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POWER, THE SENSES AND CRAFTING THE

GIFTED BODY

By

LAUREN ELIZABETH NORTON

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Archaeology and Anthropology

College of Arts and Social Sciences

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

June 2019

© Copyright by Lauren Elizabeth Norton 2019

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Declaration

I, Lauren Elizabeth Norton, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the

requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, is

wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. This thesis has not been

submitted for qualifications at any other academic institutions.

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program

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Acknowledgements

It is perhaps fitting that the completion of this thesis, which examines the powerful operations

of generosity between bodies and their results, has depended entirely on the openness of

others and their willingness to give of themselves towards me. Because of this I owe a debt to

many people – more than I can thank here. Yet in true Maussian style it is the obligation I

have felt to give back that has spurred me on to finish this thesis. Born of and borne by their

generosity, I hope its completion allows me to, in part, return the gifts of their instruction,

support, love, patience and encouragement. In the hope of giving back, of demonstrating my

worthiness of their gifts, and continuing the cycle of exchange, I give to them this thesis –

giving a part of myself and returning a part of them.

My first thanks go to the staff and students at Canada’s National Ballet School who

generously opened their world to me and whose experiences provide colour to the pages you

are about to read. Thank you for sharing with me your thoughts, feelings, passions, fears,

joys, successes and frustrations as you navigated the intricacies of life at the school and the

training process. To Mavis Staines, thank you for seeing the value of my project, for taking a

chance on me and for allowing me the opportunity to briefly join the NBS family.

To my supervisor Prof. Simone Dennis at ANU, I am enormously grateful for the guidance,

support and inspiration you have given me throughout this process. Thank you for

challenging me to push further, for your questions and suggestions, and for your belief in this

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Thank you to my friends Kathy, Bel, Allison, Kate and Briony for the shared cups of tea,

glasses of wine, laughter and your heartfelt words of advice and encouragement – whether

near or far I cherish your friendship.

I am so very grateful for the love and support of my family. In particular, to my mother Susan

and father Bruce, thank you for your unwavering encouragement and for making it possible

for me to pursue my dreams. This thesis and PhD would not have been possible without your

support. To my sister Madeleine, thank you for always cheering me on and for the quick

visits, warm hugs, shared laughs and words of advice. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my

grandmother Beryl, who died while I was away on fieldwork and to whom this thesis is

dedicated. Her commitment to lifelong learning, asking questions and doing things for herself

continues to inspire me and I know how proud she would be that I have completed this.

Finally, to my husband Shawn, whose continual love and support has enabled me to celebrate

the highs and survive the lows of this process. I am profoundly grateful for your willingness

to enter the worlds of anthropology and ballet, for your patient listening to and kind

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Abstract

This thesis examines the creation of gifted bodies, their sensory experiences and operations of

institutional power. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a

professional classical ballet school in Toronto, Canada, I examine how the students relate to

the training processes they must undergo in order to become gifted, where powerful exchange

relations between student, teacher and school facilitate the creation of body, identity and

institution.

I begin by suggesting that the institutional training of gifted bodies may be easily pursued

through Marcel Mauss’ (1954) theory of gift exchange, where gifts of skill, technique and

training are exchanged between teachers and students during daily interactions within the

ballet school. Over the years of training, these regularised gift exchanges result in the gifted

body – the core valuable of the institution. However, these are corporeal gifts belonging to

and residing within bodies, of ways of moving and feeling, which cycle between bodies –

something Mauss’ thesis does not permit access to. In recognising this, throughout this thesis

I follow and extend Rosalyn Diprose’s (2002) insight into the possibilities of corporeal

generosity and an openness between bodies to bring Mauss’ thesis into the realm of the

corporeal and sensory.

Addressing existing literatures of giftedness and ballet, I discuss how gifted bodies and their

relations have traditionally been analysed visually, where the performing body has been read

for what it may reveal about giftedness, gender, culture and society. As I will show, this has

often obscured the emic experiences of those engaged in such processes as well as the

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results of these powerful relations are sometimes made visible on the body – where muscles

become strengthened, stretched and sculpted – I argue that the creation of the gifted body is

not pursued by the institution or experienced by the individuals in this way. Instead, this is a

process felt by bodies at the level of sensibility.

To access these felt experiences, both haptic and affective, I apply a sensory analysis

privileging touch, which I argue is the way in which gifts for ballet are transmitted, received

and experienced by the body and through which giftedness is accrued. To do so, I expand a

definition of touch beyond physical contact to also encompass feeling between and within

bodies from which movement cannot be undone. Utilising touch in such a way allows an

examination of the intercorporeal relations between teacher and student in the ballet studio

and the way such relations involve the exchange of multisensory gifts. This approach

provides a different avenue through which to understand the powerful operations at work on

and between bodies in the context of the institution, where it becomes apparent that the

gifting relations that work to shape bodies and the hierarchies these encounters perpetuate,

enable the creation of bodies, identities and the institution itself.

Yet these are operations that determine which bodies become gifted and which do not. As

such, the pain experiences of students provide an apt illustration of the interface between

bodies and institutions, indicating not only success or failure or the body’s physical

transformation but also the regularised injustices which make the gifted body, identities and

the institution possible. To conclude I expand this discussion beyond the realm of classical

ballet to suggest that a similar approach may be applied to other forms of institutional life

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Table of Contents

Declaration i

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract v

Preface

1

A return to ballet 1

Anthropology offers answers and questions 3

A problem with perspective 5

Limitations and challenges 8

Introduction

13

Thesis questions, aims and argument 13

My gifted bodies 16

My approach to giftedness 19

Limitations to generosity 22

A sensory approach 25

A touching analysis 29

Powerful touches 33

A painful process 36

My research contribution 41

Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet

43

Mauss goes to the ballet 44

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Phase two: getting a better sense of ‘things’ 55

