1. Embodied knowledge. Relections on belief and
technology
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
his book explores the relationship between knowledge and
the body through a series of historical and archaeological
case studies. More speciically, it considers the concept of
embodied knowledge by exploring some of the apparent
diverse and yet shared forms of what may be called embodied
knowledge. he papers share a focus on knowledge as it is
implicit and expressed through the human body and bodily
action, and as it formed through intentional practices. But
what is this kind of knowledge? Using speciic case studies of
knowledgeable actions, the book explores embodied knowledge
through a focus on practice. It does so through two diferent,
yet interconnected aspects of how such knowledge expresses
itself: belief and technology.
Challenging dichotomies
he deconstruction of the common juxtaposition of these two
forms of knowledge is an essential aspect of our approach to
embodied knowledge. Rather than seeing them as distinct
categories, and thus reproducing an unhelpful polarisation,
the chapters each in their own ways help to underline essential
connections between these two forms of knowledge. In some
ways, this is part of the social science and humanities challenge
to the mind/body dualism, which has been so prevalent in our
disciplines and so subjected to theoretical criticism over recent
decades (e.g. Turner 2008). At the same time, irrespective of
whether the disconnection between beliefs and technologies
is part of this fundamental dualism in our epistemologies, it
has certainly been furthered by the ways in which academia
produces specialists with non-overlapping knowledge. his
means that we usually become specialists in one of these
major areas, but not in both; we develop and work within
diferent specialist languages and networks. We are rarely
pushed to acknowledge how ields such as technology and
beliefs overlap and may afect each other. herefore, rather
than pursuing abstract arguments about embodied knowledge,
we have selected to use an essentially empirical, one may say
an ethnographic, approach to demonstrate the overlapping
meanings and at times even dependencies between these two
forms of knowledge.
his is why the body must be brought into focus, providing
the reason for the title of the volume: ‘Embodied knowledge’.
We call attention to the shared epistemological and ontological
aspects of the knowledge required to make pots and perform
rituals, to similarities and convergences that are acknowledged
in our routine interpretative languages and expectations. In
daily life, we recognise, depend on, and use the connection
between these diferent areas of practice. he body is the main
forum for learning about how to do, think and believe, and
practices as apparently diverse as belief and technologies are
accordingly enacted and performed through the body in similar
manners. Moreover, as these practices become embodied
knowledge, they come to inhabit and afect the body as motor
skills and practiced ways of doing things (Sofaer 2006). he
body is thus the forum for the learning and performance of
belief just as it is for the learning of metallurgy and how to
produce metal objects. his does not mean that the two are
the same; rather they are both rooted in the body and may be
involved in the constitution and performance of each other. It
is these interrelations that are of interest and in need of further
scrutiny through case-study based relections.
Together, the papers collected here emphasise and explore
the characteristics that are common to belief and technology:
for instance, their organisation around repeated ‘ritualised’
practices, their transmission through observation and imitation,
their involvement in the construction of socio-cultural norms
and the diferentiation of individuals in terms of knowledge
based roles. In the accounts provided in the chapters, belief
and technologies are often intertwined and they show how
2
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
through this relationship epistemological and ontological
reasoning is constructed. Moreover, the chapters demonstrate
how notions of right and wrong, or good and bad, are extended
into practical actions and performed in terms that emphasise
how to act in the right manner – this applies to practices as
diverse as baptism and spinning. he case studies show how
belief needs technologies in order to become expressed and gain
forms appropriate for them being practiced and appreciated,
and, likewise, how technologies are enmeshed with ideas about
right and wrong procedures, and good and bad associations.
Knowledge/embodied knowledge
he question of what knowledge is has a long intellectual
history. Knowledge and belief have often been linked or,
quite the opposite, seen to be in opposition. Technology, on
the other hand, has commonly been associated with practice
in a manner that emphasises it as non-discursive and tacit, as
‘understood by the body’, or as the application of technical
knowledge.
Over recent decades, the concept of embodiment and
embodied knowledge has challenged this dichotomy arguing
that: ‘Embodiment is the ensemble of corporeal practices
which produce and give “a body” its place in everyday life.
