Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  To this natural biological variability, we must add cultural factors. Gender refers to our social and cultural self-definition as distinct from our biological sex. Our expectation of what gender is and ought to be is shaped by culture, and one of the principal restrictions is the existence of gender in grammar. Why, in French, is a table feminine and a desk masculine? Why, for that matter, is a table feminine in French but masculine in German? The nonsense of all this is revealed in the fact that words for the sex organs themselves frequently have the wrong gender. In French, for example, ‘la bite’ is the cock, and ‘le con’ is the corresponding slang term for the female genitals (and less offensive than its English equivalent). In Greek, Marina Warner observes, the words for knife, fork and spoon have three different genders. Gender is a superfluous development in grammar that should gradually wither from the world’s languages, say the experts, although perhaps it will not do so quickly: in long ungendered English, ships are still designated feminine (even the USS Benjamin Franklin and HMS Nelson). The word ‘gender’ merely means ‘type’, and has no intrinsic sexual significance. Where there were two (or three) such types, it simply happened that grammarians chose to call those types masculine and feminine (and neuter). They might as well have called them left and right or up and down or black and white.

  Gender is one of the major ways in which we continually reinvent ourselves. Lifelong, we respond to those around us by performing to our chosen gender identity in order to meet – or occasionally to challenge – social expectations. The clearest example of this is perhaps the contemporary pressure to dress baby boys in blue and baby girls in pink. This is a cultural consensus with no basis in biology. In Victorian times, by complete contrast, children were often dressed alike in smocks until the boys were ‘breeched’ (put into trousers) around the age of six. Passports and public lavatories oblige us to choose one of two genders. Even language can force us to make a declaration, as in some languages the same phrase will have different word endings whether it is uttered by a man or a woman. In our bodies and minds, though, we may feel only comparatively male or female, rather than totally and unambiguously gendered in this way. Moreover, this strength of genderedness may alter during our lives.

  There are numerous examples in fact and fiction of both men and women who have spent an extended period of their lives presenting themselves as other than their birth sex, including the legend of the female Pope Joan, who supposedly held office in the ninth century, although this is probably a later fabrication designed to discredit the papacy. Here are two stories from the eighteenth century.

  The French diplomat and spy Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont claimed to have been born a girl in 1728. He was brought up as a boy, possibly in order that his parents could gain an inheritance that was conditional on their producing a male heir. He became a spy for Louis XV and fought in the Seven Years’ War, but eventually came into disfavour and was pensioned off to live in exile in London. Here, his feminine looks gave rise to gossip, and a gambling pool was started on the London Stock Exchange as to his true sex – the bet was never called, however. After the death of Louis XV, d’Eon petitioned to return to France as the woman he now claimed to be. His wish was granted provided he dress as a woman. Horace Walpole met d’Eon, and later noted: ‘her hands and arms seem not to have participated in the change of sexes, but are fitter to carry a chair than a fan.’ A postmortem found that she had been a man all along.

  Hannah Snell, born in Worcester five years earlier than d’Eon, travelled in the opposite direction. When her marriage broke up after the death of her child, she adopted the identity of her brother-in-law and joined the Royal Marines in pursuit of the husband who had deserted her. She had enjoyed playing with toy soldiers as a little girl. Now, she took part in the British campaign in India. She was wounded eleven times, including once in the groin. It is assumed she must have treated the wound herself or else relied on the help of a sympathetic Indian nurse for the truth not to emerge then. In 1750, her ship returned to England, and she revealed her true sex, capitalizing on the ensuing sensation by selling her story to the press and giving performances on the stage. In later years, she ran a pub in Wapping which she named ‘The Widow in Masquerade, or the female Warrior’.

  Before it was relatively easy to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and before science possessed the wherewithal to think of locating spots in the brain that might determine what we think we are, the experience of shifting sexuality was less a problem to be solved and more part of life to be lived. It is an ironic consequence of the possibility of gender reassignment that our cultural ideas about sexual identity have become more fixed, rather than less.

