The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood

3. About Hens, Hands, and Old-Fashioned Telephones: Gestural Bodies and Participatory Consciousness

T H R E E About Hens, Hands, and Old-Fashioned Telephones Gestural Bodies and Participatory Consciousness THE HISTORY OF BODY AND SPACE In medieval illuminated manuscripts and pre-Renaissance paintings we find many depictions of the human body that strike the modern reader as odd. We come across the infant Jesus sitting or standing on his mother’s lap: sometimes he is larger in size than the shepherds or other adults who are visiting. At other times we find biblical characters in the midst of an activity— such as giving a present to the infant Jesus or presenting a sacrifice in the temple—but the length of their arms, legs, and torsos seems to contradict our expectations of anatomical correctness: the arms are too short, the legs are too long, and the whole formation of the bodies disturbs our modern sensibilities. We feel inclined to think that medieval artists did not know how to draw. But can it be true that the people who built Chartres—and carved statues that were placed thirty or even a hundred feet above the viewer and still looked lifelike and completely appropriate—did not know how to draw a human figure? Rather than dismiss the medieval representation of the human body as inadequate, I would like to take it on its own terms—and by way of this detour also arrive at a new appreciation of children’s drawings. The depiction of the human body and its surrounding space in artists’ as well as children’s artwork reflects the ways human beings understand and conceptualize 59 their experiences of embodiment and spatiality. Culturally and personally , a change in the representation of body and space also announces a change in how embodiment and spatiality are experienced and understood (Romanyshyn 1989). This chapter will show that adults have not always and everywhere conceptualized embodiment and spatial experience in the same way contemporary Western adults do. Anatomical bodies and geometrical spaces as objective, measurable, and conceptual entities are inventions of the Western mind and have a rather brief history. They also contradict children’s experiences and conceptions of body and space. The lived body along with the lived dimensions of space, time, and coexistence are no longer obvious to the thinking adult mind, but they come to expression in children’s symbolic representations. The lived dimensions of existence have to be unearthed through a careful investigation into states of consciousness and forms of existence that are different from our own. MAPS AND TELEPHONES If you ask contemporary adults to draw a map of their house they usually assume that they see their house from a bird’s-eye view and take great pains to construct the rooms in the correct measured proportions. Children, on the other hand, when asked to draw a map of their house, often begin with their own room, followed by everybody else’s space. The size of the room is not geometrical; size is determined by the meaning this space has for the child. The following illustrations are children’s drawings collected by myself and my students in the context of classroom assignments. Children’s bedrooms are often larger than other rooms, or a particular object dominates the scene and its size is out of proportion to the other things in the house. Scott, for example, incorporates a huge red telephone into his map (fig. 1), and Tela (eight) made sure that the basement full of boxes was in the picture. Children’s representations of their homes always have furniture in them, for the furniture stands for the activities that happen in these lived spaces. Sometimes the rooms seem laid out on the page as if seen from above, but the furniture is depicted in frontal view. The different rooms exist not as measured extensions but as meaningful spaces for human activity . Children feel perfectly free to ignore and even distort the geometrical extension of a space in order to represent the meaning that the space has for them: we can almost hear Scott say, “My own bedroom is 60 CHAPTER THREE the biggest, because it needs to be big enough to hold all my favorite things (and myself, too).” Children share the preference for the depiction of the meaning of a space with medieval artists. Compared to the significance of one’s bed or the telephone or the guinea pig’s cage—or the birth of...