Embodiment locates or places particular bodies within a social
habitus […] embodiment is the lived experience of the sensual
or subjected body’ (Turner 2000: 496). Apart from providing
embodiment in the sense of this quote, the body itself afects
discourse and the performance and understanding of what
knowledge is, and through this it also afects how beliefs and
technologies are perceived. he body as a point of reference, of
housing and sheltering experiences, is a very common and strong
metaphor; it is a starting point for the granting and forming
of many forms of meaning. In the world we create around us,
our bodies are the measure of all things. Architecture, tools and
objects are adjusted to match our body proportions and sizes.
hrough such body-sized paraphernalia we overcome our bodily
limitations and enlarge the potential spheres of action. Belief
similarly extensively explores references to the body.
Another strong tendency is that practices and their
outcomes become imagined and perceived in terms of body
references, adding a diferent meaning to the concept of
embodiment, as things are literately made into bodies. his
is often seen in archaeological and ethnographic studies, but
it can also be observed in modern society, as many of our
contemporary technological developments are ascribed human
traits. In colloquial language these technological products
are not merely humanised, they are made understandable by
linguistically morphing into bodies: computers go to sleep and
catch viruses. his ability to anthropomorphise technology
afects many aspects of how we comprehend and respond to
our material environment, showing how removed the oftenargued distinction between abstract and practical knowledge,
between beliefs and technologies, is from observations of the
world around us. We routinely use abstractions and metaphors
to comprehend the inventions we have made.
To make the exploration of the two dimensions of
embodied knowledge explicit, the volume is divided into
two parts. he irst focuses on beliefs about the body as
they are embedded in various societies and preserved in or
expressed through material culture and particular practices.
he case studies range widely in time, from prehistory to
today, and spatially from Western Europe to China. here
are beliefs about many things, such as the universe, animals,
and consequences. he interrelations between such diverse
forms of beliefs would in themselves be fascinating to study,
but due to our interest in embodied knowledge, we elected
to focus on beliefs which in various ways are about the body.
he chapters therefore analyse case studies about birth, death,
transformation, sickness and religious beliefs. he second part
focuses on technology, on what might be classiied as practical
or tacit knowledge. Here our concern was to bring into focus
the technologies themselves, and the chapters therefore aim
to introduce relections on diferent material practices, such as
carpentry and weaving. his part mainly uses archaeological
case studies to beneit from the expertise in technology and
material culture traditionally ofered by the discipline.
Belief
People understand belief in many ways, and the practising of
beliefs use a variety of devices for establishing orthodoxies, or,
on the contrary, to absorb change. Belief is often an interesting
mix between abstract thinking and mundane matters. It may
be perceived as a deeply personal phenomenon or in terms
of oicial doctrines, and it is commonly framed within social
norms and systems of sanctions. he chapters show that
beliefs are rooted in inherited traditions and practices and at
the same time subjected to reinventions and transformations.
Beliefs are therefore deeply dependant on processes of learning
and the ability to emulate and communicate. A major part of
belief is about learning how to perform one’s belief, including
doing prescribed rituals in the correct manner. Belief is usually
ritualistic, these papers show, and this means an emphasis on
things being done in the right ways, the appropriate objects
being used, and the appointed persons being involved,
repeatedly. Beliefs themselves are indeed often not only
abstract, but also ill-deined, referring to a feeling more than
knowledge. However, through performance, beliefs become
physical: the body is used as an instrument of ritualised
behaviour and things are used both practically and as symbols.
he chapters focus on two areas where the interconnection
between the material and beliefs are particularly pronounced:
the dead body and its status, and the ideological concerns
about the immaterial aspects of a human, such as the soul
and the mind.
1. Embodied knowledge. Relections on belief and technology
Katharina Rebay-Salisbury’s ‘How burial practices are
linked to beliefs’ (Chapter ), for instance, looks at the
burial practices of cremation and inhumation diachronically
to understand how beliefs are associated with the dead body
and how the body was understood. In a survey of three case
studies ranging from early 20th century Vienna, through
the Greek and Roman world to Bronze Age Europe, she
asks whether the mode of disposal and treatment of a dead
body is a crucial clue to beliefs or if the divergent practices
are merely embedded in every-day routines and traditions.
While contemporary sources give some explanations for why
inhumation or cremation was favoured at times, these are by
no means consistent. here is no one and simple explanation of
the meaning of cremation or inhumation as a distinct practice.
