Stearns, Peter N

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Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

 9PETER N. STEARNSReally Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Body: A Cultural ChallengeOne of today’s most pressing interdisciplinary tasks involves combining cultural and scientificresearch techniques in exploring the human condition. A focus on the body – seemingly, ascientific domain par excellence – provides a splendid way to illustrate the opportunitiesand challenges involved in this call for pushing out the boundaries of interdisciplinarity.Let’s take the case of fat bodies, certainly a topical issue, increasingly on a global scale asreports of rising obesity now include population segments in India and China as well as theindustrial world with its American leader in girth. Three lines of scientific research, all winningsubstantial public attention, fruitfully explore the question of body fat. First, of course, issimply nutritional science – studying what kinds of foods, and in what quantities, have whateffect on the body. This is an old subject, though constantly being refined.   Second – andthis kind of inquiry goes back over a century – scientific research treats the relationshipbetween overweight and health – at an extreme, between overweight and prematuremortality. There is room for dispute here, despite the long track record; experts disagreeabout how thin one should be, or about whether dieting is preferable to stability even atabove-desirable weight levels. But there is unquestionably a valid research area. The thirdand final tack is more recent, in seeking genetic explanations for why some people gainmore weight than others. Genetic science is trendy, exciting – and it holds some potentialfor remedy, for there is always the hope of manipulating genes toward beneficial individualresults.The limitation on all of the scientific inquiries toward body fat is that they fail, or partiallyfail, at three crucial explanatory tasks: first, why different groups have different weightexperiences; second, why societies such as in the United States have seen such dramaticweight gains in the past two decades; and third, why abundant warnings about overweighthave not produced behavioural changes comparable, for example, to the impact of cautionsagainst cigarette smoking in recent years. To be sure, group variations may have somethingto do with genetic variations in body type. Change over time can be partly explained byshifts in the amount and nature of available food, combined with more sedentary life styles.       Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 200310But the fact is that all three topics, vital to understanding why contemporary bodies are asthey are, involve culture. Why, by the end of the 20th century, was the average French womanonly about a third as likely as her average American counterpart to be obese? The answerhas to do with profound differences in expectations about eating (how to define enjoyment,when to eat), plus notable differences in degrees of emphasis on aesthetic considerationsas constraints on eating (with the French considerably more devoted to beauty as a criterion),plus considerable differences in approaches toward children and eating, with the Frenchpersuaded that children do not naturally make good decisions about eating and that adultsupervision and restraint are essential. All of these differences in values and beliefs can beexplained, through comparative and historical cultural analysis, and they are indispensabletools for social diagnosis and, potentially, remedy.The same approach holds for the vital issue of change over time. Genetics may be invaluablefor showing why, in a social context in which average weight gains are considerable, someindividuals gain more than others – but they do not help explain the social context itself atall. For this, alterations in food availability – the infamous increase in the size of restaurantportions – are crucial, but so again is culture, in explaining why people accept the largerportions, why the role of eating shifts particularly from the 1980s onward.The third point, on the ineffectiveness of campaigns against overeating, is intriguing, andoddly neglected. Marshalling scientific data about desirable bodies does not alone suffice.There has even been some fascinating counterthrust, based on other cultural valuesassociated with civil rights and feminism, arguing that weight control campaigns arethemselves a trap, particularly for women. Cultural analysis and, in this case, some culturalexperiments seem essential if proponents of slimmer bodies are to win through.The message seems obvious: while there is important research to be done in both thescientific and the cultural veins, neither approach by itself suffices around issues of bodiesand obesity. Cultural issues offer intriguing analytical challenges and arguably outweigh –the word is used advisedly – the scientific issues in explaining why contemporary peopleare as they are and in establishing the bases for remedy.Yet the problems are equally obvious: we have no established apparatus for collaborationamong scientists and cultural analysts in dealing with topics like body weight. Fundingsources are wildly disparate, with most cultural analysis operating with little or no fundingat all, compared to the feasts available, say, to geneticists.Similar challenges and complexities surround a host of other body topics, though the balancebetween physical and cultural assessments will vary somewhat from case to case. No onewould dispense with medical and psychological research on the problem of anorexia nervosa,for example; but understanding why the disease is modern, and what the dynamics offamily values were in initially causing it brings us straight back to cultural issues. The impactof ageing on the body is perhaps more heavily a scientific domain, but it has intriguingcultural angles as well, as assumptions change over time, for ageing individuals themselvesand