Abstract
The chapter will cover the poetic sentiment created by human meaning-makers as they experience, present, and represent the body on the side that is directly non-observable by the self, but constantly accessible to the others. Various relations between the hair and the skin, hiding and displaying of both as ways of presenting of the human back, will be analyzed on the basis of the painting Le Chignon by French artist Eva Gonzalès (b 1849–d. 1883).
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Notes
- 1.
It is not inconsequential that the back side of the body becomes set up as such arena of cultural messaging—a “Back Book” (in analogy to the hyper-popular Facebook). Observations of higher primates indicate that the back presentation is a body position used to establish and restore positive social ties in the group (while frontal interaction is a form of aggression in most animal species). Even as Homo sapiens has developed a new form for positive social relations in the frontal social contact, remnants of the aggressivity of the animal kingdom remain—intolerance of enduring eye contact between unrelated conspecifics.
- 2.
In contrast with face-to-face communication where the direct eye contact moderates the affective tone of the encounter—ranging from aggressive (persistent eye contact is a form of fight in sub-human species, with remnants in human intense gazing) to affectionate (lovers endlessly enjoying looking into each other’s eyes).
- 3.
The best example (of many) is the “upper breast cloth” controversy that erupted to social unrests in 1858 in Travancore, South India (described in Hardgrave, 1969, Chap. 2). Lower caste women who had traditionally been prohibited from covering their breasts in public (which was upper-caste privilege) started to do so, encouraged by Christian missionaries’ efforts to eliminate such “indecent exposure” of the human body. The result was inter-caste conflict where the vigilantes from upper castes started to rip off lower caste women’s breast covers to restore the social distance between the castes—for them the “indecency” was not in bodily exposure but precisely the socially inappropriate covering of the body. The situation required governmental intervention and subsequent re-negotiation of socially appropriate clothing styles.
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Acknowledgment
The preparation of this chapter was supported by the Niels Bohr Professorship grant by Danske Grundforskningsfond. Feedback from the editors of this book on an earlier version of the manuscript was very helpful in bringing it to conclusion.
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Valsiner, J. (2017). Beauty of the Back. In: Lehmann, O., Chaudhary, N., Bastos, A., Abbey, E. (eds) Poetry And Imagined Worlds. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64858-3_2
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