It is clear, however, that associated practices and customs draw
on the experience of everyday life, using its metaphors and
images, and this in turn may inform us about basic tenets of
the underlying beliefs. Furthermore, supericial explanations
gloss over much more deeply seated social concerns, in which
the discourse over inhumation and cremations is merely used
as a stand-in battleground to communicate and deal with
other topics, such as politics and power struggles. his gives
us an insight into how layered beliefs can be, that they are
not straightforward simple, but may be contradictory, vague,
and hard to summarise. Burial practices perhaps do not follow
beliefs as a result, but customary ways of disposing the body
are accompanied by beliefs, explained and justiied through
them.
Tim Flohr Sørensen’s ‘Delusion and disclosure: human
disposal and the aesthetics of vagueness’ (Chapter 4) continues
the theme of beliefs about death. He observes, with changing
contemporary burial practices in Denmark as a case study,
how knowledge of death is worked through on various levels,
including the psychological and communal. Dealing with
death is so problematic for the living because knowledge
of it is fundamentally un-knowable. Before our own death,
we can only experience death through the loss of others.
Sørensen’s case study contrasts the ‘traditional’ way of dying in
Denmark, deeply rooted in Christian belief and with a focus
on the integrity of the body as central to the belief in bodily
resurrection, with the now much more common practice of
cremation in an increasingly secular society. Although beliefs
about death and religious beliefs are not the same, they
intersect; religious belief provided not only speciic ideas and
universally accepted explanations of death, but also physical
places for farewell rituals and resting places. As cremation
became more popular, the time between death and burial
became longer and cremation, as well as the interment of
the ashes, became further and further removed from even
the closest kin, who are often not present at these stages of
burial. Furthermore, unmarked resting places instead of family
plots are becoming increasingly popular. he ever decreasing
material expression of death may be linked to a less ixed idea
about death, and an embracing of deliberate vagueness. In
terms of knowledge, Sørensen diferentiates between ‘inding
meaning’ and ‘making sense’: the former taken to signify the
projection of cognised knowledge, the latter denoting the ways
in which sensory stimuli and emotions correlate and create
balance in the psyche. For death to make sense, one must come
to terms with the loss as well as preserve the memory of loved
one, and rituals and aesthetics provide the necessary scafolding
for this task. And yet, contra Freudian psychology, traumatic
experiences may be better veiled than disclosed – in coping
with death, this means a protecting layer of vagueness and as
little material contact with the dead body as possible.
Mads Dengsø Jessen takes a closer look at ‘Material culture
and the construction of religious knowledge’ (Chapter 5),
situating religious knowledge as it is embodied both in human
beings and the material world. By looking at how theological
concepts were transmitted in early Christian (late Iron Age and
early Medieval) Scandinavia, he zooms in on two particular
interesting case studies: the portable altar as a miniature,
condensed version of a church, and the role of the Eucharist.
Missionaries used portable altars in locations without a church
infrastructure – the altars combined the functions of shrine for
relics and table and had the power to transform any place into a
sacred space. hrough this, religious concepts were externalised
into the material world, but the altars were also integral to the
religious message. he Eucharist, also a material object, did
not only embody Christ in the eyes of the believer after having
been transformed through sacred power evoked by the priest,
but could also be taken into one’s own body and work through
it, creating a community of believers through partaking in the
ritual. In both of these examples, the materiality of human
life and its familiarity is cleverly integrated with new religious
knowledge. We can think about them in terms of embodied
knowledge, extended into the material world and distributed
amongst a number of people. Dengsø Jessen argues for a
better recognition of the extra-somatic dimensions of religious
knowledge, as they are situated in and inluenced by context
and environment; in turn, they play an important part to be
manipulated and integrated in religious concepts.