Ongoing evaluation 59

Fieldsite selection 65

Fieldwork methods: observation 66

Participants 69

Interviews and group discussions 69

Data analysis 71

Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies

73

Ballet in anthropology: a brief history 74

The look of the ballet body 76

Parallels to understanding giftedness 81

Bringing the body into focus 84

Training the gifted body 90

The way forward 98

Chapter 3: A touching analysis

100

A sense of ballet 101

Anthropology of touch: a brief history 105

Teaching with touch 108

What is touched touches back 113

Touch facilitates becoming gifted 115

The gift of time 120

Multisensory, multibodied training 123

Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet

125

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Tasteful bodies 127

Moving bodies 132

Seeing bodies 135

Seeing myself versus being myself 140

Misplaced mistrust 147

Hearing bodies 150

Feeling the sound of music 154

Considering reciprocity 160

Chapter 5: Powerful gifting

162

Bodies of the past 167

Obligation and identity 169

Not all bodies are the same 171

Bodies are also institution making 173

The problematic gift of identity 176

In a state of potential becoming 181

Institutionalised injustice 182

Looks can be deceiving 189

(In)formative touches 192

(In)appropriate-looking relations 195

Beyond touching 200

Chapter 6: Bodies in pain

202

The look of pain 204

The power of pain 212

The problem of pain 220

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The pains of bodies past 228

Making and differentiating bodies 233

Hierarchies made and re-made 239

The feeling of pain 242

Productive pain 247

Chapter 7: Conclusions

250

Future gifts 254

Beyond ballet bodies 257

Chapter summary 260

Glossary 268

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Preface

Preface

A return to ballet

When anthropologist Helena Wulff (1998a) described her seminal work, Ballet Across

Borders, as a way to return to the ballet world, her words struck a chord with me. Through

this anthropological study I too returned to the ballet world, one I first entered more than

two-and-a-half decades ago. But this research also enabled me to make a return to ballet, to in

some small way give back to a world that has given me so much.

When I studied ballet as a student, I enjoyed the demanding training process where hard work

and application bore physical results and I placed a high value on having the freedom and

opportunity to express myself through dance. After an acute injury, I transitioned to teaching,

where over the next decade I gained two internationally recognised teaching qualifications,

prepared students for exams, competitions and performances, worked as a guest tutor and

choreographer, and sat on an advisory panel for ballet teachers. This shift in focus, from

student to teacher, opened up new, previously unimagined, ways of looking at and exploring

dance. Working with others’ bodies, as opposed to my own, enabled a certain clarity to better

understand technical efficiency – an awareness I wish I had had as a dancer. This new insight

was coupled with a deeper understanding of the differences between bodies; and one of my

favourite elements of teaching became working out how best to connect with a student to

ensure I was providing them with the optimal opportunity to learn – be it verbal description,

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Years later, I found once again that another career path and shift in focus paved the way for a

different engagement with my experience of ballet. Anthropology enabled me to explore and

think about ballet from a different perspective, providing me with an avenue through which

to reflect on my own experiences and situate them within a broader historical, social and

cultural context. In this way, considering others’ experiences of the ballet world has allowed

me to revisit and make sense of my own.

Ballet, for me, was so much more than just a physical practice or avenue for artistic

expression. It was a practice through which I discovered and worked on myself as a person. I

learnt about the difference between physical and mental limits and what my mind and body

were capable of achieving in the face of adversities such as exhaustion, illness or injury. The

act of dancing and the coordination of movement to music gave me an outlet to express

feelings and emotions in a safe environment surrounded by like-minded individuals – my

‘ballet family’. Ballet gave me the satisfaction of controlling my body down to the smallest of

movements, as well as the exhilaration of letting my body go and allowing the movement to

take over and in a way, control me. Because of this, I understand ballet to be an activity that

depends on total sensory emersion.

Training refined my visual sensibilities of perception and attention to detail as I analysed my

body in the mirror as well as the bodies of those around me. My imagination was broadened

as I continued to visualise how my body was moving while away from the mirror and how it

might look to others. Ballet further developed my kinaesthetic awareness – the awareness of

my body as it moved through space – as well as the ability to ‘listen’ to my body and

understand what my body was telling me through the multitude of physical sensations I

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Preface

execution of movement. It would tell me if I was on balance or where my centre of gravity

needed to be adjusted. It would tell me if my shoulders and pelvis were aligned, in order to

display the correct line for a certain movement. It would tell me if the correct muscles in my

legs were being used, in order to make my allégro more powerful and dynamic. Also, the

physical feedback from teachers, who would support the weight of my leg while I was trying

to activate the desired muscles, or touch my shoulders to draw my attention to the tension I

was carrying, was invaluable in understanding what my body was currently doing and what

else it was capable of. Equally important was my ability to not only listen to the music and

the sounds my body made as I danced, but to ‘feel’ the music through my body. In this way,

my body would reflect the rhythmical nuances of a melody with the timing and dynamic of

my movement. A teacher once told me to work my body like a musician playing an

instrument and that heightened awareness of how each of my muscles was able to express the

complexity of music has stayed with me ever since. These balletic gifts and my multisensory

experience of them were therefore instrumental in how I learned, refined, executed and later

taught movement. That experience has remained part of the person I am today and continues

to shape my interaction with ballet more than a decade after my last ballet class.

Anthropology offers answers and questions

Wulff describes how, despite no longer dancing, her “body still remembers what it feels like

to dance” (1998a:1). In a similar vein, anthropologist Cynthia Novack (1993:36) spoke of a

“kinaesthetic reference” that stayed with her long after her days of taking ballet classes were

over. Their words resonate with me. The embodied memory and feeling in the very fibres of

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longer move the way it used to, yet when I hear certain types of music, I can feel my body

wanting to respond to it; that past experience is still very much a part of me, a shade that

resides under the surface of my skin. However, by situating this bodily experience within a

Bourdieusian theoretical framework of habitus and body hexis, I reconsidered my experience

of this historically situated bodily and sensory response to music – from one of frustration

and upset, to one of fascination and interest – how does that movement, that physical

response, become embodied? How is that ballet body created?

