Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right

Abstract

Training toward 'perfect timing' in karate entails deciphering small movements and interpreting them as signs of an opponent's decision to launch an attack. It includes the aptitude to perceive those signs and react to them before the attacker is aware of her own decision. It also depends on the ability of the body to perceive and move without recourse to cognition. This article considers the body in its own right as well as how it is involved in social construction. Following Sheet-Johnstone, the article contends that movement as it is performed is a tool of data collecting, sense making, and action. It attempts to show how movement organizes a social setting that enables intentionality and also opens up the possibility of violence obstructing that intentionality.

Full text

Social Analysis, Volume 51, Issue 3, Winter 2007, 1–22 © Berghahn Journals
doi:10.3167/sa.2007.510301
TIMING IN KARATE AND THE BODY IN
ITS OWN RIGHT
Einat Bar-On Cohen
Abstract: Training toward ‘perfect timing’ in karate entails deciphering
small movements and interpreting them as signs of an opponent’s deci-
sion to launch an attack. It includes the aptitude to perceive those signs
and react to them before the attacker is aware of her own decision. It also
depends on the ability of the body to perceive and move without recourse
to cognition. This article considers the body in its own right as well as
how it is involved in social construction. Following Sheet-Johnstone, the
article contends that movement as it is performed is a tool of data col-
lecting, sense making, and action. It attempts to show how movement
organizes a social setting that enables intentionality and also opens up
the possibility of violence obstructing that intentionality.
Keywords: body, Japanese martial arts, movement, perfect timing, prac-
tice, violence, world-of-activity
To have meaning is not necessarily to refer and neither is it necessarily to have
a verbal label. Movement—animation—can be in and of itself meaningful.
(Sheets-Johnstone 1999: 491)
[T]o have a body is to learn to be affected. (Latour 2004: 205)
Japanese martial arts students undergo many years of training, during which
they learn to alter physical and social aspects of their bodies.1 They experiment
with their muscles and senses, relearning their bodies’ capabilities and uses, as
well as discovering new ways of interacting with their bodies—of understand-
ing them and what they encompass—and how to decipher them. They become
stronger and more agile, developing sensitivities to minute changes in stance and
movement in their own bodies and those of their opponents. The participants in

2 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
karate training learn to set their own and their opponents’ bodies in motion at
the outset of a bout with the aim of either winning the bout or aborting it alto-
gether. As the two opponents stand facing each other before moving, the blink
of an eye or a slight shrug of a shoulder can signal the beginning of an attack.
The failure to discern such changes is risky, and martial artists must develop a
keen ability to perceive these tiny adjustments. A karateka (karate student or
students) who fails to recognize these signs will also fail to react to his or her
opponent’s attack with the correct timing. At that point, the opponent’s deci-
sion to move—the opponent’s thought—is detectable as movement. Ultimately,
no distinction remains between thought and movement.
This article describes and interprets how these somatic changes are effected
through a close examination of one aspect of training—the moment before the
bout starts. This is ‘perfect timing’ in karate—namely, the ability to perceive
and decipher small movements as signs of an opponent’s decision to launch
the attack and the aptitude to react to those signs even before the attacker is
aware of his or her decision. This enables a defensive movement to begin when
it is most effective, gaining a few split seconds that may be crucial to the out-
come of the bout. Perfect timing can be found at the intersubjective interface
between the body’s interior and an exterior indication because each participant
reacts to the opponent’s movement, thus revealing within his or her own body
what the teacher teaches and demonstrates. The students must repeat changes
while perceiving, understanding, and then correcting them. They learn to be
increasingly affected until their bodies attain capabilities that they did not
know existed inside them, so that their senses and muscles can perform in
ways that have not been previously experienced. A complete and meaningful
world-of-activity unfolds, emanating from the body in and of itself, in its own
right, from its training and consequent modification.
What kind of body is needed to achieve perfect timing? What are its borders
and contents, its connectedness, both inside and out? Is it contained within our
skin, or can it include more than that circumscription? What are its relations
with its surroundings? Does it negotiate with other bodies? With the environ-
ment? With the cosmos? Where does one body end and the next one begin? Are
there exchanges between bodies? Are thoughts part of the body, and do changes
in the body consequently entail changes in thoughts or emotions? Do cognitive
or emotional changes encompass somatic changes? Or do thoughts and emo-
tions belong only to the world of consciousness and words? What, in fact, do we
mean by the word ‘body’? How do we become the body that we are?
Bruno Latour (2004) describes the process of becoming the lived-in-body,
tracing the path along which we learn to ‘become’ our bodies. He describes
a training course in the perfume industry in which, by means of a process of
systematized exposure to smells, the trainees learn to distinguish between
ever-increasing numbers of scents and thus reconstruct their bodies, crafting
new capabilities until they become the perfume experts known as ‘noses’. Their
noses are made of these previous interactions with the surroundings. The body,
Latour continues, is constructed much like the nose. It too is “an interface that
becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 3
elements … By focusing on the body, one is immediately—or rather, medi-
ately—directed to what the body has become aware of” (ibid.: 206).
Unlike the restricted focus of nose training, martial arts training is a holistic
process, situating its participants in an entire, meaningful world-of-activity.
Through endlessly repeating challenges, such as training toward perfect timing,
this world unfolds, a world anchored in a specific Japanese cultural tradition
that includes social organization and semiotic understandings, as well as an
ethical facet. The sole and unique site of martial arts is the participants’ bod-
ies, which make up the cultural vessel, the contents as well as the purpose of
training. Naturally, the central issue of martial arts is violence, so in karate, as
in all other Japanese martial arts, the body emanates from a practical engage-
ment with violence and its potentialities, tackling with its capacity to threaten
the body—even to annihilate it. Within the Zen tradition, martial arts use the
potentiality embedded in violence to lead to the eradication of violence itself,
not only to ensure the warriors’ safety but also to enhance spirituality. While
this is performed in different ways at the various schools of martial arts, in
nearly all of them, the achievement of both efficient fighting and spirituality
is attained through the same exercise and training. The training draws upon
culture, the creation and control of violence, spirituality, and at times also
ideology.2 In karate, the body—its movements and senses—is inseparable from
the significance of its activity. Thus, this martial art is highly suitable for the
study of the body in its own right.
Perfect timing presupposes an understanding of the body that is different
from the one usually take for granted in Western thought and language. This
poses a semantic issue. When employed to denote the way that the body is
used and understood, the term ‘body’ smacks of the ontological and, as such,
is unsuitable to describe the lived-in-body of anthropology—that is, the body
as a product of culture, learning, and training. Ots (1994) and others make the
distinction between the German words Leib, which can be used in the phe-
nomenological sense as the lived-in-body as a whole, including both its mental
and physical aspects, and Körper, which includes only physical traits. However,
this does not completely resolve the problem because, even if we now define
Leib as including both mind and body, which would bring it closer to the
experienced world, it still describes a definite thing and is thus not unlike an
ontological approach. Handelman (2001: 249n2) uses the terms “selfness” or
“traits of selfness” to denote the shifting nature of the self “to avoid pointing
to the thingness of self, and instead highlight the possibility of its existence as
interactive bundles of configurations of qualities of being.”3 To denote the non-
ontological shifting, in-the-making, dynamic, socially constructed body, I will
use the terms ‘bodyness’, ‘traits of bodyness’, ‘lived-in-body’, ‘body-self’, and
even just ‘body’ to designate an ever-shifting “interactive bundle of configura-
tions of qualities of being.”
The lived-in-body is made of practice, constructed through the specific use
of senses and movement and meaningful relations between them. It is not
enough to say that “the body is simultaneously a physical and symbolic arti-
fact” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 7). We must add that this simultaneity