In Chapter 6, ‘Sealed by the cross: protecting the body in
Anglo-Saxon England’, Helen Foxhall Forbes takes us into the
world of the seemingly familiar, yet strange medieval way of
theological thinking. A world which is populated by invisible,
but omnipresent angels and demons that may all afect us in
good and bad ways seems diicult to imagine today. Body
and soul had to be protected from demonic powers and may
have had angelic powers as helpers. In medieval times, body,
soul and mind were linked in such a way that practices and
rituals done through the body as a medium may afect the
internal and invisible soul – the fate of which was central in
medieval Christian belief. Sacraments such as baptism or the
anointment of the sick involved treatment of the body, but
this was not the aim per se; in fact, it was the soul that was
addressed by these rituals. Speciic gestures, body movements
and positions were an integral and essential part of prayer
4
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
and blessings. he body may have been the medium through
which the spirit of a person could be reached, but the body
also exhibited the state of the person to the external world,
for instance in the case of obsession or illness. he plurality
of ways in which sickness was conceptualised and explained
in theological terms is again a good example of the complex
and fragmented way beliefs work. Beliefs about the body
overarched life and death – the dead body, although of much
less concern than the soul of the deceased, could, similarly to
the living body, be a medium of manipulation and an external
sign of inner workings.
Mary Laven’s chapter on ‘he role of healing in the Jesuit
mission to China, 1582–1610’ (Chapter 7) continues the
theme of transmission of religious knowledge and belief. he
Jesuits’ missionary eforts to convert the Chinese to Christianity
are well documented and give interesting insights into cultural
clashes as well as similar understandings between the worlds
of Catholicism and Chinese religion (which includes elements
of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism). Although highly
educated and prepared for intellectual exchange, the Jesuit
missionaries did not celebrate the best success in persuading
the Chinese of the truth of Christian knowledge through
discourse, and they had far more positive efects through their
advice on and involvement with much more immediate, bodily
concerns. Miracles of healing, exorcism and bringing about
fertility, all actions that work directly on or through the body,
could be integrated into existing worldviews and were much
better attractors to Christianity than teaching and preaching.
These emotional, ‘embodied’ experiences of Christianity
responded to profound human needs; the bodies of Christians
were seen to be protected by God. he only downside to the
successes was that appealing to the popular side of religion
did not win over the educated segment of society the Jesuits
would have wanted to attract. Another aspect of the deeply
embodied nature of Christianity that focussed on Christ’s body,
the blood, sufering and cruciixion of Christ as well as the
meaning of the Eucharist, did not prove easy to explain and
transmit. In Mary Laven’s chapter, we learn important lessons
on the multi-layered facets of embodied belief and how they
appeal in diferent ways to diferent strata of society.
Jacob Copeman’s ‘Protest re-embodied: shifting technologies
of moral suasion in India’ (Chapter 8) takes us into a diferent
world of body manipulations. He explores how bodily
techniques are used to articulate protest in India. Classically,
fasting is a means of expressing discontent, but more recently,
blood and organ donation have become more common.
Copeman investigates the complex interrelationships between
these new technologies, concepts of the body and religious or
spiritual beliefs. He argues that donating blood is a way for the
donor to reach multiple recipients as well as their dependents
and descendents; as blood donation is both anonymous and
done in a way that separates blood into several components
used in diferent patients, donors believe that this technology
might beneit a large group of people. In turn, the larger the
number of recipients, the more spiritual merit the donor
receives. Blood giving is not only motivated medically, but also
entangled in a wide range of beliefs. It replaces, for instance,
other practices such as ofering animal blood, whilst at the same
time, gives the donor the social venue to express opposition
against it. he process of blood transfusion becomes entirely a
political method of self-identiication in terms of the religious
community and of virtue. Furthermore, the substance of
blood is also believed to contain a number of qualities, such
as strength, that may be distributed. While fasting withdraws
the body from the world, blood donation extends the body
into it – the knowledge about the way in which the body is
to engage in protest has shifted.
Technology
The second part of the book, dedicated to technology,
focuses on material knowledge and in particular the common
association between technology and tacit and non-discursive
knowledge (Ryle 1949, Polanyi 1966). Issues discussed and
theorised include the performance of technology and the
interaction of tradition and innovation. he chapters also
touch upon the ways in which technology is embodied
and such knowledge learnt and transmitted. Technology is
usually thought about as ‘hard stuf’ and is explored in terms
of physical properties, inventions and impacts. Its study is
often inluenced by assumptions about rational reasons, goalorientated experimentations and ‘natural’ tendencies towards
maximisation. Investigations of society, whether historical or
archaeological, commonly take for granted that technological
activities are product orientated, and their resulting objects
are approached as direct evidence of technical prowess and
intensions. Technology studies are thus commonly based on
inferences made from the objects themselves – their material
properties, their technical and resource demands and the
organisation of labour needed for their execution. It is the
work of the hand guided by the rational brain. he chapters
collected here challenge this by showing technologies as social,
discursive and knowledgeable. he chapters also deal with
the question of how practical knowledge is represented in
non-literate ways and explore alternative forms of knowledge
repositories.