In looking to answer those questions, I turned to discussions in much of the literature about

the body/mind dichotomy in ballet. Anthropologists Anna Aalten (2005) and Maartje

Hoogsteyns (2013), among others, discuss the duality of working the physical body in an

attempt to reach the imagined ideal body. As a dancer, I was taught to understand that there

was always an element of technique to develop, that my body and what it could do could

always be challenged, improved on and extended. This at times motivated me to continue to

push myself beyond my physical, mental and emotional limits, yet was at other times

debilitating: no matter what I did, my body would never be or do all that I wanted it to do.

Later, when injury prevented my continuing to dance, I was forced to accept that my mind

could not always control my body. However, through a consideration of Michel Foucault’s

(1988) technology of self and Marcel Mauss’ (1973) techniques du corps I am able to

understand this problematic experience as part of a broader context in which the intertwined

relations between my physical and imaginary, present and future bodies were necessary for

both the creation of my ballet body and my identity as a dancer.

Aalten refers to such experience as the “occupational culture of the ballet”, where “belief in

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Preface

construction” (2005:67). In this way, my seemingly contradictory responses in trying to

reconcile the imagined ideal body with my own physical body as well as the control (or lack

thereof) of my mind over my body, although something I did not recognise at the time, were

vital elements in my development as a dancer and gaining membership to the ballet world.

But I was prompted to ask: how does this actually occur? I surmised that an examination of

the ballet training process, then, ought to be key to answering this question, however such an

examination seemed to be, for the most part, missing from the anthropological literature.

A problem with perspective

With much scholarly focus on what the performance of ballet represents and looks like on

stage to outsiders, while obviously the final product of ballet production, behind-the-scenes

discussion of what it takes to get the dancers to that professional level is rare to find in the

literature. Given that most of a dancer’s dancing life is spent training in the studio and, in

contrast, only a small portion of that time performing, such a performative focus in the

literature is puzzling. How can only looking at what the performance of ballet represents to

an outsider adequately represent what constitutes the complex world of ballet?

Historically, much of the literature seeks to understand and explain what ballet is and what it

symbolises within Western culture and society, through the visual analysis and objectification

of movement, bodies and performance. This overwhelmingly visual focus on performance

has left little room for the exploration of how ballet is experienced by the dancer or what is

involved in the creation of a ballet dancer. The voices of the dancers themselves are often

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distinct from what it looks like to an outsider (see Daly 1987; Jackson 2005; Wulff 1998a,

1998b). This lack of emic perspective has sought to be addressed in recent years and Wulff’s

work with professional ballet dancers (later built on by Aalten using contemporary body

theory to re-situate the physical body, missing from Wulff’s work, within ballet scholarship)

can be seen as trailblazing in this regard. Making room for the physical body in ballet

scholarship has been an important step in encouraging analysis to move away from seeking to

understand what ballet is or what the performance of it represents, towards a more holistic

exploration of the experience of dancers and complexities of the form. However, these emic

perspectives are derived primarily from professional dancers, rather than students, and while

providing insight into the ongoing occupational construction of a ballet body, do not provide

clear insight into how that process is seeded, negotiated or experienced by individuals.

I have found only three scholars who have turned their attention towards the training of

ballet; their ethnographic descriptions of the training process and the students’ perspectives

are insightful. In addition to Wulff’s occupational work, as mentioned earlier, dance scholars

Jill Green (2002) and Angela Pickard (2012, 2013, 2015) have applied Foucauldian and

Bourdieusian analyses respectively to the institutionalised training of dance. In particular,

their work highlights the operations of power which serve to control and train students within

training institutions and how the students experience such processes. Despite gaining new

insight into how a ballet dancer may be crafted, their theories only in part reflect my own

experiences. As mentioned above, my experience of ballet was one of total sensory emersion,

where every sight, sound, smell, feeling and even taste, yielded information to my dancing

body. However, the available literature reduces the involvement of the senses in ballet to a

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Preface

training. This restrained sense register, I feel, siloes ballet into something that can only be

understood and experienced through our eyes rather than our bodies. Even when experiences

of pain and pleasure are discussed, these are analysed with reference to how they are shaped

by the pursuit of a visual bodily ideal (see Aalten 2005, 2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou

2011; Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Hamilton et al. 1989; Pickard 2015; Wainwright and

Turner 2004; Wulff 1998a, 2006, 2008). Such analysis backs ballet into a sensory corner,

with no room for other experiences of ballet and indeed no acknowledgement that ballet can

be experienced in any other way. In regarding ballet bodies purely as objects to be visually

consumed by an audience or shaped to meet an aesthetic ideal, current work largely ignores

the fact that the people performing are living, breathing, feeling bodies.

Some scholars, despite on occasion taking a sensory approach to other forms of dance, have

nonetheless maintained that vision is the primary and most important sense for a ballet dancer

(see Aalten 2004; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Cohen Bull 1997; Green 2002; Grau

2005; Hall 1977; Legrand and Ravn 2009; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015; Salosaari 2001; Wulff

1998a). While I do not dispute that ballet is indeed a highly visual art form and a practice

heavily reliant on both the sight of the dancer and the audience, I do not believe vision is

more important than other sensory experiences while dancing nor is my own experience of

ballet or my body solely defined by my sense of sight. In fact, one of the world’s leading

ballet companies, the Royal Ballet in London, England, has run ballet classes for the blind

and visually impaired for more than 25 years in an attempt to debunk the “myth that ballet is

a sole visual art form” (Bartley 2016). In this way, I liken the literature on ballet to an iceberg

where the majority of attention has been paid to the most obvious and visible part of ballet

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invisible to the observer. It is this invisible experience I have sought to access in my research

and thesis, which has necessitated the application of a sensory analytic other than vision.

For all the above reasons, I have explored how anthropological theories and in particular an

anthropology of the senses can be applied towards an examination of the institutional training

of gifted ballet bodies, how those processes are experienced by the students, and how they

work to shape those gifted bodies. In so doing, my thesis moves beyond the world of ballet to

consider institutional power and how bodies relate to its operations.