  The Foot

  After fifteen years alone on the island where he has been shipwrecked, Robinson Crusoe one day spots a single footprint on the sandy shore. Left or right, large or small, he does not say. Nor does he immediately do the obvious thing and place his foot alongside the print to confirm that it is not actually he who has made the mark previously.

  The footprint makes its appearance exactly halfway through Daniel Defoe’s famous story. From the moment he is washed up on the shore to this point, however, there have been repeated hints that Crusoe is not completely alone. He fears cannibals even though he believes the island to be deserted. He sees a vision of a man calling on him to repent his sins. Some creature tramples his food. He even hears speech – but it is only his parrot, Poll.

  The footprint is the first real evidence of another living human presence. Three days after he first sees it, Crusoe at last considers the possibility that it could be his, and rules it out by measuring it against his own foot, which turns out to be ‘not so large by a great deal’.

  Crusoe eventually learns that the island is occasionally visited by cannibals who bring their victims there for slaughter. When a suitable opportunity presents itself, he puts into practice a dream he has had of saving one of these prisoners from the pot. The rescued ‘Indian’, whom he names Friday, becomes his ‘servant . . . companion . . . assistant’. Now, what about the footprint? It is quite clear that the footprint is most unlikely to belong to Friday, despite the popular belief that it does (a belief apparently shared by Umberto Eco, who understands the footprint in this way in a discussion of signs and clues in his Theory of Semiotics). Seen some time earlier, it’s obviously much more likely to belong to one of the cannibals or their captives from a previous visit to the island, although in fact we never learn whose print it is. It remains simply a clue, a generic sign of human presence.

  This is not to say that the footprint is without further meaning. A footprint is many things. It is, for instance, a claim to possession of land. Such a sign is often swiftly followed by the still more assertive action of planting a flag, as Neil Armstrong’s boot mark in the dust of the moon reminds us. On Crusoe’s island, tellingly, it is (presumably) an indigenous savage who has left the footprint, but it is Crusoe who claims ‘undoubted right of dominion’ over ‘the whole country’.

  In its isolation, though, this footprint is more intensely symbolic than just this. A trail of footprints would suggest a particular person, a body with direction and purpose, the path of a hunter perhaps. But a single footprint in the sand raises the question of how it got there. In this sense, it is a divine symbol, an indication that Crusoe need lack neither god nor human fellowship. For the gods and holy men leave footprints – Christ does so on the Mount of Olives, and Muhammad does at Mecca, while both the Buddha and Vishnu measure out the size of the universe with their steps. Such contact with the ground clearly demonstrates earthly concerns.

  In Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume uses the hypothetical circumstance of finding just such a lone footprint to consider the question of whether there exists ‘a Particular Providence’ or God. ‘The print of a foot in the sand can only prove, when considered alone, that there was some figure adapted to it, by which it was produced: but the print of a human foot proves likewise, from our other experie
nce, that there was probably another foot, which also left its impression, though effaced by time or other accidents,’ he writes. On the other hand, Hume reasons, ‘The Deity is known to us only by his productions.’ Yet from these productions, the wonders of nature, we cannot infer anything directly about Him because, unlike in the case of the footprint, we have no other knowledge to adduce. We are human, and know the shape of a foot and the mark it leaves, but God’s productions – if that’s what they are – lack this reference. Nature’s works cannot therefore be taken as proof of His existence. And more than that: ‘All the philosophy, therefore, in the world, and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life.’

  The Czech author Karel Čapek – whose play R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) gave us the word ‘robot’, and of whom more later – makes this logic his point of departure in a humorous short story called ‘Footprints’. Mr Rybka is walking home in the fresh snow, speculating idly on the owners of the various prints he sees. Then he notices footsteps directed towards his own house. ‘There were five of them, and right in the middle of the street they came to an end with the sharp impression of a left foot.’ Unsettled now, Rybka opens his door and calls the police. The sergeant turns up, deduces various things from the prints – hand-sown shoes, brisk stride – and assures Rybka that, since no deeper impression was left in the toe of the final print, the person who left them cannot have simply jumped off somewhere. Where did he go then? Why do the prints just stop? The sergeant can go no further – no crime has been committed. But a man has disappeared, Rybka insists indignantly. The police, the sergeant chides him finally, are interested in misdemeanours, not in mysteries.

