5. The final matter to consider bears upon the segregation issue expressed in "tension" and joking. As will be argued throughout, individuals can rather fully constitute what they see in accordance with the framework that officially applies. But there is a limit to this capacity. Certain effects carry over from one perspective in which events could easily be seen to a radically different one, the latter the one which officially applies. The best documented case, perhaps, is the slow development of the easy right of medical people to approach the human naked body with a natural instead of a social perspective. Thus, it was only at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain that childbirth could benefit from an obstetric examination, an undarkened operating room, and delivery—if a male physician was to do it—unencumbered by its having to be performed under covers.₁₆ The gynecological examination is even today a matter of some concern special effort being taken to infuse the procedure with terms and dottons that keep sexual readings in check.₁₇ Another example is the difficulty faced by those who would promote the practice of rescue breathing: mouth-to-mouth contact apparently cannot easily be dissociated from its ritual implications.₁₈ Similarly, we manage to let orthopedists and shoe salesmen touch our feet, but first we make sure to clean what might ritually contaminate. Or consider the Sensel, the instructor at karate, who, when his students take up a proper position, ordinarily can touch crucial points of their bodies instrumentally, as might a physician, to determine directly whether the appropriate tension is present Consider the question of limits to this sort of physicalistlc framing that is introduced by the admission of female students:
When Sensei makes the rounds to test our "stance," by touching the "butt and thigh muscles, he just doesn't touch ours. After three months he finally did touch the fifteen-year-old's "butt," but he sit avoids us older women like the plague. It seems clear that twenty. five-vear-old Sensei cannot see us as other than females who can be touched for one purpose and one purpose only. ₁₉
It should be obvious that the human body and touchings of it will figure in the issue of frame maintenance, just as the body's various waste products and involuntary movements will figure in tensions regarding boundaries.₂₀ For it seems that the body is too constantly present as a resource to be managed in accordance with only one primary framework. It seems inevitable that our interpretive competency will allow us to come to distinguish, say, between an arm waved to signal a car on and an arm waved to greet a friend, and that both wavings will be distinguished from what we are seen as doing when we dispel flies or increase circu-lation. These discernments in turn seem linked to the fact that each kind of event is but one element in a whole idiom of events, each idiom being part of a distinctive framework. And here what is true of Western society is probably also true of all other societies.₂₁
₁₆ Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963), chap. 17, "The Creeping Obstetrician," pp. 167-170. It should not be assumed that in the West individuals have shown a continuously increasing capacity to suffer examination in a naturalistic perspective and treatment in a purely instrumental, "physicalistic" one. We no longer have slaves, and therefore, presumably, no longer do individuals have to suffer the kind of impersonal testing described by Harold Nicolson in Good Behaviour (London: Constable & Co., 1955) :
The slave dealers, whether those of Delos or the mangones who ran the slave-market by the Temple of Castor in Rome, would display their wares in the manner of horse-copers, allowing prospective purchasers to examine the teeth and muscles of the animals, taking them for little runs on a string to show their paces. Slaves were exhibited for sale in a wooden cage, their feet being smeared with white-wash, and tablets stating price and qualifications hung around their necks. [p. 63]
In any case, one should see that allowing ourselves to be treated as objects is a form of conduct, if only a passive one. Persons being made up by stage cosmeticians, measured by their tailors, and palpated by their physicians conduct themselves in much the same way. They respond to requests to assume various positions, may engage in desultory side talk, but the rest follows a widespread understanding as to how to act when we are supposed to be merely bodies.
₁₇ The staging of the gynecological examination so as to sustain non-sexual interpretations is nicely detailed in James M. Henslin and Mae A. Biggs, "Dramaturgical Desexualization: The Sociology of the Vaginal Examination," in James M. Henslin, ed., Studies in the Sociology of Sex (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), pp. 243-272. A useful treatment is also available in Joan P. Emerson, "Behavior in Private Places: Sustaining Definitions of Reality in Gynecological Examinations," in Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed., Recent Sociology No. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 1-97. Emerson argues that although joking during a gynecological examination may provide too open a reference to what must be inhibited, other more subtle means will allow (and oblige) participants to give nonmedical matters (such as "feminine" modesty) their due. Here see also "A Simultaneous Multiplicity of Selves," in E., pp. 132-143. Emerson's paper provides a useful reminder that when one schema applies, its tenure may shift from moment to moment and may never totally exclude alien readings—and (it is felt) properly so.
₁₈ See, for example, Maurice E. Linden, "Some Psychological Aspects lescue Breathing," American Journal of Nursing, LX (1960): 971-974.
₁₉ Susan Pascalé et al., "Self-Defense for Women," in Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1970), p. 474.
₂₀ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), provides a text:
But now we are ready to broach the central question. Why should bodily refuse be a symbol of danger and of power? Why should sorcerers be thought to qualify for initiation by shedding blood or committing incest or anthropophagy? Why, when initiated, should their art consist largely of manipulating powers thought to inhere in the margins of the human body? Why should bodily margins be thought to be specially invested with power and danger?
…
Second, all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matters issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual's attitude to his own bodily and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural and social experience. This is the clue which explains the unevenness with which different aspects of the body are treated in the rituals of the world. In some, menstrual pollution is feared as a lethal danger; in others not at all. ... In some, death pollution is a daily preoccupation; in others not at all. In some, excreta is dangerous, in others it is only a joke. In India cooked food and saliva are pollution-prone, but Bushmen collect melon seeds from their mouths for later roasting and eating. [pp. 120-121]
₂₁ A Borneo society might serve to provide an illustration:
The clasping of hands, or throwing an arm about the neck of a friend of the same sex, or a relative beyond the range of defined incestuous relationships, serves to establish boundaries of permitted tactile contacts in social action situations. Lovers regularly denote their status by mutually clasping waists while walking in public. Community members not related, or in the status of special friends, or lovers, are not permitted the familiarity of such forms, since each denotes a meaning of opening another close level of tactile experience. Touching or holding contacts are permitted among non-married adults of opposite sex only during instances of divination and curing relationships between a female ritual specialist and seriously ill persons. In the course of both divination and curing rituals a female specialist in the supernatural seeks out the site of illness through gross palpation of trunk and limb areas. In most in-stances, areas of sexual meaning are avoided. There is no practice of generational transfer of political power through tactile contact, although ritual and magical formula and associated power passage between an aged female ritual specialist and a girl pupil may involve clasping of hands as a symbolic transfer is effected. [Thomas R. Williams, "Cultural Structuring of Tactile Experience in a Borneo Society," American Anthro-pologist, LXVIII (1966): 33-34.]