Limitations and challenges

I acknowledge that this project has been for me of both personal and professional significance

and has enabled me to reconnect with my past experience in the ballet world and, as a result,

has enabled me to reshape my own identity. However, while my previous experience and

bodily knowledge of ballet has steered me to conduct this research and given me a certain

perspective through which to analyse the ballet world, I do not consider this to mean that I am

better placed than others to conduct this research, nor that my experience will be equal to that

of others’. In fact, whilst my past experience gave me a certain type of understanding of

ballet, a return to ballet as an anthropologist exposed my lack of understanding in other areas,

which in turn provided the motivation for my further enquiry. In this way, my work is

evidence of Max Weber’s (2012) interpretive framework, where experience doesn’t

necessarily equate to understanding. Because of this, I consider myself to be both an insider

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Preface

somewhat dichotomous position posed some challenges to my research, particularly as to

how I might best give voice to the experience of others.

The very act of writing this thesis has been problematic. How could I turn others’ sensory

experiences into text? How could I put into words the bodily experiences of individuals that

they had already translated into language? As Michel Serres (2008) shows, it is almost

impossible to translate the senses and our experience of them into language. That the act of

turning experience into words “anaesthetizes all five senses” (Serres 2008:89) at once

separating experience from the body where words become not representations of experience

but only of language: “I cannot tell or write of touch, nor of any other sense” (ibid., 58). That

words do not equal experience poses a challenge for this thesis which seeks to communicate,

through writing, the sensory and bodily experiences of gifted individuals as they work with,

on and through their bodies. This challenge is compounded by the well-documented

questioning within anthropology of how accurately others’ experiences may be represented

through text (see Abu-Lughod 1991; Clifford and Marcus 1986).

In acknowledging this, it is necessary for me to state that I do not consider my words to be

equal to that of my participants’ sensory experiences – they are poor translations. However, as

language becomes meaningful once it is understood within its sensory context (Okely

1994:46), where possible I use the words that my participants chose to express their

experiences. This process of what I might call disembodied translation also proved difficult

and unsatisfactory for my participants, as they often struggled to turn their sensory

perceptions into language. How does one articulate how movement feels when it just feels

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My challenge, then, was to find different ways to talk about the body and the sensoria that

highlight this problem and complexity, as well as to deal with the contradictions that this task

created.

In so doing, and following Serres, I do not suggest that sensory and bodily experiences can be

explained in a neat linear fashion. As our senses are inextricably linked to each other, blended

under, in and on the skin, knotted together, as Serres suggests, in a tapestry of tangled threads,

it would be fruitless to try to further abstract the experiences of individuals beyond that of

translating them into words. Instead, I have attempted to keep the senses and the body

together as much as possible, to show how these concepts are linked together, to highlight the

complex relationality of the senses, as well as the fact that it is through our senses that we

take information into our bodies. We hear music, we taste food, we smell fragrance, we feel

touch – even the act of speaking aloud requires a sensory “feedback loop which guarantees

the audibility of our own voice” (Serres 2008:110). I do, however, focus on and use an

exploration of an anthropology of touch as a ‘way in’ to explore these multisensory

experiences. This is one of those contradictions that highlights the messiness of writing about

the senses: where I must single out one of them in order to write about how they are

inseparable.

Much has been written, from as far back as the Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher

Democritus, that considers touch to be the sense through which we ‘make sense’ of all our

sensory perception (see English 1915; Derrida 2005). While this perhaps offers justification

for my approach, my exploration considers touch experiences to be much broader phenomena

than simply those elicited by physical contact. Instead, I also investigate the often invisible

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Preface

this broadened definition of touch, I am able to best articulate the complex sensory

experiences of gifted individuals as they work within and are shaped by not only physical

practice but also institutional processes, thereby allowing my work to contribute to an

understanding of the creation of bodies. While singling out any one of the senses would allow

me to offer insight into institutional worlds, an analysis of touch allows me to access the

powerful processes at play within the institutional setting experienced by and which facilitate

the gifted body.

Serres, among others, maintains it is through our senses that we gain knowledge about

ourselves and the world around us (see also Classen 1997, 1999; Csordas 1990; Desjarlais

and Throop 2011) – that sense leads to sense – and that our bodies and selves are created

through this process that is forever in flux, in motion (see Diprose 2002; Manning 2006,

2014). A consideration of bodies in motion through a touching analysis, allows me to explore

not only the way physical training processes shape the body but also how the reciprocal

exchange of knowledge and flow of power enables the accumulation of knowledge and

ongoing creation of bodies.

This temporality, the idea of bodies being created in ongoing movement and therefore

arguably never reaching a finished or complete state, is also another contradiction in this

thesis. Asking how a gifted body becomes seems to necessitate that a gifted body is an end

state and something static. But if bodies are continually in formation, engaging in relations

with themselves and others that enable a movement towards an unattainable end goal, then

the idea of a static and achievable finished body is problematic. That the body is never truly

complete and instead is always in formation aligns not only with my own experiences, as

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finished gifted body, beyond identifying the characteristics it must possess in order to be

considered gifted at certain points in time and thus able to continue in its creation. Instead, I

ask how it becomes and suggest that the giftedness a body acquires is to be found in the

processes of becoming and the relational web of experience between the senses, the body, the

self and others that those processes depend on.

My examination of the gifted body is situated within and between bodies, and my thesis

explores the role of the senses in the production of knowledge and formation of gifted bodies

and the individuals’ experiences of these powerful formative processes – for one cannot be

understood without examining the other. This necessitates a move away from thinking about

bodies or power in a strictly Foucauldian or Bourdieusian sense, to one which privileges the

complexity of sensory perception and intercorporeal exchanges. Such an approach also

requires an extension of Maussian concepts of giftedness and exchange to bring the corporeal

to the fore. While this thesis grapples with the elastic concepts of the body, the self, senses

and power, these concepts do not stand alone and, just like our sensory complex, all work

together, interlaced and interwoven, coexisting in inseparable relations with one another.

Moving towards an understanding of the sensory and institutionalised formation of bodies

allows for an understanding of the way all experience is underpinned by the social and the

shared: that it is through an openness to exchange relationships with others that gifted bodies

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Introduction

Introduction

Thesis questions, aims and argument

My thesis poses three central questions. First, what is a gifted body? Second, how does it

become? And third, how does the gifted body experience its own becoming?