In ‘he language of craftsmenship’ (Chapter 10) Harald
Bentz Høgseth takes tool marks left in woodwork as the
starting point of his study of embodied knowledge of
craftsmanship. he knowledge of a craftsperson is diicult
to articulate, as it combines a high level of abstraction. For
instance, when picturing the inished object and the way to
get there, knowledge about properties and afordances of tools
and materials, and the manual skill necessary to put these ideas
into practice is needed. his includes drawing on all senses,
feeling with ingers, seeing, hearing and smelling; in other
words, situating oneself and one’s body into the materiality
1. Embodied knowledge. Relections on belief and technology
of the world around. In an experimental approach, Høgseth
attempts to reconstruct the processes behind artefacts, tool
marks, working patterns and actions. Here, the toolmarks
play a crucial role: if a tool has damaged edges, it leaves
speciic traces on the surface of the wood, which can be
recorded and used to reconstruct the actions. his includes
observations on how the craftsperson stood, when he cut the
timber with an axe, which weight the axe had, which angle
the timber was cut by, etc; the whole chaîne opératoire that
leads to the inished object is re-enacted. A replication of
this process, however interesting, is not the goal: Høgseth
develops a system of notation that translates movements and
techniques into an academic format and that simultaneously
helps analyse them. he notation system draws on a notation
system that has been developed for dance – here again, it is
diicult to articulate movement, sounds, choreography in
all expressional details, but at least aspects can be recovered
through a speciic notation system. For carpentry, this includes
the movement pattern, action and rhythm of the blows. What
Høgseth developed is a way to make tacit knowledge literate,
or non-discursive knowledge discursive – in a world in which
traditional craftsman’s knowledge is about to die, this might
be the only way to preserve it.
Sheila Kohring’s ‘Conceptual knowledge as technologically
materialised: a case study of pottery production, consumption
and community practice’ (Chapter 11) theorises the role
of engagement of the body with its social and material
environment in construction and transmission of knowledge.
She emphasises that technologies are part of our understanding
of the world, and are used to communicate social meanings.
In this, the ‘community of practice’ becomes important: it is
the social arena in which techniques are learnt and loaded with
meanings, and through continuous practice and experiencing
routine, both are reinforced. Kohring bases her argument on
pottery production in Copper Age Spain. She investigates
variability and conformity in the material, focussing on both
visual diferences and technical choices. Importantly, the visual
and the haptic are experienced directly by producers and
consumers of a vessel, whilst certain technological aspects of
the vessel might not be equally apparent. Looking at all aspects
of the chaîne opératoire, she observes how social and technical
knowledge co-inform each other, and how each step in the
production is shaped by knowledge of both production and
use within the whole of the society, not just the potters. In
this shared social and technological knowledge, a repertoire
of acceptable diference is developed which is constructive to
the communal identity.
In Chapter 12, ‘Many hands make light work: embodied
knowledge at the Bronze Age tell at Százhalombatta, Hungary’,
Joanna Sofaer and Sandy Budden give further insights into
pottery production, this time with a case study set in Bronze
Age Hungary. Pottery production is scrutinised for evidence
of the relationship between individual and society. The
authors challenge the universal assumption that each pot is
5
made individually by one person from start to inish. As a
very physical action, where the body of the potter is engaged
with clay and tools, potting is a kind of embodied knowledge
that is acquired through practice, but cannot be un-learnt.
he skill level of a potter is apparent in every single piece of
work, for instance in the frequency of production errors and
the range of variability within a certain type of pottery. It is
suggested that simple, small forms like cups require less skill
than large, composite vessels, which have to be made by an
experienced person. However, when analysing the pottery
assemblage it becomes clear that not all steps of the chaîne
opératoire exhibit similar levels of skill for each individual
vessel, for instance, decoration or iring technique may be
diferent from consistency in the wall thickness. It seems
that the responsibility for individual vessels is shared, and
includes apprentices and experienced potters. Learning to be
a potter involves acquiring non-discursive knowledge through
the repeated enactment of bodily performance, and this
embodied knowledge may be critical to the construction of
social categories, such as masters and apprentices.