for groups reacting to the elderly. Modern emphasis on the centrality of gender inStearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003 11understanding the body gives rise to massive scientific programs, but it is itself partly acultural artefact, a context that warrants serious attention. And the list goes on. Wholefields, including the physical senses, or sexuality, or physical disabilities, now have richcultural agendas to complement, sometimes to rival, their scientific counterparts. No fullunderstanding of vision, for example, is possible without some grasp of the changes invision’s role, among all the senses, over the past two centuries.But the fact remains that culture does not jump to the fore when most people – scholars orthe general public – think about the body. We return to a central dilemma of contemporaryinterdisciplinary research, eerily evocative of the old and largely unrevised two culturesformula: the gap between the physical and the cultural, with its echoes in the gap betweenthe (seemingly largely) quantitative and the (largely though not necessarily entirely)qualitative. Over the past two decades, not only in cultural studies per se but in culturalanthropology, the cultural branches of sociology, history and psychology, there have beenvast gains in our knowledge of the nature and impact of culture in domains such as thebody – but the larger resonance of these gains has fallen short.Most scientists, even most psychologists, have brushed aside cultural findings, if they wereaware of them at all. Biosociologists have asserted the primacy of inherent physical attributesmore loudly than ever. No new sources of research funding have opened for cultural inquiry.And no larger curricular changes have marked a recognition that culture demands moresystematic attention. In general education, culture still means great literature, or foreignlanguage, or formal philosophy – all valid topics, but quite different from cultural analysisas practiced and available on topics such as the body. Nor has the list of academic majorssignificantly altered, with a few exceptions such as gender studies or cultural studiesthemselves. Certainly, when we think about interdisciplinarity, we more commonly turn tonew combinations within the sciences – sometimes wedded to computation, as incomputational neuroscience or bioinformatics – than to efforts to bridge the larger divide.There are several reasons for the distressing gap between significant findings in culturalanalysis and wider reception.  Two key explanations are closely related: the self-indulgenceof culturalists and the hostility of conservatives.In terms of impact, as opposed to self-congratulation, many cultural-turn partisans havecommitted a number of blunders that have called their approach into question.  Somehave, quite simply, pressed the cultural case too hard, ignoring evidence of constant or‘natural’ features in the human experience and disdaining scientific findings in the process.Efforts to describe certain illnesses as entirely culturally contracted can fall into this category.More serious still has been a widespread addiction to exceedingly recondite postmoderntheorizing that has created an often impenetrable in-group vocabulary while, at times,showing little interest in actual evidence.Implications of relativism, inherent in the cultural approach to some degree, have oftenbeen presented too baldly or defiantly, distracting from solid findings.  Few disciplines havereally been converted to a sense that everything is in the eye of the beholder, yet grandiose       Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 200312claims in that direction have, rightly or wrongly, alienated many potential allies.  And someculturalists have taken such a delight in exploring particular subcultures, for example, wheresexuality is concerned, that larger cultural standards have been underinvestigated or evenignored.  A colleague recently pointed out to me a graduate student who was amazinglyknowledgeable about cultural evidence for the values of various sexual minorities, but whoknew nothing about either widely current standards or about actual sexual behaviours inthe society he was studying.For a variety of reasons, thus, it has been too easy for nonconverts to dismiss the culturalturn as radical self-indulgence.In the United States, the cultural turn has also run afoul of political conservatism.  In thehands of critics like Lynne Cheney, the valorisation of the nation as multicultural in the1960s began to yield to an emphasis on a single inspiring national story in the 1980s.  Thecentral issue was conservative discomfort with exploration of cultural diversity at a timewhen growing immigration seemed to be making the discussion of core values imperative.Amid the din, findings about values and beliefs as sources of human behaviour could notovercome partisan objections.The cultural turn, in other words, got caught up in the wider culture wars.  Theory andjargon helped comfort culturalists amid growing conservatism, but those tendenciesdiscouraged wider persuasion while goading conservative intolerance.  And, while the culturewars may have softened, they are not over today, as new international crises have promptedreassertions of the need to rally around a national culture.Most importantly, the sound and fury have distracted us from what should be the principaldiscussion: the place of cultural findings in an intellectual community that, particularly inthe United States, has become excessively devoted to a scientism that tends to ignoreculture.The cultural turn has made no perceptible dent in our deeply rooted attitudes.  Many socialscientists still view cultural data as soft.  