Building on Marcel Mauss’ (1954) theory of gift exchange and bringing it into the world of

the corporeal, I consider a gifted body to be reciprocal, one that is able to receive, process,

give back and pass on gifts (whether thing, knowledge or skill) in exchanges with other

bodies. My analyses work to show how the gifted body is crafted through these intercorporeal

relations – the ongoing and formalised exchanges with expert others – as the value and

prestige of being and becoming gifted is accrued within the physical body. As the results of

these powerful processes and exchanges come to reside in, as well as shape the body, the

experiences of the body as it becomes gifted are also embodied, registered through the

sensoria and, in particular, the body’s ability to feel.

To access such intercorporeal experiences, I have sought an approach that goes beyond the

existing visual and performative analyses of gifted bodies. Visual analysis may allow

consideration of what a gifted body looks like and what outwardly visible gifts it must

possess in order to become gifted, such as body shape, gender or skin colour. For example,

female ballet dancers have been described as predominantly white and thin (see Daly

1987:14). Yet I suggest that evaluating bodies in such a way elides how a gifted body

becomes and what its own experiences of becoming are. While I do not dismiss the role of

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alternative sensory tool through which to analyse the gifted body – touch. Different tools, I

argue, allow for different understandings and possibilities for giftedness – for powerful

processes of becoming are not always visible although their results may be. By privileging

touch, which I argue is the primary mode through which becoming a gifted body is both

affected and experienced, I offer an alternate entry point through which to explore the gifted

body.

In so doing, I build on an anthropological understanding of the sensory and political nature of

touch to show how the process of becoming gifted depends on bodies willingly engaging

other bodies. This is an ongoing process where negotiated multisensory relations are

mediated and made possible between bodies by their capacity to feel. In order to become

gifted, I argue that bodies must hold themselves open to others during relations in which gifts

of skill and knowledge are exchanged between and giftedness is accrued in bodies over time.

However, these relations are hierarchical – comprised of expert and novice bodies – and

bodies possess differing gifts and potential for giftedness. As such, not only do these relations

craft gifted bodies but they also determine which are insufficiently gifted.

This is a process in which identity, difference, belonging and exclusion are continually

(re)defined by how bodies respond to the gifts of others – how they succeed or fail to meet

the obligation to receive and repay, that such exchanges entail. In other words, the touching

relations in which bodies must willingly engage to become gifted may also determine their

failure to become so. Where gift exchanges and giftedness are predicated on body-to-body

generosity, such a process therefore also harbours the potential for injustice – injustice that

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Introduction

Considering these sensory and political relations through touch and the body’s ability to feel,

allows me to reconsider the senses in my examination of both giftedness and institutional

power. I challenge the common etic visual analyses of the gifted body and the Foucauldian

notion that institutions chiefly control and shape bodies through surveillance, to instead

consider the role of sensory and corporeal experience in the institutional production of bodies

and accrual of giftedness. I thereby advocate that attention be paid to the powerful operations

at work in the spaces within and between bodies and institutions – operations of power that I

will show are not always as they appear. I build these ideas to culminate in a discussion of

pain – an experience unable to be separated from touch – as it offers a visceral point of

contact between bodies and institutions and ties together each of my thesis’ central themes:

giftedness, sensory perception, temporality, movement, power and the social formation of

identity, difference, belonging and bodies.

While my thesis may appear to be a Maussian analysis of gift exchange applied to bodies, my

approach deviates from his work in two distinct ways. First, through my application of

sensory tools (and in particular touch as an analytic) and second, through my discussion of

pain – neither of which are themes examined by Mauss. As such, my thesis is intended to

build on and extend our understanding of The Gift (1954) as it relates to bodies and offer a

contribution to the anthropological literature on giftedness, body production and institutional

power. Namely, that gifted bodies are reciprocal, crafted through ongoing senso-historical and

intercorporeal relations both activated and experienced through the body-in-becoming by

touch, where the institutional embodiment of giftedness is experienced by and results in the

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My gifted bodies

To execute such an approach, I consider the foundational element of the professional ballet

school in which I undertook 11-months’ ethnographic fieldwork: the gifted ballet body.

In Chapter 1, I discuss how bodies are selected for admission to the ballet school on the basis

of a particular aptitude for ballet dancing: a property referred to emically as ‘a gift’. A gift for

ballet is not equally given to bodies: bodies come in all shapes and sizes with ranging degrees

of strength, flexibility, coordination, musicality, artistry, passion and tenacity. Balletic gifts

present as various combinations of raw potential that can be developed in and through

formalised exchanges with expert others – namely training under the instruction of ballet

teachers who have successfully developed their own gifts in their own previous, generational

exchange relations. However, some bodies are more possessed of and accumulate greater

value – of increasing giftedness – than others. Some will complete their training at the school

and graduate, others will not; some will win places at top companies around the world, others

will not; some will go on to have celebrated careers within the dance world and beyond,

others will not.

The audition process for selecting students for entry into the school involves searching for the

traces and evidences of giftedness and continues after a student’s enrolment, according to

their capacity to respond to training. While we might suppose that these gifts are visible and

measurable, such as great technique, body shape, flexibility and strength, not all are thus and

indeed the key attribute that identifies the potential for giftedness is often invisible and harder

to define – what teachers often referred to as the “microchip”. Bodies identified to be in

possession of such a gift are willing and able to participate in and make sense of the training

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Introduction

back. It is only those bodies able to do so that are considered worthy of being crafted into

gifted shape.

As the school’s selection process shows, a body’s capacity to receive and repay is something

not easily assessed by simply looking at auditioning bodies. Instead, such evaluation is only

made possible during an extended period of daily body-to-body interaction between teachers

and potential students. As such, the process to determine which bodies to take into the school

is conducted in two parts – the audition class and the month-long summer school. It is these

possessions and processes that the institution relies on to determine and sort those bodies

recognised as producing giftedness and those insufficiently gifted. The latter can only benefit

from the generosity of others but cannot produce anything of equal or greater value in return;

the former are bodies worthy of gifts (of skill, of instruction, of knowledge) and are thus

bodies deserving of training.