  What can we tell from a human footprint? Certainly not whether its owner is savage or civilized. The moral of Robinson Crusoe revolves around the question of who is the more civilized, Crusoe or islander, with the Englishman forced to consider that right is not all on his side. We can, though, perhaps infer the nature of the master–servant relationship that Crusoe imposes. Friday’s feet are larger than Crusoe’s, but in a bizarre scene Friday kneels before Crusoe, lays his head on the ground and then places Crusoe’s foot upon it, a gesture that Crusoe interprets as a ‘token of swearing to be my slave for ever’. A few pages later, Crusoe’s reading of the symbolism is made plain when he teaches Friday that ‘God is above the Devil, and therefore we pray to God to tread him under our foot’.

  Fossil footprints enable scientists to glean rather more information about those who made them thousands or even millions of years ago. The shape of a foot reveals which of various hominid species may have passed that way. Height may be estimated from the size of prints using a conversion factor based on anthropometric data. Speed of walking or running can then be deduced from the length of the stride. The depth of a foot’s depression shows where the greatest pressure has been applied, and this information can be used to draw conclusions about gait. Was the walker creeping up on prey? Was she carrying a child at her hip? Or was he carrying a dead animal across his shoulders? Prints may even be dated with some certainty by analysing the way different ingredients in the soil have been rammed together when the impression was made.

  In 2005, Australian anthropologists reported the discovery of fossil footprints from the Pleistocene era about 20,000 years ago in the Willandra Lakes region of New South Wales. The marks of a number of adults and children were preserved. The tracks of one man, designated T8, showed that he had been running in the thin layer of mud fringing the lake. From the placement and depth of the depressions and the distance between them, the scientists estimated the man’s speed as a respectable twenty kilometres per hour. A year later, however, Steve Webb, the lead scientist reporting these findings, re-examined the site after new tracks had been uncovered, including four new footprints of T8 (bringing his personal tally to eleven among hundreds of individual prints). This time, he came up with a very different estimate of T8’s speed: thirty-seven kilometres per hour – faster than Usain Bolt, the present world-record-holding sprinter, would be able to run on the same surface. The discovery caused quite a stir, and provided useful ammunition for Peter McAllister in his book Manthropology, which catalogues the supposed physical inadequacies of modern man. In addition, Webb declared incredibly, T4 was the trail of a one-legged man moving at a clip of 21.7 kilometres per hour, leaving the prints of one foot and the post marks of his crutch. This unlikely revelation was prompted by consultation on the interpretation of the tracks with Pintubi people of Central Australia who still hunt by tracking on foot. Their reminiscences about one of their number who had lost a leg but nevertheless remained highly mobile in the field encouraged Webb to draw this bold conclusion.

  Another tantalizing trail was set around the same time when another cluster of prints was found in volcanic ash on a dried lakebed in central Mexico. Tracks showed birds, livestock and domestic pets as well as adults and children, possibly all fleeing together from a volcanic eruption. The depressions in the compressed ash were initially dated as being up to 38,000 years old. Since it is thought that humans first came to the Americas less than 15,000 years ago, the discovery was set to revolutionize human archaeology. Either the North American continent had a human population far earlier than had been previously thought or there was a gross error in the dating of the prints. A second team of scientists then dated the ash itself to 1.3 million years old, well before the appearance of humans anywhere on the planet, forcing the first team to look again at its data and to concede their error. The prints are damaged where water has flowed across them so that even a clear left–right pattern in them is hard to discern. Could they be the prints of some much earlier hominid? Or are they a complicated mixture of modern footmarks and other manmade traces in ancient ash – much as that last footprint in the snow in Capek’s story becomes when, on the final page, the police sergeant’s colleague arrives and inadvertently treads on it with his boots? It seems that, as Mr Rybka finds, reading footprints of whatever age is an unreliable art.

