Wober 1991). Imagine, even within the Eurocentric system, the sophisti-
cated auditory and kinesthetic conceptual organizations that specialists
in music composition or choreography master.
In the Eurocentric system, we barely even have terminology for think-
ing in a conceptual mode that would comprehend the creation of the uni-
verse, conceptual as well as physical, through dance. This creation would
encompass not just the ability to visualize the unfolding of matter, but
also the way that sensations of movement—rhythm, muscular intensity,
weight, degree of force, etc.—come together with materializations of
form and abstract ideation. It would combine the conceptual, propriocep-
tive, kinesthetic, spatial, and manual skills of the mathematician, chore-
ographer, composer, dancer, and philosopher. It is no less semiotic than
creation in words and letters.
Meitei letters are now called upon to do political work, to stand not so
much for a cosmological schema as for a political one, as if political fac-
tions want to inscribe their own power. Whereas in the kabbalah
described by Wolfson, letters refer to both a religious philosophy and a
political position vis-à-vis Christianity, here the religious system appears
to have been diluted, and the letters become largely political symbols.
Indeed, Ray points out that the orthographic system has been secularized,
to the extent that the letters are re-mythologized to refer to scientific
facts. It is not clear how much of the Meitei cosmology, lost when it was
replaced by Hinduism and Sanskrit orthography in the late 18th century,
was retrieved in the 1940s revival, and whether what was retrieved blend-
ed with Brahmanic ideas. Politicians now use, even co-opt, the letters and
their reference to a former, romanticized time, toward the political ideal
of instilling Meitei nationalism. However, Ray hints that the Meitei reli-
gion has been preserved, secretly. Is it, indeed, so secret, and loaded with
esoteric potency, like kabbalah, that one cannot even write about it? Or
is religion, as in the United States, banned from being taught in the
schools because the subject is so politically polarizing?
If there is a phenomenological dimension to the conflict over the
Meitei alphabet, it concerns the meaning of “the body.” Even though reli-
gion may not be taught in the schools, the letters of the Meitei alphabet,
referring as they do to parts of the body, and, ghostlike, to parts of God’s
body, bear the whole religio-political system. By extension, the parts of

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Reflecting on Words and Letters from the Perspective of Embodiment,
with Commentary on Essays by Daphne Lei, Susan Phillips, and Sohini Ray

people’s bodies, named as letters of the Meitei alphabet, become part of

the Meitei cosmological system. Perhaps the politicians know this. Not
only letters, but everyday bodies become a reference to and a part of
God’s body. Then, embodiment itself stands in for Meitei religion. This
would indeed be an effective religio-political strategy.
All three papers in this volume emphasize the power of letters to symbol-
ize and to mobilize communities. Letters are, of course, inherently symbol-
ic. They are also, I have attempted to show, inseparable from both human
embodiment in general, and cultural organizations of embodiment as a
braided perceptual and conceptual schema in particular. Phillips forcefully
brings out the impossibility of separating language from embodiment, the
semiotic from the phenomenological. She does so through example, detail-
ing the modal “crossovers” in Crips literacy that expose and challenge, by
comparison, the disconnect between disembodied sign and sensate body
incorporated into the hegemonic Western notion of literacy.
Interestingly, in bringing out the braiding of semiotic and phenomeno-
logical, Phillips, like Wolfson, also reveals the conventionality of language
to be a cover-up, in Wolfson’s words, a garment, in Phillips’ a disguise,
though what is being concealed and revealed is different in each case. In
comparing all the essays in this volume, it becomes clear that writing, in
each case, conceals and reveals different conceptions of embodiment.
One only has to imagine a Han woman writing RIPs with her feet, or a kab-
balist dancing the gestation of a baby to see that ideologies of embodi-
ment as well as techniques of the body are encoded in culturally-specific
ways in different systems of writing. Whether from a religious, literary, or
political perspective, embodiment is not so much the ghost as the ele-
phant in the human language room.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Sohini Ray for inviting me to participate in the panel on “Writing and
Embodiment” at the 2000 annual American Anthropological Association meetings and for
her perseverance in seeing this volume through. I also thank Carrie Noland and the mem-
bers of the 2002 University of California Humanities Research Institute on “Gesture and
Inscription” for their lively discussion of some of the ideas presented here.

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ENDNOTES
1
Wolfson’s essay for this seminar was revised and published as “Flesh Become Word:
Textual Emboidment and Poetic Incarnation,” Chapter 5 in Wolson 2005. My citations
are to that volume.
2
It is interesting that the eighteen essential letters of the Meitei alphabet correspond,
via the shapes of written letters as pictures, to parts of the body template. The Sanskrit
letters, on the other hand, depend, via their points of articulation, on representations
of their sound production. Thus, a basic difference emerges: where the Meitei version
treats letters as visual events—language as inscribed, the Sanskrit treats them as audi-
tory ones—language as spoken.

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