4 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
is embedded in one action, one gesture, one practice, because practice per-
force puts things in relation to one another (Handelman, personal communica-
tion). Such an approach weaves together data collection and deciphering and
depends on a meticulous description of the social somatic unfolding.
An anthropological analysis of the body in its own right, of what makes for
a particular bodyness, therefore involves the close monitoring of the modes of
organizing and using the body and the relations between those modes. Only
thus is it possible to discern the nature and to follow the dynamics of the
process of ‘becoming body’. Always in movement, bodyness is constructed
through those processes while forming the dynamics of its own creation. It
is not an abstraction but rather an integral part of social relations (Turner
1995: 168). Since ‘becoming body’ is an intersubjective process in the social-
cultural world, at the interface between inside and out (Bar-On Cohen 2006),
the lived-in-body is formed through its social relations while concomitantly
creating its surroundings. And thus the body-self also becomes a condition for
intentionality, because only one who can distinguish between scents can earn
a living—have agency—in the perfume industry, and only one who can create
violence and annihilate it can be active in the world of karate.
David Sudnow (1978: xi) watches his hands typing (as I am doing now)
and comments: “If I watch my hands on the typewriter, I don’t recognize their
movement. I am startled by the look of my hands while typing, just as I’m
surprised by the sight of my profile when surrounded by mirrors in a clothing
store. It’s like witnessing an interior part of my body going through some busi-
ness.” But when he plays the piano, when his hands are improvising jazz, he
easily recognizes them. Now they are intimately familiar to him. They are his
jazz-hands—they are David Sudnow. In Ways of the Hand, Sudnow describes
the total unification between his hands, his self, and his music, a union pro-
duced through practicing, learning, and playing while improvising. The success
of his improvisation depends on the disappearance of surprise when looking at
his hands and image, on the elimination of strangeness and unfamiliarity. An
intricate and delicate bit of culture such as jazz is created through the elimina-
tion of the gap between an observation of the body from outside and its inner
feeling, the distinction between my hands typing now and my unmistakable
knowledge that it is myself who is typing. This is a result of training, of appren-
ticeship, as the body-self becomes so proficient in whatever it is doing that it
no longer needs to concentrate on the mode of doing and is thus free to invent,
to improvise, to be creative, to have intentionality.
I would like to make a preliminary suggestion for an anthropological
approach to the moving and feeling body, the body in its own right, without
recourse to symbols, representations, or discourse. I would like to propose
that we inspect the lived-in-body as a creature of culture undergoing con-
stant transformation, in a perpetual process of change.4 We can paraphrase
Deleuze and Guattari (2005) and call this process ‘becoming body’.5 And
following Handelman’s (2004) and Kapferer’s (2004) appeal to regard rituals
in their own right, with no prior supposition of symbolic context or concern
for the impact of a specific ritual on its society, the proposal to examine the

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 5
body in its own right is to a large extent heuristic. Exposing the dynamics of
the ‘becoming body’ and the anthropological understanding at the center of
such discussions is inseparably related to the nature of field notes collected
by the anthropologist.
Body and Dualism in Anthropology
The anthropological foundations for this approach can be found in the work
of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, who studied a Balinese village over
60 years ago. Their book’s introduction refers to a heuristic problem faced
by anthropologists who have difficulty reporting on non-Western societies,
because those societies use words differently from the Western languages in
which anthropologists publish. Bateson and Mead (1942) contend that using
native words without explaining them in a language understandable to a
Westerner, as anthropologists sometimes do, neither resolves this difficulty
nor elucidates the specific meaning of those words in a non-Western cultural
setting. To overcome this hurdle, they propose close examination of how
the Balinese villagers use their bodies—in photos and explanations—and in
that way describe how the emotional life of the villagers is organized into a
“culturally standardized form” (ibid.: xi). For instance, the book illustrates
the body positioning and gestures of mothers to their young children, draw-
ing our attention to how the mothers provoke and frustrate their babies. The
authors point out the similarity between how the mothers position their bod-
ies toward their children and the content of Balinese myth, dance, and sculp-
ture. The mothers’ gestures do not represent the sculptures, dances, or myths,
nor do those public cultures represent the private body; rather, cultural recur-
sivity is exposed in this way of presenting the social-emotional reality of the
village. The young mothers reflect the Balinese arts while forming them, at
the same time constructing the body-they-live-in—that is, their own bodies,
as well as those of their children.
The languages of anthropology are embedded in Western monotheistic per-
spectives, in particular, in the dualist mode of thought entrenched in those
languages. This may explain some of the difficulties encountered by Bateson
and Mead. The meanings and understandings of words in Western languages
already include the social presupposition of the existence of an unequivocal
dualistic (Cartesian) split between object and subject, word and object, body
and mind, nature and culture, biological and acquired, me and other, and so
on and so forth. Cartesian thought also presumes that the abstract (the mind,
culture, the word, the acquired) has higher moral value than the material (the
body, nature, objects, the biological). Moreover, this approach posits that the
abstract should control the material. Domesticating nature through culture,
controlling the biological by the acquired, and restraining the body by the
mind are all viewed as cardinal actions for a ‘better’ humanity (see, e.g., Feath-
erstone 1991). The ‘highest’ human achievement occurs when the abstract
molds, tames, and disciplines the material. Foucault reverses the direction of

