It will be clear by now that the title of this book, Mind, body and culture, is not an endorsement of our ordinary-language or social-scientific usages of the three terms ‘mind’, ‘body’, and ‘culture’. Instead, it indicates a domain of enquiry within which these terms are questioned and alternative terms suggested. The alternative terms are the modal states of the MMF. These states are descriptions of patterns of relationships, both relationships among human beings and relationships between human beings and their natural environment. In other words, they are states of the entire human ecosystem. They are also, as I have emphasized repeatedly, unified states of mind and body.

On the whole, the mental or psychic side of this mind–body unity has been to the forefront in chapters 7 to 11. In part this reflects the nature of the ethnographic material I have used. We can recall some of the places where the body has been considered in these chapters:

1. (i) the role of the body in ritual: the Ndembu rituals, as with many rites of passage, involved processes that operate directly on the body. Examples include the girl's motionless position, wrapped in a blanket at the foot of the young mudyi tree, through the first day of Nkang'a, her controlled demeanour during the period of seclusion and the dance through which she emerges as an adult woman, as well as the physical operation of circumcision in the case of the equivalent ritual for boys (Mukanda). We might add the consummation of the marriage, in Nkang'a, as a physiological experience given strong social meaning by its context in the ritual sequence and in Ndembu society (cf. chapter 7).

2. […]