  A footprint, then, is not only the mark of a person who has passed that way, but also a relic of dynamic human action in the past. That person long ago walked, or ran, or crept and sprang after prey, or fled from danger. The foot is a site of extraordinary power, not only the launching pad of physical action, but a part of the body identified in older belief with generative potential. Three thousand years ago, it was believed that the first Chinese emperor of the Chou dynasty was born as the simple consequence of his mother’s stepping into the footprint of the deity. Well into the modern period in China, it was the tradition that husband and wife were not allowed to see one another’s feet because of their procreative significance. So strong was this taboo that women’s feet were bound away from sight so tightly that they were often permanently deformed. This bashfulness has its echo in the West, occasioning the famous myth that the Victorians even swathed the feet of their pianos, though it seems it truly was a myth: Victorian catalogues openly advertised pianos with naked legs, for one thing, and ‘even in Victorian times it surfaced as a satirical joke’, according to Ruth Barcan’s study Nudity.

  The human body that we know best is not the anatomist’s cadaver or the sculptor’s stony ideal but our own, in constant life and motion. Its most animated actions involve varieties of bipedal motion. Today, sport provides a ritualized vestige of these actions required for fight, flight and survival. The pentathlon of the ancient Olympic Games involved five such demonstrations of agility that still feature in sporting events today: a running race, long jump, javelin and discus throwing, and wrestling. The addition of such cultural artefacts as balls, measured fields of play and formal rules gradually distanced us from these primitive activities, and gave the feet more exacting athletic tasks to perform, such as kicking to score a goal.

  The form of movement that m
ore greatly interests me, however, is dance. Here, extreme physical exertion must be combined with extreme restraint to produce artistic expression. It is at once a highly sophisticated and yet also strangely primal activity. If sport is our cultural legacy of the actions necessary for individual survival, then dance, it seems to me, is our inheritance from our first attempts to make connections. It contains the erotic, the religious and, in the synchrony of a war dance or of a corps de ballet, the urge to be one of the group. Dance is the bodily expression of civilization.

  I have come to learn more from Deborah Bull, a former principal dancer in the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in London. I saw her in several roles in her heyday. The performance I remember best was in an inventive ballet describing the plight of endangered species, set to the music of an ensemble called the Penguin Café Orchestra. Deborah was a Utah longhorn ram, a role that demanded a lot of mournful jerking around the stage while wearing a cumbersome headdress, and a complete surrender of the feminine elegance one usually associates with the ballet. Today, she sits smartly dressed in cream and black in a windowless office at the Royal Opera House, where she is the creative director. A poster for the 1948 London Olympic Games hangs on the wall. She jiggles a sandal negligently on her otherwise bare foot as if to remind me of my purpose.

  The rules of ballet, Deborah tells me, developed at the court of Louis XIV. These rules may seem arbitrary now, even capricious, but they arose out of the fashions and customs of that time. They decree that particular physical actions must have a particular look. ‘In sport, it doesn’t matter what you look like. A footballer can score a goal any way. But a ballet dancer must move their leg in the right way.’ For example, the stance known in ballet as ‘turnout’ – standing with the heels together and the feet pointing outward in a straight line – may have developed because the king, himself a dancer, would turn out his feet so that people would admire his silken shoes. The action appears highly stylized to us now. In fact, it looks impossible. But as I find to my surprise, even I can stand in this way without too much difficulty. Standing like this makes me newly aware of the working of the major muscles and joints in my legs. I feel an unaccustomed strain in the ligaments of my hips, for example, that a trained dancer with more elastic ligaments would not feel. More importantly, I realize that my proprioception – my sense of my own body’s position in relation to itself and its surroundings – is being awakened.