6 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
dualistic ethics, showing how the dualistic worldview that favors the abstract
effectively exerts violence upon the body, how discourse is used in relations
of power to oppress the body. Other societies also make distinctions between
body and mind, culture and nature, and so forth, but for some societies those
entities are not always understood as contraries. Moreover, the entities are
engaged in other relations among themselves in which the material is not nec-
essarily subordinate to the abstract and the abstract is not necessarily morally
preferable to the material. From this circumstance, different moral orders and
altogether different human projects may emanate.6
Duality also undermines attempts to describe the lived-in-body, the phe-
nomenological body. The body as we experience it while living, walking,
dancing, presenting ourselves, fighting disease—the body that is us—can
hardly be identified as dualistic. It is a challenge to examine the body in its
own right in neutral terms that do not postulate a priori duality in the body’s
way of going about its social business. The Western languages and their inher-
ent duality are an obstacle to a phenomenological account of the body and
explain the widespread use of the hyphen in phenomenology, for example,
in the word ‘lived-in-body’. Dualism, Drew Leder argues in The Absent Body
(1990), is entrenched in our experience of our body. The body is absent from
our experience of its actuality. We are not conscious of it until it manifests
difficulty—through pain, illness, or any other need—to turn our attention to
it and change its habits. Until then, the body is self-evident, unperceived,
which is all to the good, because if we had to pay attention every time we put
one foot in front of the other, we could not walk, and if we had to calculate
the movement of every finger, we could not write. If we were not unaware of
operating our bodies, we could not perform even the simplest of tasks. Leder
concludes that the source of dualistic understanding is experiential (ibid.).
Dualism’s error, he goes on, is in attributing an essential value to this paradox:
the error is assuming that the distinction between the way we experience the
body and the self stems from the essences of the body and of the mind. The
error of dualism derives from attaching ontological value to a phenomenologi-
cal experience. In perfect timing, however, the experiential body itself does
not match Leder’s description. The absent body, it would seem, is not the only
phenomenological option.
Despite the difficulty presented by the duality embedded in our languages,
anthropology has an advantage over other disciplines in its potentiality to
discern the body in its own right. Revealing the ways of using the body in dif-
ferent societies may undo the obvious and bring to light alternative ways of
constructing bodyness whose comparisons may yield new insights. Different
societies understand bodyness differently; they have alternative body theories
(Turner 1995)—or rather, alternative practical conceptions of the ways body-
ness is used. An analysis of Israeli students of karate, who are using their
senses and movements in an alternative, non-dualistic understanding of body
emanating from the Japanese cultural horizon, indicates the possibility of
forming a non-dualistic body in a delineated social setting for Japanese mar-
tial artists in a Western society.7

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 7
Perfect Timing: Movement Is Decision Is Emotion
Training in karate, the ‘empty-handed’—that is, weaponless—Japanese mar-
tial art, immerses the participants and their bodies in an entire, meaningful
world-of-activity. This world, which derives from Japanese cultural horizons,
includes training in fighting techniques, ritualistic behaviors, social relations
among the participants according to their rank and seniority, and a new under-
standing of bodyness.
One aspect of this entire world is perfect timing, which also derives from
the Japanese view of the body and illustrates the connection between Japanese
martial arts and Zen Buddhist practices (Hurst 1998). Elsewhere (Bar-On Cohen
2006), I have described another aspect of karate that I refer to as ‘somatic
codes’, that is, untranslated Japanese words used in karate instruction whose
meaning is discovered from within the body, because only through extensive
training and practice can their traits be discovered. Thus, somatic codes blur
the clear distinction between word and deed. Perfect timing—the ability to
perceive one’s opponent’s decision to launch an attack, even before she herself
is aware of her decision—blurs the clear distinctions within bodyness between
body, movement, thought, decision, and emotion. The distinction between
body and mind is obliterated by praxis, while a new mode of using the body,
acquired during the study of karate, emerges.
Perfect timing stems from the body and is anchored in the mundane way
we use it. The capacity to develop perfect timing is available to everyone. It
is not mystical and is in no way transcendental. Nor is perfect timing a mat-
ter of speed alone. It ensues from the interaction between opponents. In one
specific exercise (ippon kumite), for example, the opponents face each other,
one about to attack and the other assigned the task of defending herself. Per-
fect timing comes about when the defender starts to move before the attacker
does. The assumption underlying karate exercises is that the opponents are
equally skilled, so it is a tactical error for the defender to set out from the initial
defense stance too early, because this will allow the attacker to see where the
defender is going and to follow her. It will also mean a role reversal, because
the defender becomes the attacker. On the other hand, delayed movement is
obviously also a mistake, because the defender will not have time to defend
herself. The best solution is therefore to start moving precisely when the oppo-
nent decides to move, but before she actually does so, and after it is already
too late to stop the attack from happening. How can that be achieved? How can
a decision be perceived before it is actually made? Before the attacker herself
knows that she has made the decision?
The novice karate student will betray signs before she sets off from her
initial stance and begins to move. She may contract her facial muscles, flex
her hands backward as if to collect speed, release and then flex her muscles,
or move her front foot to stabilize her body. She is unaware of these precursor
signs and is as yet incapable of controlling her involuntary movements. The
defender, even a beginner, can see these signs and thereby understand what
is going on within the attacker. Thus, initial training toward perfect timing

8 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
consists of developing the capacity to discern those slight changes and to start
a defensive move immediately. However, the defender cannot know which
limb the attacker will choose for the attack. If she focuses her gaze on her
opponent’s hand, the attack may come from the other hand or perhaps the
leg. Thus, the defender’s best choice is to concentrate on her opponent’s eyes,
allowing a clear peripheral vision of the entire body.8
The karateka call this ‘catching the opponent going out’ or ‘catching the
opponent’s decision’. Something changes, even if it is not always possible to
pinpoint precisely what, and the skilled opponent does not try to decipher
‘what’, because such clarification entails transmitting what her eyes are seeing
to her muscles. This takes time, and she may miss her cue. Thus, the proficient
karateka learns to react to such change without conscious thought. Her body
effectively reacts on its own.
On the other hand, the attacker is interested in preventing the defender from
‘catching her going out’. She trains in order to be able to conceal her decision
to start moving, in order to eliminate the precursory signs, in order to maintain
constant muscle control. Ultimately, she aims at allowing her body to roll into
movement when the right situation presents itself. Her goal is to progress from
her initial stance into movement without consciously deciding to move. She
tries to hide her decision even from herself, for if she is unaware of the begin-
ning of her own movement, the defender standing opposite her will not be able
to ‘catch her going out’. Concealing her decision not only involves a somatic
technique but also depends on her capacity to remain calm, to forgo conscious-
ness, to relinquish the will to strike the target, even the will to win the bout.
The attacker must separate herself from the fear of injury or, conversely, from
anger: she must not feel the desire to hurt her opponent because her opponent
can perceive emotion as movement.
Learning perfect timing hence depends on emotional modification. Like the
decision to act, emotions such as fear, hatred, competitiveness, anger, revenge,
shame, or arrogance become perceivable movements and constitute obstacles
to perfect timing. In perfecting the use of one’s senses and movement in karate,
the body itself brings about a new emotional state of steadfast determination—
what karateka call ‘no-emotion’—and forms a new attitude toward violence
and the potentialities of its annihilation.
In perfect timing, thought is a somatic act. A conscious thought can spoil
perfect timing. The capacity to achieve a state of no-thought, no-emotion, no-
surprise, no-aggression, no-mind constitutes the link between Japanese martial
arts and Zen practices. The knowledge folded within the movement exteriorizes
it and takes form with it. The interior surface of the body is smooth and calm.
The movement has already happened, and it remains only for the body to do,
without the obstacles that thought may put in its way. Maintaining inner-quiet
concentration before and during the movement is a key aim of karate training.
Perfect timing in karate emerges in a rich and complex social reality, present-
ing new options for relations between persons, for relating to violence and to
thought. Perfect timing is not instead of anything. It is not a symbol and does
not represent anything. It creates a new reality, from what the body does in its

