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99 10 Containers, surfaces, apertures and contents(1) In the first chapter, I suggested that the king may be seen as a container of ancestral substances. If this is so, it is worth investigating the theme of surfaces, containers, apertures and contents. On a world scale, the comparative archaeological and ethnographic record concerning the latter as well as ceramics, textiles, the human skin, its openings, movements from inside to outside and vice versa is considerable. Too vast to reduce to a short article on the topic which would amount to a laundry list unless one has some kind of key that will unlock various doors opening onto a common corridor. My key will be the human body, for two reasons. First, it is itself a container, with its skin as a surface, with its openings conjoining an inside and an outside. Second, by acting in a material world, the human body supplements itself with innumerable surfaces and containers by means of which it extends beyond its own physical limits. However, we encounter here a first difficulty. It has proved difficult to turn ‘the body’ into an anthropological object. The reasons for this were explored by Berthelot (1995). Basically, the social and cultural facts are not the body in itself, but the techniques of the body (see Mauss 1936), its uses, its social representations, and all the practices (sports, health care, dress, cosmetics, control, apprenticeship, etc.) attached to it. This difficulty has led most attempts towards an anthropology of ‘the body’ to an epistemological dead end. As a result, from an anthropologic point of view, it is more efficient to focus on bodily conducts than on the body as such. Consequently, my argument will unfold as follows. Bodily conducts are gestures accomplished by a given subject in which his/her subjectivity is involved. They can be limited in scope, to the point of being static, like holding one’s breath and staying put while playing hideand -seek, or quite mobile, as in riding a bicycle. Second, there is no motricity without the involvement of the seven senses, that is, the conventionally distinguished five senses, to which must be added proprioception and the vestibular sense of gravitation and spatial orientation(2) . The seven senses are interconnected in such a way that, according to the neuroscientist Berthoz (1997), they are all part and parcel of a single sense: the sense of movement. There is no perception without motricity, and no motricity without the involvement of the senses. So far, my key has been transformed from ‘the body’ to ‘motor conducts’, then to ‘sensory-motricity’. The next step consists in introducing a third essential dimension. As Damasio (2000) rightly pointed out, any sensorimotor conduct involves both a drive and the emotions that correspond to it: pleasure, anger, satisfaction, curiosity, etc. – most of the time, a complex and volatile mix of affects accompanied and stimulated by the production of hormones (ocitocyn, dopamine, endomorphine) affecting the central nervous system. As a result, my key becomes the ‘sensori-affectivo-motor’ conducts of the subject. Much like keys that are equipped with grooves, small balls and holes, this key has several components or dimensions to it. It has a psychic dimension, made of the cognitive (not necessarily ‘conscious’) and emotional 100 Part III - Grassfiels sacred kingship aspects (including ‘unconscious’ as repressed in the Freudian sense) of all our actions. It has an anatomophysiological component in so far as all our actions are mediated by bodily motions, as those who are disabled know only too well. Last but not least, it has a material component, in so far as all our ‘sensori-affectivo-motor’ conducts are propped against, or articulated with, a human-made material culture that has been co-produced along with the relevant gestures. The keyboard with which I type the present chapter has been manufactured very precisely to fit a human hand and to adjust to its motions. Vice versa, through a protracted apprenticeship I have devised sensori-motor algorithms that allow me to incorporate the keyboard and write as if it were a component of my bodily schema. So now my key becomes ‘sensori-affectivo-motor conducts geared to material culture’. It may sound a bit complicated, but human motricity in a human-made material world is easier to contemplate than to analyse, and for analytical reasons we need the full constellation of concepts. From an analytical point of view, the components of the key can be considered apart from one another. In agency...

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