Book contents
5 - Tradition as conversation and tradition as bodily re-enactment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
In his Sketch for a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu argues that
if all societies and all total institutions that seek to produce a new man through a process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy.
I intend in what follows to look at one way in which the body is treated as a memory, in which it is entrusted in mnemonic form with the fundamental principles of the content of a culture, when the principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness.
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- The Spirit of MourningHistory, Memory and the Body, pp. 104 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011