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 9
own right. Thought, says Sheets-Johnstone (1999: 491–496), cannot be under-
stood as disconnected from action. The claim that conscious thought precedes
action is not embedded in experience; rather, it is the result of theological
thought. A painter thinks through painting, a person thinks through talking, and
an improvisational dancer thinks through movement. Thought is entrenched in
action in the same way that action is entrenched in thought. By the same token,
sensual perception is not dissociated from either thought or action. Sheets-John-
stone (2000: 356) calls the thought-like activities of the body “neither mindless
aping nor bodiless thought.” Perfect timing is based on the body’s capacity to
perform thought-like activities with no recourse to verbalized thought.
Erasing the gaps between thought, emotion, decision, sensual perception,
and movement is not the result of an alternative theoretical conception of the
body. It derives from practice, from the long and purposeful effort to achieve
unity between parts of body and parts of mind. The Japanese philosopher
Yuasa (1987, 1993) explains that the aim of Zen practice is to attain this state
of unity between body and mind. This is not a natural state but is achieved
through training. True knowledge “cannot be obtained simply by means of
theoretical thinking, but only through ‘bodily recognition or realization’ (tainin
or taitoku) … this is to ‘learn with the body’ not the brain” (Yuasa 1987: 25).
The Lived-in-Body
Over the past 20 years, the body has become a primary category in social and
cultural theory (Turner 1995: 143), but its activity and materiality somehow
still seem to elude the discussion about the body. In the behavioral disciplines,
the body is understood as a result of human social endeavor, and scholars
identify the dualistic approach as a product specifically of the Western world
and as an obstacle to analysis and exegesis. Nevertheless, social thought seems
to encounter great difficulty in separating itself from the dualistic split. The
dualistic tendency to see an unequivocal separation between body and mind,
between abstract and material, which goes hand in hand with the view of the
material as subordinate and inferior to the abstract, seems to be translated,
in social thought, to the depiction of a thoroughly passive body caught in the
shackles of discourse. Perhaps this more than any other reason clarifies the
“vanishing body” (Shilling 1993: 79) in sociological and, to a lesser degree,
anthropological preoccupation.9 In many of these discussions, the body is
described as the subject of discourse, as a symbol and representation of soci-
ety or as an artifact of the powers operating within it. And so, despite the
great interest in the body as a source for understanding human behavior, and
notwithstanding the attention given to its physical formation and cultural
construction as a result of social process, the body as reflected in sociology
is understood as a product and not as a producer. Its possibility to act in the
world is not explained and so it dissolves. The same sociology that chose the
body as a site of research because of its materiality has lost much of its connec-
tion with that materiality. Lyon and Barbalet (1994: 52) maintain that the body

10 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
“is passive in that persons are seen to possess their bodies, and it is passive
as an object of gaze and exchange.” For that reason, they call for a new model
in sociology and anthropology, a model “whereby the body is understood not
merely as subject to external agency, but as simultaneously an agent in its own
world construction” (ibid.: 48).
Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2002; see also Csordas 1993) describes the world
we are born into as a ‘blurred horizon’. This world exists before we can order
or understand it and before we can identify distinct objects in it. He calls this
state ‘pre-objective’. This primal capacity, in which the body can only perceive,
enables us to make sense of the world and of the objects in it by distinguish-
ing details in the indistinct horizon-of-being, the unspecified background, by a
conscious activity of reflection or attention (also a somatic potentiality), which
turns the pre-objective into recognizable and nameable objects. The body itself
is therefore capable of forming the mind by the act of attention and reflec-
tion—that is, by objectivation. Accordingly, the body is already-in-the-world
before anything else, preceding the existence of distinct objects in the world,
which are, of course, as yet nameless. The mere possibility of identifying and
naming disparate objects is enabled by the body’s capacity to perceive and the
equally somatic capacity to reflect. The somatic ability to create consciousness
is therefore pre-objective and pre-verbal.
In the pre-objective state, adds Merleau-Ponty, there are no dualistic distinc-
tions between body and mind, self and other, objectivity and subjectivity; no
subjectivity exists (Csordas 1993: 149). The construction of objects (and also
of the separate ‘self’) takes place in the physical, social surrounding. At the
site of the unfolding of objectivation, no verbal possibility exists, and under-
standing is therefore non-verbal and non-representational. The characteristic
that pertains to the body, and to it alone, is the simultaneous manner in which
it is an object that has undergone the process of objectivation as well as the
tool of perception. Therefore, Csordas says, there is a spot, as it were, where
the blurred becomes distinct, an ephemeral point at which body becomes
consciousness: the site of the act of reflectivity and attention and of somatic
intersubjective communication. Csordas calls the possibility of tapping into
this site the “somatic mode of attention” (ibid.).
Csordas (1990, 1993, 1994b, 1999, 2001) proposes a model in which the
body is not seen “as an object that is ‘good to think with,’ but as a subject that
is ‘necessary to be,’” a model in which “embodiment is the starting point for
analyzing human participation in the cultural world” (Csordas 1993: 135). He
describes healing methods based on the body’s unique twofold trait, namely,
that we have our body and are it at one and the same time. He sees healing as
an instance of immediate, unmediated, intersubjective somatic communication
between patient and healer at the point where the indistinct becomes distinct.
He describes healing methods that make use of somatic modes of attention,
rituals of a corporeal and verbal nature between patient and healer, mediated
by religious beliefs that enable the patient to enter a somatic state in which she
no longer feels—or is—ill. The healer’s words are crucial in this process because
they trigger the special somatic mode of attention, creating the possibility of