Indeed, particularly in disciplines like psychology,which could serve as a bridge between the humanities and the social sciences by embracingboth nature and nurture in their explorations of human behaviours, trivial but quantifiableprojects – like those that endlessly count college students’ reactions to this or that stimulus– easily qualify for funds over projects that explore larger questions with cultural data.Even more:  widespread assumptions of human uniformity across cultures, ultimately derivedfrom the Enlightenment and deeply ingrained in disciplines like economics as well as thelife sciences, readily prevail over attention to cultural causation.  It is far easier, for example,to finance a project on uniform human facial expression (not least because of obviousrelevance in military interrogation) than to find backing for studying cultural distinctions inemotional standards.The presumably scientific approach has gained further impetus in recent years from thenew passion for genetics, which, again, seems to dwarf attention to culture.  There hasbeen undeniable and important progress in genetic research in recent years.  But there hasStearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003 13also been a tendency to claim too much for genes where behavioural changes are concerned.First, genes have a soothing way of limiting responsibility for one’s actions.  Cultures do not,since it is widely assumed that individuals should be able to rise above cultural constraintsthat are human creations.  Second, there is the hope that genetic identification might leadto medical remedy (hopefully without much personal effort); but we are less certain aboutchanging cultures.The last uncertainty, however, leads back to the need to pay more attention to culturalanalysis.  Cultural factors are often altered, sometimes quite intentionally: eating habits ofour culture can be changed, even if we have not yet hit on a successful formula.  One of thereasons to urge the continued validity of culture research, in fact, involves our capacity tolearn more about the process of deliberate cultural change than we currently know.  Evenprosaic examples, like the dramatic American shift toward disapproving of smoking and thereconfiguration of smokers as moral pariahs, provide evidence of change through what onemight call culture management.We need, therefore, to expand the cultural research agenda.  Continued inquiry into whatcultures cause, in terms of human and social behaviours, remains vital.  Comparative work,domestic and international, has tremendous additional potential.  We can also think about‘applied’ cultural work, dealing with the explicit promotion of beneficial cultural change,and the kinds of methods that are most likely to be reliable, with the fewest unintendedconsequences.Already, there are signs of how a new generation of work on culture can focus on centralissues, even as we discuss moving beyond the cultural turn. There are several points here.First: the range of aspects of human behaviour, including the body, being investigated throughcultural analysis expands steadily. We have new work on the cultural understanding ofsleep, an important new study of the elusive topic of masturbation, new inquiries on thecultural construction of boredom – to mention just a few examples.Second: the complexities of the current global age call attention to cultural factors fromanother angle, requiring a new generation of comparative scholarship to explore what isinvolved in cultural differentiation. Recent surveys of the Islamic world, for example, revealfar more disagreement with the West on issues such as gender and sexuality, than onpolitical systems directly. The range of cultural analysis, including attention to issuesassociated with the body, takes on additional significance.Third: though haltingly, there are signs of greater discourse across the science-culture divide,around specific issues.  A conference on addiction invites a researcher to talk about theorigins and ongoing cultural functions of the addiction concept in the United States.Admittedly, the audience, bent on establishing the scientific basis for addiction whilediscussing treatment, is not quite sure what to do with the information, but at least aconversation is launched. A French program, largely staffed by nutritional scientists, invitesanother cultural researcher to talk about what comparative history suggests should be       Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 200314done to avoid American obesity levels.To be sure, more remains to be done to create a more dynamic and imaginativeinterdisciplinary climate around topics such as the body. We need more active work on theinteraction between cultural and somatic causation. We need bolder curricular venturesthat stake a clear place for cultural analysis, in a new interdisciplinary configuration thatdoes not smother cultural explanations amid conventional bows to the humanities. At thesame time, we need to encourage cultural-studies programs to move beyond their currentisolation and to take more central roles in combining the disciplines that generateunderstanding of how cultures work.Above all, while learning from the mistakes of cultural theory and jargon in the past, weneed more researchers willing to ask what role culture plays, even when their own maininterests lie in other explanations – and more cultural researchers interested in takingscientific findings more seriously. The challenge is exciting.Peter N. Stearns is Provost of George Mason University, in Virginia, and Professor ofHistory. He edits the Journal of Social History. His research, both on modern Europeand the United States, has focused on using historical analysis to explore humanbehaviours in areas such as old age, the emotions, and dieting. His most recentbook, Anxious Parents, deals with the emergence of new kinds of childrearingchallenges in 20th-century America.Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003

Really Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Body: A Cultural Challenge

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Really Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Body: A Cultural Challenge

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Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue