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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
73Ballet 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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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).
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
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
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
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
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
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