Prestige is laid upon novice ballet bodies as they are granted entrance into the school on the

basis of their giftedness and is accrued as they are re-accepted and invited to return after each

year’s evaluation period – their place never guaranteed. This is a prestige felt by selected

students, as one told me:

There’s so many kids that audition to come for summer school, and then there’s so many kids in summer school that audition for the year, and out of those people we’re the ones that got in. Just, like, that’s amazing.

Formalised, parcelled-out gifts of skill, knowledge and training are bestowed on the novice

ballet bodies by their teachers and the institution over the course of years of training. Upon

receiving such gifts the students demonstrate their worth and developing giftedness by

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understood and acted on the gifts given to them through their increasingly honed techniques

du corps (see Mauss 1973). These small exchanges, involving the detailed development of

particular muscles, movements, techniques and specific corporeal capacities (of fingers, toes,

thighs, bellies, necks etc.), build over the years of training to the ultimate exchange, as the

dancer graduates with and ‘receives’ from the school a fully competent ballet body. In turn,

the institution and its teachers acquire the generational prestige which the dancer’s now fully

gifted body will bring as they join an internationally recognised dance company – the core

mission of the school I visited and all professional ballet schools around the world.

Training therein might be usefully conceptualised in the terms of a series of intercorporeal

gift exchanges that manifest, ultimately, in the gifted body – a body that is the result of

formalised and regularised exchanges with other bodies and in which a gift for ballet is

realised. If the dancer fails to return these small and regularised institutional prestations by

demonstrating an increasingly skilled body, one which in future will be capable of returning

the gifts of their instruction, in and through manifestation of the techniques du corps of which

they were previously not possessed, the teacher’s desire to give gradually diminishes and is

eventually terminated. This withdrawal of generosity results in the student’s temporary or

permanent dismissal from the school when they are not re-accepted for the following year,

their gift insufficient to maintain the exchange relations of instruction and demonstration.

Such dismissal will arise irrespective of how much financial or any other capital the student

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Introduction

My approach to giftedness

These Maussian concepts of gift exchange and techniques du corps might be applied to all

manner of exchange relations to illuminate the core valuables and exchanges at play in

nontraditional contexts well beyond the traditional societies to which Mauss conducted and

applied his work. They might also equally be applied to situations in which the body itself is

the main commodity, such as elite sports academies (the athletic body), the armed forces (the

military body), or correctional facilities (the reformed body), among others. In the world of

professional ballet training, the body is the core valuable and is at the heart of exchange

relations of skill and prestige. Equally, the notion of giving and receiving the gifted body is at

the heart of the socio-corporeal world of the ballet training institution.

Indeed, much of Mauss’ thesis resonates with my own research in the ballet school. Mauss

(1954) initiated the notion that giving, rather than commodity transaction, establishes

communal relations and the social identities of the parties within that community (such as

teachers and students within the ‘ballet family’), distributing to each party the reciprocal

relations of obligation. His is an argument about a gift-based social economy, an economy

that might be hidden beneath the pretence of equal social contracts between individual agents.

As the gift circulates, it determines not only what might appear to be the preexisting identity

of the individual, but equally the rank and situation of that individual relative to others, such

as ballet teacher/student or, more broadly, employer/employee, parent/child, master/slave etc.

In so doing, it confers privilege on gift receivers and concurrently a stern moral obligation

toward the giver – an obligation that cannot be repaid in terms any other than by the

maintenance of a social bond (Mauss 1954:6). The especial power of the gift to do this, to

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or in the case at hand, skill, knowledge, capacity – is a transfer of part of the personhood of

the giver (ibid., 44-45).

As philosopher Rosalyn Diprose (2002) shows, this notion puts Mauss’ thesis beyond that of

the social contract theorist, in the sense that while such theorists do assume that a part of

one’s personal property is indeed exchanged through contract, Mauss assumes that the gift

remains part of the personhood of the giver, “so that its circulation is one that seeks a return

to the place of its birth” (Diprose 2002:6). Models of social economy, as proposed by social

contract theorists, consider the exchange of commodity, where “objects of equivalent

exchange value are reciprocally transacted” (Schrift 1997:2), to be separate from the self.

Therefore, the identity of both giver an recipient is claimed in advance of the contract and

bonds between them are severed once the transaction is made.

In contrast, social exchange is not constituted by the exchange of commodity (whether thing,

skill or knowledge) deemed separate from the self, but through the gift of part of oneself to

another (Mauss 1954:10). Further, the respective identities of the giver and the recipient are

not given in isolation prior to the giving of the gift. In other words, in models of social

exchange, identity is not formed separately or prior to the exchange, but is constituted

through the giving and receiving of the gift. That is, I give you a part of me and claim a part

of you in return, thus we are made different from each other. Because the gift comprises and

determines the social identity of each body interrelatedly, and with it a lasting social bond

that obligates the recipient to the donor, the debtor in such exchanges is the recipient, rather

than the giver – another contrast with the contract model of exchange (see Diprose 2002:6).

Such insights as Mauss’ would make compelling sense of the enclosed social world of the

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Introduction

corporeal exchanges (the importance and specificity of which I will discuss further

momentarily and throughout this thesis). I might say that the exchange of balletic skills for

the claim the school makes on crafting bodies desirable to the best dance companies, is surely

a gift bestowed on the dancer that comes with part of the teaching self. This is writ large by

the fact that these are bodies that bear the hallmarks of generational training, of skills (quite

literally) handed body-to-body-to-body through the centuries. Tracing the pedagogical

lineage of dancers is similar to following a family tree (Fournier 2018), where relations

between teaching and student bodies travel back for generations (see Homans 2010). Gifted

bodies, therefore, come replete with the physical characteristics of having been trained by one

particular school and set of teachers, who give of their own embodied knowledges to the

bodies they are crafting. In this way, corporeal transactions of balletic gifts give the identities

of ballet students and teachers in their very exchange, and in so doing, the identity of the

institution itself.