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 11
auto-suggestion. Calling upon spiritual forces, the patient embodies the healing
mode of somatic attention; she can now heal herself, even without the healer.
This special somatic mode of attention is formed as a result of intersubjective
relations that enable controlling modes of healing that do not entail conscious-
ness. Csordas describes this form of healing among American Christian Char-
ismatics (1990, 1994c), who call these forces ‘insight’ and discern in them
divine intervention, and Native Americans (1994d), and also notes its presence
in modern psychotherapy (1993).10 He follows Leder (1990), who also draws
on Merleau-Ponty. Leder asserts that our ability to see the connection between
body and mind is intertwined with the disappearance of the body from our
everyday experience. The use of the somatic mode of attention derives from the
practical possibilities of the body’s capacity to disappear from and to reappear
in our consciousness under deliberate as well as non-deliberate circumstances.
To explain how the somatic mode of attention is rooted in the social sur-
round of the particular healing method, Csordas adds Bourdieu to Merleau-
Ponty. Bourdieu (1977: 124) posits the “socially informed body” and the theory
of practice and habitus. In a 1935 address on technologies of the body, Mauss
(1950) enumerates the domains in which body techniques differ from one
society to another and from one social context to another. Considering ways of
running, walking, standing, feeding, giving birth, etc., Mauss points out how
various corporeal norms are used in different social settings. In the army, for
example, looking straight into the eyes of one’s commanding officer is manda-
tory, while in other social circumstances, staring is considered rude. Mauss
does not address the question of the significance of the body’s techniques.11
However, as a notion that can provide insight into social influences on the
techniques of the body, he suggests the Greek word hexis. Bourdieu (1977)
translated hexis into the Latin habitus, which describes the sum of tastes and
behavioral preferences that form us and at the same time position us in a cer-
tain social group: a cultural habitat.
Csordas looks at Merleau-Ponty’s notions in relation to those of Bourdieu.
He compares Merleau-Ponty’s ([1945] 2002) “perception,” the characteristic
of the body already-in-the-world that steers us into the world, to Bourdieu’s
(1977) “practice,” the first social tool that orients and involves us in the social
world. He likens habitus to the pre-objective state: habitus directs and imposes
behavioral possibilities in an unconscious social manner similar to the way in
which a person acts unconsciously in the pre-objective state. Csordas (1993)
sees dialectic in the relations between the pre-objective and the objectified,
between practice and habitus. It is within this dialectic that social relations
evolve. Interestingly, he does not propose a social parallel between Bourdieu’s
theory and the potentiality of the body of reflection in Merleau-Ponty. He thus
cannot account for agency. Instead, he can account only for structure as it
is understood in habitus, and this already points at what may be the central
lacuna in his theory (Evens 1999).
The use of insight to discern the physical (emotional or moral) state of the
other—the deliberate entering into and acting within the other’s body-self—is
common to shamanic and Charismatic healing, as well as to Japanese martial

12 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
arts. In shamanic and Charismatic healing, this is a special power granted only
to those in contact with divine powers. In martial arts, by contrast, the capac-
ity to enter another’s body-self is seen as a human trait that can be developed,
improved upon, and controlled. Located in the body, it is to be used in training
and battle.
The Moving, Feeling Body: The Body in Its Own Right
From among the wide array of possibilities proposed by the sociology and
anthropology of the body, what can contribute to the understanding of perfect
timing in karate? How can the way that perfect timing works be accounted for
in anthropological terms? Any explanation that includes discourse cannot help
us understand how it constructs a socially and culturally meaningful world-
of-activity, because perfect timing does not stand in place of anything. It does
not represent or symbolize anything but rather organizes social reality in an
active way, simultaneously creating body and culture. Csordas’s approach does
not supply a convincing explanation for perfect timing either, because perfect
timing is not an innate, infantile, undeveloped, pre-objective capacity. Perfect
timing is the result of focused and ongoing training, of strenuous physical effort
and concentration on minute details, of movement, of relations with others in
a complete social setting. Training in order to ‘catch the opponent’s decision’
alters the body, its muscles and its senses alike; it also sets it within an alter-
native practical view of the body, concomitantly forming the surrounding in
which this takes place. The aim of this meticulous training—‘becoming body’
in Latour’s sense or ‘becoming warrior’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense—con-
stitutes a slow process of change. In the course of strengthening their muscles
and rendering their senses more sensitive, karateka discover new possibilities
of the body. A body that can make use of perfect timing discovers ‘built-in’
meanings and understandings of the world and ways of sensing and moving,
without making clear-cut differentiations between the practical facet of doing
and its meaning. How the body is constructed is inextricably tied to what it
does, and both are enmeshed with meaning. The issue is not the body as raw
material for symbols, as something ‘good to think with’, nor is it only, as Csordas
(1993: 135) claims, “necessary to be.” The anthropological question is, what
does the body do? And what the body does, how it alters the world, also engen-
ders conceptualization, namely, what the body can do.
Karate is a world rich in strata—practical, cultural, spiritual, social, moral,
and more—all embedded in the body’s activity. The pre-objective capacity is
not only the capacity to differentiate and categorize, to objectify and verbalize;
it is also the capacity to act. The body in its own right does not concern con-
sciousness of the body or its disappearance alone.12 Rather, it is the ability to
act, to move, to change the environment. This capacity is in a constant process
of formation, advancing along a trajectory of increasingly intricate meaning and
cultural complexity throughout one’s life. It has an entire biography of rich, unob-
jectified experience. To skew Merleau-Ponty’s terminology, the horizon-of-being

