Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art and Symbolic Anthropology (review)

Reviews 251 and has answered it plausibly. Along the way, he has contributed a great deal to the study of both peasant economies and regionalism in medieval England. Kathleen Troup History Department University of Waikato Napier, A. David, Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art and Symbolic Anthropology, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996; paper; pp. xxix, 223; 47 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. US$15.95, £12.95. At one level this book of wide-ranging yet meshed essays by American anthropologist David Napier might appear far removed from the concerns of the present journal, since it is, seemingly, focused on symbolic anthropology, or, as the 'Introduction' phrases it, 'symbolic imagination'. The first essay, both memorably and helpfully, begins with an account of h o w on the Feast of Ascension, the vicar of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford ventures forth in solemn procession to a number of ... boundaries at [which]...a ritual known as 'beating the bounds' is enacted... the spot, already designated by a cross, is marked by thrashing it repeatedly. W h y the bounds are beaten no one can precisely say... (p. xv) This ancient ceremony, resembling a similar long-running one in Bristol, is likened to various perhaps bizarre Eastern examples, all of which demonstrate h o w otherwise ordinary space m a y be so marked 'as to create a context wherein real actions take on extraordinary meaning'. This process is, of course, the one related to the difference between image and imagination, even as each one of the so-generated images or symbols needs context in order to achieve meaning. Such an argument constitutes the core of a classic volume, n o w reprinted because of its value to all students of culture. All these illustrations are applied to developing the notion that one of the most defining aspects of any culture.is that of the foreign, a concept which Napier uses again 252 Reviews and again—as he ranges the world with an anthropologist's eye—to interpret the more comprehensibly the art and mythology of Western culture. In a manner which must recall another classic, Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods—referred to on p. 212—Napier explores two such seminal moments in history as the sixth century B.C. rise of Greek culture and the revision of cultural history in seventeenth-century Rome. The first he convincingly ties to 'a thesis of personhood that deemphasies superficiality by internalising the monstrous that is represented in the foreign' (p. 75). This is illustrated by the book's several musings (in both the 'Introduction' and Chapter Three): on the Gorgon as archetype; on Medusa as compared to Kali; on cultural change in Mycenaean Greece; and on the rites of passage to Greek identity. These sections, both individually and cumulatively, illumine an essential early, sixth-century, Greek image of the foreign which became a 'predominant myth of a...culture striving to achieve a national identity' (p. 89). The musings on Renaissance Rome—focused on an anthropological response to Bernini's Piazza San Pietro—begin with an account of Pope Alexander VII's revised plans for the space in front of St. Peter's Basilica. There follows a complex mediation of h o w certain pagan ideas of the Divine w o m b 'could be understood by an intellectual pope as prefigurations of Mary' (p. 129), since they were simpler than contemporary architectural concepts and, as Seznec also had argued, 'more nearly primordial'. This ingenious section acts as bridge to the last, more general, section of the book, concerned with the very contemporary perception that 'our bodies are the only things of which w e have both objective and subjective knowledge' (p. 138). Thus we are to understand that the notions of the monstrous/foreign and the body-image are to be seen as central to the very idea of our Western culture. While Chapter Five, 'Culture as Self: The Stranger Within', and the Epilogue, 'A Social Theory of the Person', m a y well be seen as unduly general, the argument anchors these concepts very firmly to both the classical and Renaissance worlds, particularly by the treatment of such themes...