Lise Bender Jørgensen’s ‘Spinning faith’ (Chapter 1)
investigates spindle spinning as a basic craft that was practised
more or less continuously in the past. Considerable lengths
of yarn were needed for making textiles; one square metre
of average quality cloth contains at least 1,000 km yarn.
Spinning takes practice to do evenly and eiciently, but once
learnt it becomes second nature – a simple, subconscious
movement, almost like a sleight-of-hand. Yarn can be spun
in two directions: clockwise or anti-clockwise. Once the
spinning process has begun it is essential to keep twisting in
the same direction, or else ibres unwind and cause the yarn
to disintegrate. Jørgensen shows how in most societies, one
direction of twist is the norm, and suggests that the other
has often been considered the ‘devil’s direction’. In Pharaonic
Egypt, yarns were always twisted anti-clockwise; this continued
throughout the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Periods,
and after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 AD. By the 1th
century AD, however, this had been reversed: textiles from
Mamluk Egypt are almost exclusively twisted clockwise. In
most of Europe, clockwise twisted yarns have been the rule
ever since the Bronze Age, except for special efects such as spin
patterns and sometimes for weft yarns. Scandinavians deviated
from this norm during the 1st millennium BC, preferring anticlockwise twisted yarns, but around 200 AD they started to
conform to continental habits. his chapter explores changes
in the practice of textile technology in Europe and around
the Mediterranean during the 1st Millenniums BC and AD,
investigating if and how they might be related to changing
beliefs and perceptions.
Sensory aspects of metalworking technology are at the heart
of Maikel Kuijpers’ Chapter 14, ‘he sound of ire, taste of
copper, feel of bronze, and colours of the cast’. Taking the
sensual human body as a focal point, through which the world
is experienced and understood, he argues that metalworking
6
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
technology in the Bronze Age was experienced more than
rationally understood. He advocates an interpretative turn
in archaeological scholarship that takes this change of
perspective into account and pays more attention to craft,
craftsmanship and skill. Rather than investigating technologies
in the framework of modern material science, an embodied
perspective exploring the skills involved in metalworking
furthers a holistic understanding of the relationships between
the body, materials and knowledge in the past. his approach
also challenges the deep-seated dichotomy between discursive
and non-discursive knowledge and returns to the original
meaning of tekne, which included the idea of skill and the
engagement with material with both the mind and the senses.
Kuijpers argues that there was no such thing as metalworking
technology in the Bronze Age, but rather metal craft and
craftsmanship.
Connections and reflections
he bridges between the two parts are provided by many points
that reference themes covered in the other part of the volume
– these are often major parts of the observation, but just as
often apparently minor points, which traditionally would
be considered marginal. One example is Bender Jørgensen’s
observation of the ‘handiness’ in Bronze Age yarn spinning.
his has no practical explanations, and thus it is of little
interest to technological investigations. From another point
of view, however, it opens up questions about why people
do things in particular ways: was this about superstition and
believing that it was better or right to spin in this fashion?
hese pointers reveal the seepage between the categories of
technologies and beliefs. hroughout the chapters there are in
fact again and again observations and details that apparently
belong in the other part of the volume, and many, if not all,
the papers could have been placed in either of the two parts.
Sometime the interconnection between technology and beliefs,
as in the case of blood transfusion in India discussed by Jacob
Copeman, is obviously so strong that the distinction between
the two is clearly dissolved even if the rituals discussed are
manifestly about religious beliefs and performance. In other
cases, such as in Harald Bentz Høgseth’s description of the
movements of the carpenter, the connection is less apparent,
but nonetheless present – the ability to choreograph the
carpenter’s movement is due to the fact that s/he aims to do it
‘right’ and works within a ‘tradition of practice’. Of particular
importance, such practices would include ‘non-discursive’ but
nonetheless transferable knowledge about the properties of
wood, the abilities of tools and the connections between these
and the body itself. Similarly, both the cross and the portable
altar are material things infused by beliefs, and through this
they are granted both status and abilities which moves them
outside normal material categories. Such crossovers between
the thingness (Olsen 2010: 81) and the religious meaning
of objects, the ability for the objects to become the essence
of abstract beliefs, are discussed with reference to diferent
contexts by Helen Foxhall Forbes, Dengsø Jessen, as well as
Mary Laven. he strong link between beliefs and attitudes
is especially well illustrated by studies of burial practices.