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 13
expands within the body in its deeds and capacities. The lived-in-body learns
and changes without extracting objects from the undifferentiated horizon-of-
being and without naming them. Examining perfect timing reveals the possi-
bility of an entire, meaningful world-of-activity—based uniquely on the body
and its workings—which organizes its components and surroundings, making
relations between body, emotion, and thought, between self and other, with-
out recourse to the process of objectivation. The question is not what am I
aware of or what do I know, but what do I do and, from my embodied experi-
ence, what can I do.
Suzanne Langer (1979: 81) refers to non-discursive semantics situated
beyond, underneath, or at the base of discursive language. Non-discursive
ways of communication are based on feelings and emotions. Rituals, art, and
the martial arts are clear examples of the social use of non-discursive seman-
tics.13 Both discursive and non-discursive semantics, Langer continues, are
based on symbolic logic, which facilitates the comprehension of both discur-
sive and non-discursive information. While collecting information from the
environment, the senses themselves make distinctions that organize the world
in a way that is untranslatable into words. The senses ‘think’. They make order
out of the complex stream of stimuli they encounter and turn sensations into
‘things’ and ‘notions’. Sensual perception itself is a process that obeys laws
of symbolic logic. This is an entire world of understanding, organization, and
reaction made of nameless non-objects.
Non-discursive semantics perceives the world in a holistic fashion. It under-
stands the world as an undifferentiated whole with no clear-cut delineation
between an object and its background, which therefore leaves the object
unnamed. Furthermore, in contrast to discursive semantics, it does not orga-
nize the world linearly. In Monet’s impressionistic paintings of water lilies,
for instance, although no contour delineates one object from the next and it
is impossible to ascertain the borders between the objects or between objects
and background, we can clearly see the images and events depicted. The aes-
thetic meaning and affect of such a painting is embedded not in the distinction
between the objects but rather in the picture as a live, non-delineated whole.
Words are too simple and definite to account for the world as we experience it;
they have little capacity to describe complex reality.14
As already noted, conscious, purposeful activity is an obstacle to the warrior’s
goal of achieving perfect timing. Perfect timing therefore depends on a holistic
perception of the body and its surroundings. And because such perception does
not make clear-cut distinctions, the body in karate—and in Sino-Japanese under-
standing in general, which is the basis for Chinese medicine (see Hsu 1999; Ots
1994)—may encompass not only that which is delineated by the skin, but also its
environment, including the opponent’s body, without making explicit distinctions
between objects in constant movement in relation to one another. The same way
that the senses make order out of the stimuli they encounter by putting them in
relation to one another, movement also makes order by employing holistic, non-
discursive semantics to collapse the clear-cut distinctions between body, self,
emotion, thought, the environment, the other, even the entire cosmos.

14 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
Leder (1990) suggests that the ontological values accorded the dualistic expe-
rience of the body is at the crux of the Cartesian error. Perhaps, then, ontology
should be avoided in explaining the body’s perfect timing in karate.15 Therefore,
following Sheets-Johnstone, I would like to propose movement itself as the
foundation for perfect timing and of the world of karate in general. In move-
ment, Sheets-Johnstone (1999: 132) identifies the primary source of our sense
of aliveness, our primal capacity to decipher and imbue with meaning, and
thus also the origin of cognition. The body is already-in-the-world as a point of
departure, as Merleau-Ponty suggests. But discovering and understanding the
world does not come about as a result of the operation of reflection, leading to
objectivation; rather, it emanates from experimenting with our body and from
our past experiences, that is, from ‘apprenticeship’. Like the apprentice replicat-
ing the gestures that her instructor teaches her again and again, so we learn our
bodies, reiterating our movements, improving and rendering them more com-
plex while forming and discovering our bodies. So too does the karateka, who
attempts to achieve prefect timing by repeating the training exercises.
Sheets-Johnstone (1999) sees our existence in the world and our attempts
to decipher it primarily as movement, which, in the non-purposeful shifting of
legs and arms, in swallowing and smiling, is in-the-world before anything else,
even before the ‘I’. Thus, movement generates the experience of ‘I move’, the
Husserlian ‘I do’, and the ‘I’ itself from the body’s motions, past and present.
This is also the source of the abstract notion of ‘I can’, which is situated at the
outset of cognition (ibid.: 134). We are formed by the movements we perform
and have performed, and in that sense we are apprentices of our bodies. We
discover its potentialities and meanings in our social and physical surround-
ings by touching and by moving. We engage in the forming of the physical and
social body in all its dimensions. “In discovering ourselves in movement and
in turn expanding our kinetic repertoires of ‘I cans,’ we embark on a lifelong
journey of sense-making” (ibid.: 136; see also Sheets-Johnstone 2000).
‘I Move’ and Intentionality
Csordas’s use of Bourdieu’s habitus cannot explain perfect timing. Like any
other practice, perfect timing is a social tool that involves and immerses the
karateka in a social world and enables them to act in it. But it does not pertain
to their habitus. It is not part of their habits or tastes or everyday behaviors.
It is not congruent with the somatic understanding in which they were raised
and in which they live. Perfect timing is confined to the training hall, a world
fabricated in the potentialities of the human body itself (Bar-On Cohen 2005).
If perfect timing cannot be explained by assuming the social surroundings
in which it evolves as an obvious point of reference, then we need to look
closely at how the world that creates those potentialities is constructed. We
need to understand how the world of karate is put together by the karateka and
their bodies themselves; how they organize and use space, time, social rela-
tions, language, and other semiotic tools; how they employ Japanese cultural

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 15
understandings while conserving and renewing; and, of course, how all this is
embodied. The notion of habitus helps explain how the self and the body are
designed in any given social and power relation. It helps us understand how
we acquire social tastes, references, behaviors, and semiotic understandings.
But it does not explain the recursivity of social construction. Habitus explains
how the body is formed by social constraints but does not address the way that
the body acts in its environment,16 how the moving, active body engenders
itself and its surrounding.
Csordas sees relations between the individual and the social as dialec-
tic. But the relations between body, perfect timing, practice, and meaningful
world-of-practice are certainly not dialectic. They can perhaps best be likened
to yin and yang: the two opposite poles are in constant, dynamic movement
and exchange. They are relations of exchange between appearance and disap-
pearance, being and dissipation, construction and destruction, distinction and
blurring, violence and its annihilation, all emanating from the intentionality
and agency embedded in the moving body.
Thus, the construction of our world begins from the starting point of our
being in-the-world, moving along its trajectory throughout our lives, and is
hence already social and saturated in culture. The social body is always com-
ing into being, learning, repeating, changing; it is always in the dynamics of
‘becoming body’, engaged in “the journeys it takes that change its nature or
object” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 235). ‘Becoming body’ is part of an inter-
active process in recursive relation with its surroundings, forming and being
formed by it. What can explain how the body’s way of being depends on and
is directed by the social and cultural world in which it is immersed? How can
we account for the possibility of acting in a social setting? What can point at
how the potentiality engendered by movement creates specific ‘I cans’ while
subduing others? Which approaches elucidate the processuality of ‘becoming
body’ in a dynamic and recursive way?
Husserl’s (1970) intentionality encompasses a broader notion than habitus.
It can explain an initiative that is not engendered by habitus or that even goes
against its grain. It can also shed light on the absence of the possibility of ini-
tiative deriving from mechanisms and people that can limit or even eliminate
intentionality (Kapferer 1997). “Intentionality is the title which stands for the
only actual and genuine way of explaining, making intelligible” (Husserl 1970:
167). According to Kapferer (1997, 2000), intentionality brings together the act,
its exegesis, and its cultural meaning. In a more anthropological formulation,
intentionality ties together the way in which the environment is organized
to facilitate action within it: “I use the concept of intentionality minimally
as referring merely to the directedness … Such a directedness is a faculty of
human existence. Human beings are immersed in the world and come to a self-
consciousness within it. Consciousness is emergent from this directedness and
not vice versa” (Kapferer 2000: 28n1). Bodyness also emerges from this direct-
edness. Without too precisely defining this use of intentionality, Kapferer’s
directedness can be seen as movement, action, intention, and the potentialities
that emerge from the body in the social world. Being “immersed in the world,”