I might also say that it is because of this historic and “magical legacy” (Mauss 1954:43) that

the novice ballet dancer, the recipient of the gift of training, feels the obligation to give back

to their teachers; indeed, the structuring of school life insists they do, or they will fail to be

invited to return for the next year of study. Certainly, the pursuit of Mauss’ notions as they

stand, shifted into the terrain of the corporeal, would go a great distance to understanding the

institutional ballet training world, the gifted body, the specific exchanges that yield the ballet

dancers they turn out, and the reputations of the schools that are dependent on such excellent

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Limitations of generosity

But there are certain elements of Mauss’ thesis that make it insufficient to answer my

questions – of understanding not only what gifted bodies are, but how corporeal exchanges

are made and experienced, and the relations of power that govern the balletic

institutionalisation of gifted bodies. These limitations arise from a perceived aporia of the gift

(see Derrida 1992), whereby in suggesting that identities are given and bonds are established

in the exchange, Mauss ignores that to give of oneself necessitates a presence of self before

the exchange and that relations between bodies must have already been established for the

exchange to occur – thus the gift and giving become impossible (see also Diprose 2002:4-8;

Schrift 1997:10).

As Jacques Derrida (1992) has argued, and contrary to the above discussion about social

contract versus social exchange, Mauss’ work does actually consider the gift as a commodity

separate from its giver. Derrida’s argument is based on the notion that at the heart of gift

exchange there is a decision to act that is made reciprocal through an obligatory bond. Thus

Mauss’ thesis remains firmly within a logic of exchange and contract within which the gift

and giving are impossible (Derrida 1992:24). Such an aporia is created because under the

logic of contract and exchange, the gift is recognised precisely as a gift – it practically

functions as a commodity – and, once recognised, the gift bestows a debt on the recipient that

can simply be annulled through an appropriate, suitable form of return.

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Introduction

In other words, as Diprose notes:

Derrida’s analysis suggests that it is precisely this economy of contract and exchange between self-present individuals that makes generosity impossible. The gift is only possible if it goes unrecognized, if it is not commoditized, if it is forgotten by the donor and the donee so that presence (the gift as (a) present and the presence of both the donor and donee) is deferred. (Diprose 2002:6)

As she suggests, this problematic of the gift might be inconsequential were it not for the

issues it raises regarding Being. Diprose notes how the gift itself is tied “to the gift-event of

Being: Being itself gives itself in the present on the condition that it is not (a) present” (ibid.).

If identities are given in the exchange, in which the total dispersal of identity between bodies

results in identity and difference as self and other (such as teacher and student), then giving

also resists Being. This resistance happens because, regardless of any delay in counter-gift to

allow for the forgetting of the obligation to return (as suggested by Mauss and extended by

Bourdieu 1997:232), as soon as those identities are claimed, a debt to the other has been

incurred and the exchange once again falls into a parsimonious economic cycle of obligatory

exchange (Diprose 2002:7). Derrida suggests, therefore, that the gift must instead be given

before self-identity is recognised, which of course leads to its impossibility because Being is

constituted by the exchange (Derrida 1992:24).

Diprose’s work extends an understanding of the gift by revealing that both Derrida and Mauss

ignore the fact “that in claiming freedom and property as one’s own, something has already

been taken from others” (Diprose 2002:8, emphasis added).

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indigenous peoples, and immigrants). It is the systematic, asymmetrical forgetting of the gift, where only the generosity of the privileged is memorialized, that social inequities and injustice are based. (ibid.)

To address this, and to move past the question as to whether the gift is possible or not,

Diprose offers an examination of how such social injustice is made possible, an injustice she

argues that both constitutes and perpetuates hierarchical exchange relations (ibid., 9). Such an

examination leads her to suggest that for relations to have the potential to exceed a debtor/

debtee economy of exchange, and thus generosity to be at all possible, then the self must not

be recognised as a finite subject able to claim determinate identity through exchange, but one

continually in formation through the bodies of others. Equally, she argues that if the gift is to

be forgotten so that it may operate unrecognised, this must mean that gifting operates

between bodies outside consciousness, at the pre-reflective and sensory level (ibid.). She

determines that:

Only in invisible silence does generosity do its work of personal and social formation, and then only by maintaining an openness to others that is its condition. Only on the condition that a sovereign subject is neither the agent nor product of generosity does it do its formative work. (ibid., 7-8)

Mauss’ work, which Diprose shows ignores the feeling and ever-in-formation body, does not

provide for such an understanding.

However, unlike Diprose, my concern is not whether the gift or generosity is possible. While

her work may easily lead to analyses of present repellent politics that assert their own

superiority precisely on the silencing of the gifts of others they deem lesser (think current

domestic and international political rhetoric and policy about migrants and border control,

LGBTQI+ rights, body autonomy, fertility and abortion, social welfare etc.), my focus is

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Introduction

understanding of how parsimony may be overcome, that allows me to put aside the

problematic of the gift and to extend Mauss’ thesis to the corporeal and sensory world of

professional ballet training. I build on her suggestion that generosity is predicated on the

ability and willingness of bodies to hold themselves open to others, as bodies engage in a

sensory process of continual becoming, to argue that institutionalised gift relations operate

precisely at this level of corporeality – both of feeling as a physicality and of feeling as an

affectivity. Both depend on the openness of bodies involved in the giving and receiving of the

gift, on relations that are equally carnal and affective, while the product of identity and

difference that results from their interactions is a material yet ever-moving production – the

gifted body.

A sensory approach

So how might I access these powerful exchange relations? First, let me return to those

asymmetrical forgettings of generosity that Diprose describes form the very basis of social

injustice. These depend on the unequal evaluation of different bodies – a necessarily powerful

procedure. As I noted above, ballet bodies accrue value, belonging and identity, through

accumulating the gifts that once belonged to other bodies, namely their teachers and theirs

before them. However, as Diprose shows, this accrual of giftedness often comes at the

expense of other bodies (ibid., 8). In the case of the professional ballet institution these

non-dancing bodies are nowhere present in places meant only for gifted bodies. As I have

described, the school relies on processes of audition and re-evaluation to determine those

bodies which possess the required balletic gifts that can be exchanged during training and

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bodies, arraying them accordingly, such that some bodies are considered worthy of gifts and

accepted into the school or invited to continue their training, while others are not. Such an

understanding, I argue, permits insight into giftedness as it is felt, affectively and corporeally

by those bodies.