Katharina Rebay-Salisbury’s exploration of ways of treating
the body through time and Tim Flohr Sørensen’s detailed
discussion of changes in modern attitudes to death each
demonstrates and questions how the two aspects – beliefs and
material practice – may mutually reinforce each other during
changes of tradition.
Such observations and their implications for how beliefs,
technologies, bodies and things are interconnected are an
under-explored ield. Contemplating the papers collected
here in reference to one of the two parts helps to both
illustrate a particular dimension of embodied knowledge
and, simultaneously, raises the question of how each of the
chapters also contributes to the opposite theme. One of the
themes emerging from this volume is the question of the
moral signiicance of embodied knowledge. If knowledge
enables choice, there is room for good and bad decisions, and
for guilt. Does this extend to embodied knowledge, which
may be tacit and non-discursive? Several chapters show the
linking between the physical and the spiritual, how abstract
concepts (such as membership of a group) through a simple
gesture may be permanently marked on the body. hey show
how there is capacity for both outer and inner performance
and transformation. Baptism and the absolution of sins in the
Christian church are very informative of how such linkages
are drawn through a set of prescribed acts including the use
of speciied gestures and instruments. Such links between
the physical or material and the spiritual can be very strong
and unquestioned, as illustrated by the cross in the Christian
church or by how sickness was conceptualised and understood
in Europe during the Early Historic Period.
We may ask what the common distinction between
discursive and non-discursive knowledge actually implies? In
particular, how can non-discursive knowledge be transferred,
and have we tended to mistake non-verbal for non-discursive?
Several of the papers investigating technologies bring to
the fore the question of handling and learning. Learning
has traditionally been associated with either observation or
instruction. But if learning is also about recognising and
replicating details, judging subtle qualities, how it feels when it
is right, then we might have to ask what kind of knowledge is
involved? What does it mean that it ‘feels right’, how does the
body know in these instances and what processes of learning
have been involved? he papers do not provide inal answers to
these compelling questions, but we are given suicient insights
into elements of these processes that they do not appear as
merely embodied anymore. Such elements are, for instance,
learning processes through which knowledge about procedures
are acquired, including recipes, methods, and beliefs which
together ensure standardisations and compatibility. Sheila
1. Embodied knowledge. Relections on belief and technology
Kohring refers to this as ‘community of practice’ and Harald
Bentz Høgsted as ‘the language of the craft’. Whatever label
we give this, the studies show a discursive understanding of
technologies even if the language used may follow its own
format.
he cover image for this volume, he Philadelphia Twins
by Christie Brown, was chosen to express the complex nature
7
of knowledge, and the interdependency between abstract and
technological knowledge (Fig. 1.1). Christie Brown’s artwork
draws from archaeology, mythology and psychoanalysis,
using fragments of the past as ‘a way of learning’. Exploring
the transformative qualities of clay and the metaphorical
associations of the casting process, she views her work as
‘… embodiments of transition from one state to another, of
Fig. 1.1: he Philadelphia Twins by Christie Brown (photo: Christie Brown 1991)
8
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
transformation and individuation’. In he Philadelphia Twins
‘two igures were conceived as one work and given a title that
related to narrative and memory’ (Brown 2007). It is the
perfect artwork to illustrate belief and technology as aspects
of embodied knowledge for this volume.
References
Brown, C. 2007. Embodying Transformation. Interpreting Ceramics
8. Retrieved January 17, 2011, from http://www.uwic.ac.uk/icrc/
issue008/articles/02.htm.
Olsen, B. 2010. In Defense of hings: Archaeology and the Ontology
of Objects. Maryland: Altamira.
Polanyi, M. 1966. he Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Ryle, G. 1949. he Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.
Sofaer, J. 2006. The Body as Material Culture. A Theoretical
Osteoarchaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, B.S. 2000. he Blackwell Companion to Social heory. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Turner, B.S. 2008. he Body and Society: Explorations in Social heory.
Oxford: Blackwell.