16 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
the surrounding, creates this directedness and the potentialities it entails. The
consistency of meaning in which it is immersed is that of the ‘I cans’.
Precisely as we can bend the arm in one direction only because of the struc-
ture of the elbow, the physical and social worlds in which we act permit some
actions while restraining others. Directedness permits certain ways of engaging
as well as certain ways of hindering, of preventing engagement in action. Inten-
tionality is the interdependence and mutuality between the ways of organizing
the world and its social and cultural forms and the potentiality of a person or
group of persons to summon or engender will, intention, imagination, creativ-
ity, and the possibility to act. The probability of action, the ‘I can do’, is created
through directedness by progress in some direction. While forming understand-
ing and the meaning with which it is imbued, directedness brings one to desire
and action: this is the body’s potentiality to act.
The possibility of hindering action or intentionality is also innate within the
body, in its weakness, illness, needs, and, ultimately, death. Kapferer (1997)
describes demonic possession in Sri Lanka exorcised by the Suniyama as an
instance of intentionality thwarted. The demon or the person who caused the
possession obstructs the continuation of normal life, making the possessed
person ill or causing him to suffer loss. By arresting the unfolding of potentiali-
ties open to him in his world, the possession prevents him from acting, from
making his life happen. The Suniyama exorcism ritual restores intentionality by
constructing a complex world and a sequence of ritualistic acts that release a
person from possession and ‘restart’ movement in the directedness of life.
Martial arts do not deal with intentionality that has been arrested. Rather,
they deal with the possibility of intentionality being halted, with the uncertainty
embedded in the body, specifically, its fragility in the face of violence perpetrated
by another. Martial arts training is an effort to prevent intentionality from being
thwarted, a way of averting obstruction of the stream of choices by violence.
Faced with the threat of violence, the well-trained martial artist will know how to
act so that her body remains safe and so that she can go on with her life. Unlike
the Suniyama exorcism described by Kapferer, which can ‘restart’ halted inten-
tionality, martial arts training is designed to prevent it from stopping. At the root
of martial arts is the possibility of a violent cessation of intentionality, toward
which theoretical possibility the karateka has prepared her body and tactics.
Perfect Timing and Bodyness
Husserl’s (1970) phenomenology stands at the root of Sheet-Johnstone’s (1999)
“primacy of movement,” according to which our world is made of the ‘I dos’
and the consequent ‘I cans’, and at the origin of Kapferer’s (1997, 2000) use of
intentionality as recursive directedness in the social world resulting from (and in)
the ‘I cans’ and the ‘I cannots’. What kind of ‘I dos’ and ‘I cans’, then, stem from
perfect timing, and what kind of directedness does it entail? At first, the defend-
er’s ‘I do’ consists of seeing what the opponent is doing, detecting the slight,
uncontrollable movements, while the attacker engages in an attempt to refrain

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 17
from revealing those minute signs. The ability developed at this stage of training
is ‘I can see’. But soon enough there is a new sort of ‘I do’, one that undermines
decision altogether. The attacker tries to surf the dynamics of the bout, to be
drawn into movement by the dynamics of the situation while renouncing voli-
tion and forgoing effort. At the same time, the defender concentrates on trying to
feel what is going on in the opponent’s bodyness, in an attempt to react to the
unfolding without any delay. The defender is drawn indirectly into the dynamics
of the situation through the conduct of the opponent’s following those dynamics.
At this stage, the ability developed is ‘I can feel/move’.
This ability is fully and directly the result of apprenticeship, because unlike
the previous ‘I can see’, this new capacity is not part of the participants’ mun-
dane experience of bodyness: I know that ‘I can feel/move’ only if I have done
this in the past. The attacker is now about to move without a plan, but the
defender can nevertheless detect an intent unknown to the attacker. Further-
more, until now we have been considering an exercise in which the roles are
decided upon in advance (ju ippon kumite). In a real bout (ju kumite), how-
ever, where there is no prior determination of who is the attacker and who is
the defender, the attempts to conceal and reveal become much more complex.
Both karateka can disclose preliminary signs. Given a chance, both can go into
movement, and both can detect what is going on in the other’s body-self. In
this way, each can either initiate without a plan or grasp the other’s unknown
intent, capturing the dynamics of the interaction both directly through one’s
own bodyness and indirectly through the other’s bodyness. From this multiple,
overlapping stimulus-and-reaction, the dynamics of the bout develops.
Perfect timing cannot be achieved by employing a technique but rather,
through a means that resembles meditation, by letting go of the usual, pur-
poseful ways of engaging with bodyness. However, once the sign is given
and received, once the attack has started, all hell breaks loose, and the two
opponents explode into rapid, fierce, and powerful fighting movements. Yet
whoever can master perfect timing, whoever can anticipate an attack before
it is even decided but when it is already too late to stop it, whoever can pen-
etrate the other’s bodyness and feel what is going on there can also abort the
fight on the threshold of its unfolding. The intentionality that results from this
mode of social interaction is marked by the potentiality of bodyness to achieve
perfect timing. It is enmeshed with the double potentiality whereby violence
can explode or can be diverted from its explosive course. Thus, perfect timing
changes the nature of the interaction and of the entire scene. It enables a poten-
tiality of violence—not attainable otherwise—to unfold.
A senior karate teacher once described to me a historical meeting between
two Japanese masters, Harada and Oshima, in Paris in the early 1960s. Both
these masters are direct students of master Funakoshi, the founder of mod-
ern karate, and both had come to the West with the intention of propagating
karate, deciding who would teach in which country, dividing the world between
them.17 On that occasion in Paris, they held a very unusual match. They stood
facing each other in ju kumite (a free bout). They stood there, not moving, and
after a brief while, one of the masters was declared the winner. They stood