Accounting for this corporeal dimension of giftedness in my thesis permits insight into the

relations of power and their experience as they are corporeally enacted in institutional

settings. To do so, I extend and hone Diprose’s insights into the importance of attending to

the corporeal experiences that register, harbour and facilitate the operations of power and the

giving and receiving of gifts, by arguing that it is insufficient to simply attend to ‘the body’ or

‘corporeality’. Instead, particular sensory registers provide very different access points to the

operations of power and the relations of gifting and giftedness, particularly when that

giftedness is vested in the body itself.

In Chapter 2, I discuss how gifted and ballet bodies have been accessed in and through

numerous analyses privileging vision. These analyses have either sought to identify bodily

traits needed for success, such as flexibility, strength, proportions or even artistic skill,

thought to be possible through viewing and measuring the body (see Chua 2014; Hamilton et

al. 1992; Hutchinson et al. 2013; Koutedakis and Jamurtas 2004; Kushner et al. 1990;

Mišigoj-Duraković et al. 2001; Sanchez et al. 2013; Ureña 2004); or have cast bodies as the

beautiful tabula rasa onto which broader values and attitudes are inscribed, such as gender

relations, histories, and particular cultural milieu (see Alderson 1987; Banes 1998; Daly

1987, 1997; Foster 1996, 1997; Hanna 1988; McRobbie 1997; Novack 1993). Bodies have

thus been considered passive and static, subject to external forces and able to be read for

(38)

Introduction

contexts. Not only has this paradigmatic view continued to produce knowledge on the gifted

body and the relations of (often gendered) power in which it is involved, it has equally

obscured the far less (visually) obvious ways in which power operates on institutionalised

bodies – and not only those in the ballet world.

In such analyses, the dancers’ voices and their experiences as they are shaped by such

powerful discourses are not evident – a silencing that extends to the body itself. This bodily

absence persists despite literature that recognises that the way dancing looks to an outsider is

different to how it feels to dance (see Jackson 2005; Wulff 1998a:9, 1998b:107), and that

simply looking at bodies would be an “odd and shallow” way in which to understand an

embodied practice such as dance (see Wainwright et al. 2005:56). In addition, although there

is literature that recognises that ballet becomes embodied through physical training (see Grau

2005; Green 2002; Morris 2003; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015; Ureña 2004) and is learned

between teaching and student bodies (see Pickard 2015; Wulff 1998a, 1998b, 2006, 2008),

the overwhelming majority of research to date has focused on adult professionals. As such, I

argue that visual analyses that privilege an audiential view of bodies have left the processes

of becoming gifted, and the dancers’ emic and felt experiences of them, unexplored and

inaccessible.

All this has important consequences. First, simply observing or reading the gifted body for

symbols and signs, I suggest, might not be a robust way of gaining insight into broader

cultural or social factors such as gender – factors commonly understood to be contextualised

by time, place and experience (Daly 1992, 2000). Second, viewing the gifted body in such a

way – as simply a vehicle for the communication of something broader – entirely misses the

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with the institution, with teachers, with other dancers, with itself? To examine the experiential

dimensions of giftedness and the processes involved in the institutional crafting of gifted

bodies that have been hitherto left aside, and to move analysis beyond the dominant mode of

reading and measuring the body for insights it might give into broader contexts, I instead ask

how a gifted body becomes and how it experiences its own becoming. To answer these

questions, I put aside the predominantly visual analyses of both gifted and ballet bodies that

have been conducted to date. Instead, I employ an analysis that centres on the body and the

primary sensory mode through which I argue giftedness is both accrued and experienced –

touch.

I offer my touching analysis, centred on both the feeling of bodies and the fleshy relations

between them, for a number of reasons. First, the way in which the institution itself assesses

the suitability of auditioning bodies in two parts and conducts year-long re-evaluations of

those selected points to the importance of felt body-to-body relations in the pursuit of

giftedness. As described earlier, while some gifts are visible on bodies, others are only able to

be evaluated between teacher and student through longer intercorporeal interactions during

class, as students are given time to demonstrate their ability to receive and return gifts of

instruction. Second, as Diprose has suggested, in order for the gift to go unnoticed then gift

exchange must operate at the sensory level – an understanding Mauss overlooks in his

analysis (see Diprose 2002). This too suggests a link between the senses, relations between

bodies, and the accrual of giftedness. Third, despite the visual preoccupation of the ballet

literature, there are findings that point to the fact that how bodies look may not be how they

feel (see Jackson 2005; Wulff 1998a, 1998b), and that although dancers may work their

(40)

Introduction

of at the pre-reflective level (see Legrand and Ravn 2009). And finally, while ballet training

has rarely been the subject of anthropological inquiry, it is recognised that ballet is taught

relationally, between bodies (see Wulff 1998a, 2008).

While Mauss overlooks the role of the feeling, sensing body in his theory of gift exchange, by

grounding my examination in the body and the sensory and felt relations between them, I can

address this limitation as well as expand an anthropological understanding of both ballet and

giftedness beyond what the look of performing bodies might show us. For when giftedness

resides in the body itself, the processes and experiences of being and becoming are of course

embodied (Crossley 2005:16).

A touching analysis

Anthropologists have a responsibility to hold their analytic tools to rigorous account and

examine why they are using them and the kind of results they deliver. This is especially true

of sensory approaches, where scholars have been urged to articulate both why and how their

chosen analytic is appropriate (see Pink 2015), as well as those tools used to examine gifted

bodies, where early feminist analyses of dance have been criticised as being too reductionist

and unsuitable through which to attend to moving bodies (see Banes 1998, 1999; Daly 1992,

2000; Fisher 2007; Foster 1996, 1997; Grau 2005; McRobbie 1997). I argue that touch allows

me to not only examine the corporeal specificities of giftedness and the embodied processes

of becoming gifted, but to access and ground my examination of power in the feeling body.

I use touch to examine how gifted bodies are crafted within the context of the institution – in

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