The Body and Geography

Abstract

TRADITIONALLY, which to say in most times and places prior to of early modern Europe, tie between body and (description of earth) has been primordial, intimate, and manifold. According to modern phenomenology, body made for earthly space, as--in an immediate sense--earthly space becomes manifest through perceiving and feeling body. Bodies not only perceive space or things-in-space through any combination of their five senses, but their very design--their handedness, their slightly uneven bifurcatedness--orientates or situates them qualitatively within space and fits them to manipulate things-in-space. Bipedalism not only equips body to move through space but propels it as well. Little wonder, then, if traditional geographies or pictures of are deeply imprinted by body. One primordial entail of body the practice of dividing circle of horizon into four cardinal directions, which (as historian of religion writes) is almost universal. Only with development of concept of azimuth (whereby one point was fixed on horizon) did this directional scheme become more abstract and useful. Azimuth itself, however, also keyed to body; to felt value of one direction over (and indeed against) another. East sacralized in Jewish and Christian tradition (and, behold, glory of God of Israel came by way of East, Numbers 2.2.3). West and north are ominous. However, as east (roughly) direction of rising sun, it tended to be sacralized by other religions as well. For this reason, and because of growing importance of Jerusalem, Jewish (and traditional Christian) geographies tended to be keyed to Jerusalem as to sacred center rather than to sacred direction. As such, they resembled other omphalos- (or navel) centered cosmographies, such as ancient Greek and Chinese. In such cosmographies, geographic boundaries are equally valorized if somewhat paradoxical. Conceding that there indeed beyond boundaries of earth, such boundaries assert limits of properly human or habitable. Beyond limits of Greek oikumene (or house-world) are wild beasts, monstrous bodies, impassible deserts, mountains, ocean, insufferable heat or cold. Even within oikumene, rooms (continents) were of variable quality. Following Herodotus, Hippocratic treatise Airs Waters Places pronounces that Europeans will be well nourished, of very fine physique and very tall, because Europe situated midway between heat and cold [and] very fruitful ... very mild. Asiatics, on other hand, are less homogeneous ... because of changes of seasons and character of region. If human races tend to be geographically imprinted in traditional geographies, so too geographic image--the imago mundi--fairly glows with affect. (To Beowulf poet, wlite-beorhtne wang, swa waeter bebugeth or a gleaming plain girdled with waters.) From late Roman thought (primarily Macrobius) into Renaissance, it was commonplace to think of as macrocosm in which human body was recapitulated as microcosm. Again, world of earth (Orbis Terrarum) was astrologically predicated by environing spheres. In all these contexts, primary fact about early modern emptying of body from picture. The so-called can be thought of as an amalgam of new geographic discoveries (vast new lands and oceans) with dramatic developments in cartographic science that had made these discoveries possible. In none of three standard narratives of New Geography body real player. For post-Baconian, scientistic narrative, key development an objective spatial awareness predicated on mathematical graticule (keyed to itself alone) from which precisely bodily geography of myth and dogma absent. …

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