18 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
again, looking into each other’s eyes, and now the other master was declared
the winner. A third time they fought a motionless bout, but the result of that
third bout is still disputed. These masters are so accomplished that they did not
need to move in order to know how the bout would have unfolded if they had
moved. Apparently, the match was held in virtuality only, within the capacity
to read into the other’s determination and decision. But because of the holistic
lived-in-body’s connectedness, all other aspects of bodyness were also in play.
The correct physical, emotional, and cognitive stance was put to trial, and the
battle did occur, but in contained, cocooned non-movement.
The two opponents facing each other in karate train and develop strategies,
including perfect timing, to overcome violence and protect the karateka. In per-
fect timing, the attacker and defender are entangled in a complex web of self
and other, body and environment, past and future. At the singular point of this
actuality, before the bout begins, intentionality is open to endless possibilities
yet offers only one option, which has been curtailed. Perfect timing creates a
change in the flow of time because it means entering this narrow ephemeral
space that is the present, where things happen after they have occurred in the
past but before they are actualized in the future. Perfect timing seizes the pres-
ent at the precise moment when intentionality is liable to be halted by a vio-
lent act, a moment that is movement in its essence yet does not move. At the
instant of perfect timing, movement finds itself suspended just before it unfolds
between the ‘I can’ and the ‘I do’, where the ‘I do’ has already happened but
is also still ‘I can’, when the movement has already taken place even though
it has not moved. Therein lies the potential to choose the right movement and
thereby to prevent violence and control it—to correct the world. Just as dei-
ties can fill the entire cosmos, so too “the living holism of the body enables its
equivalence to units of any scale” (Handelman 1991: 222n2).
Acknowledgments
I thank Don Handelman for his enabling guidance.
Einat Bar-On Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem holds a second dan black
belt from the Shotokan Karate-Do International Federation. Her PhD research analyzed
Japanese martial arts as a case of traveling culture. She has published articles con-
cerning the intensely somatic practice of martial arts and its capability to form social
realities dealing with the potentialities of violence while undoing or reiterating social
categories. She is currently conducting a comprehensive study on the instruction of
Israeli close combat in private schools and in the Israeli Defense Forces as sites where
social somatic understandings of nationality, bureaucracy, and violence are formed.

Timing in Karate and the Body in Its Own Right | 19
Notes
1. My observations in this article are based on 25 years of personal experience as a student
of karate as well as my research in Japanese martial arts in Israel for my PhD dissertation
(Bar-On Cohen 2005).
2. Martial arts played an active role in the rise of Japanese nationalism both before and
during World War II (Hurst 1998; Ohnuki-Tierney 2002).
3. Another solution might be to use the plural form, that is, to talk about ‘bodies’. However,
in the sociology and (less so) anthropology of the body, the term ‘bodies’ is frequently
used to mean something different. Following Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s (1987) seminal
article, the term ‘bodies’ is used to denote multiple categorical aspects of the body: the
social body, the political body, the symbolic body, and so forth.
4. Previous research and analysis have been conducted from a similar point of view. See,
for example, Csordas (1994c), Tamisari (2000) on dance, Feld (1996) on music, Friedson
(1996) on African music, Bender (2005) on Japanese drumming, and Alter (1992) and
Zarrilli (2000) on Indian martial arts.
5. Deleuze and Guattari coined the terms “becoming animal,” “becoming woman,”
“becoming dead,” and, more generally, “becoming other.” This refers to transformation
that does not depend on representation or discourse but instead results from decoding
and deterritorialization (see also Rajchman 2000).
6. Anthropological literature is replete with examples. I would like to mention only the Japa-
nese view of the body and moral duty as depicted by Japanese philosopher Yuasa (1987,
1993) and the presentation of the body among the Kayapo in Brazil (Turner 1995).
7. Jewish religious karateka, for example, may maintain dualistic conceptions and ways of
using their bodies in a religious context while engaging a non-dualistic practice in the
training hall. For them, the double approach to bodyness presents no difficulty.
8. The decision is not actually perceived by the eyes but in movement as a sense, a data-
collecting tool. For that reason, training is sometimes carried out with blindfolds. I saw
an exercise in Tokyo at the Bu-jin-kan school of ninja techniques in which the attacker,
standing behind the defender, attacked with a plastic sword, and the defender was
expected to avoid the attack that he could not see.
9. Much of the passivity in these depictions stems from Foucault’s influence on medical soci-
ology, feminist thought, and the view of the body in a consumer society. While criticizing
Foucault, Terence Turner (1994, 1995) points to ideological reasons for this passivity.
10. For similar research on shamanic healing among the Sherpa in Nepal, see Desjarlais (1992).
11. But Mauss (1950) does open the way to seeing the body in its own right, gesture as a
kind of language, and the body as a fundamental social symbol. Researchers have used
this seminal article in all these directions.
12. The question of consciousness does not help to distinguish action from thought because
we are aware of what is going on in our bodies without recourse to words. Pain, for exam-
ple, creates acute consciousness, but this consciousness is not verbal (see Jackson 1994).
13. Alexander Durig (1994: 256) holds that disregarding the non-discursive (i.e., untrans-
lated into language) modes of communication is a symptom of dualistic thought.
14. Therefore, claims Langer (1979), what is grasped by non-discursive means can be trans-
lated into words, but not the other way around.
15. On the ontological element in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, in particular, with regard to his
view of the body, see Sheets-Johnstone (1999: chap. 6). Without elaborating on this topic
here, I would like to note that Merleau-Ponty’s attitude is inclined toward dualism, since
the gap between the body that is already in-the-world and objectivation is unbridgeable.
On the contrary, it grows and deepens as the horizon-of-being enlarges. In Bourdieu’s
view of practice, too, the notion of indetermination is based on symbolic understanding,
perhaps only in a mild and shifting manner, but it too has dualistic meaning. And of
course, dialectic relations are dualistic ones that engender new dualistic relations, and

20 | Einat Bar-On Cohen
so on and so forth. My point is not to try to undo dualism but rather to explain how
the body operates in the social world and to distinguish this explanation from Cartesian
dualism only to the extent that it obstructs such an explanation.
16. Bourdieu (1977) himself points out that the symbolic structure (habitus) cannot be
practically implemented as it is. Persons living in a symbolic structure employ practices
of approximation to make adjustments between structure and practice. He presupposes
that the structure is constant and that people are flexible and thus does not explain how,
in our activities, we form the symbolic structure itself.
17. Forty years later, they are still teaching in the West and have succeeded in their mission
to a remarkable extent.
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