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Original Papers

The embodiment of a floating signifier

ORCID Icon &
Pages 110-123 | Received 16 Jan 2018, Accepted 31 Oct 2018, Published online: 02 Aug 2019
 

Abstract

As described in ethnographies, the ‘floating signifiers’ of social anthropology appear akin to similar categories in contemporary Western societies such as energy. Both may be embodied in actual experience. The practice of ritual orgasm, Pra-Na, and its relation to the group’s cosmology, are intrinsic to a religio-therapeutic community in San Francisco whose ideas derive from reified Western notions of ‘vital energy’ along with popular Chinese medicine, and in which the second author conducted fieldwork involving participant observation between 2008 and 2009. The article examines closely the formulations of ‘energy’ in the Western world, and similarities to non-Western concepts such as Melanesian mana, and asks whether the experience of ritualised orgasm by members of the group leads to their notion of cosmic energy, or whether the understanding of embodied energy is purely arbitrary from a somatic perspective. With reference to Durkheim’s ([1912]1976. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin) ­effervescence, we suggest the former is most likely.

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was given by the Department of Anthropology, University College London.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for comments on an early draft of this article from David Parkin, Martin Holbraad, Simon Dein and participants at a UCL research seminar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘… quite comparable to our notion of mechanical force’ (Mauss Citation[1904]1962, 107, cf. Keesing Citation1985). By contrast, Holbraad (Citation2007) argues that mana has the ‘maximum alterity’.

2 The ‘classic’ cases hardly exhaust the list of possible candidates. With a greater number of ethnographic examples now in the literature and a closer look at what ‘meaning’ might mean, we have an enormous list of likely candidates depending on our assessment of local exegesis.

3 Ellie Reynolds (Citation2013) conducted fieldwork with the community in 2008–2009 supported by an ESRC 1 + 3 Studentship. Pra-Na, like the House, Anastasia and Friedman, is a pseudonym and one which perhaps over-emphasises the oriental focus of the group.

4 Pra-Na was far from unique in its formulation and had a rich genealogy within the Bay Area. The founder, Anastasia, was in her early 40s when met during fieldwork; in her early 30s, she met a Buddhist monk who invited her back to his home and asked her to remove her lower garments and open her legs, and then shone a light on her genitals and quietly and slowly described them. He revealed to her the practice of Pra-Na and she experienced a revelatory moment, understanding the relationship between spirituality and sexuality.

The practice originates from a commune founded by B.D. Friedman who, through his experimentation in the field of female sexual pleasure, developed, performed and taught the ‘Extended Orgasm’. The first public demonstrations of this phenomenon took place in 1976, with Friedman and his wife inducing orgasmic states for up to 3 hours at a time. Freidman founded several communities in the Bay Area and in Hawaii, and it has been suggested that Anastasia lived in one or more, where she learnt the art of extended orgasm. However, there was some confusion within the community surrounding the extent of contact Anastasia had with Friedman, probably due to the fact that Friedman was and remains a controversial figure in the United States, and Anastasia might have been trying to distance herself from this. Several ‘intentional communities’ and individual educators based in San Francisco have drawn inspiration from Friedman’s teachings, including Welcomed Consensus, an intentional community that teaches and practises ‘Deliberate Orgasm’ or DOing (another form of Pra-Na), and Steve Bodansky and Vera Bodansky (Citation2000), who wrote Extended Massive Orgasm: How You Can Give and Receive Intense Sexual Pleasure. Many aspects of Pra-Na have clearly emerged from Friedman’s communes, including courses around gender and intimacy, as well as much of the terminology used. Friedman’s groups were themselves influenced by the many Large Group Awareness Training Seminars (LGATS) that emerged in the Bay Area during the early 1970s as a development of the Human Potential Movement include Warner Erhard’s est (Erhard Seminar Training) and the Landmark Forum. Scientology and OSHO have also been cited as influences on both Friedman and Pra-Na.

5 Our estimate is that female orgasm occurs in perhaps 5% of ritual sessions.

6 And cats.

7 Many of the members have previously been in addiction treatment programmes, and the aspirational term Higher Purpose probably reflects the Higher Power of Alcoholics Anonymous.

8 Hurlbert and Apt (Citation1995) argue that frequent masturbation improves the strength and frequency of orgasm in a Western population.

9 It is beyond this article to consider how a novel religio-therapeutic system with its optimistic new therapy inevitably acquires dissidents, failures and critics, which are then collectively interpreted as a countervailing force (Mary Baker Eddy’s malicious animal magnetism, Freud’s death instinct, Reich’s nuclear energy, perhaps medieval Christianity’s Satan). Our adepts have not (yet?) developed a named negative force opposed to Pra-Na, merely noting the therapeutic blockages which occasion personal problems and which themselves simply reflect the outside world.

10 Compare Flirty Fishing formerly practised in recruitment to the Children of God.

11 Horkheimer and Adorno (Citation[1968]2001) have suggested that nineteenth-century positivism read back into human nature the attributes of the non-organic: the personalistic now read as the naturalistic (Littlewood Citation1993).

12 The rather abstract scientific idea of ‘energy’ appears fairly late in the history of formal Western science. It is only with Newton that quantification of the dynamic appears. There is no Piagetian account of the development of the idea in modern children nor do we have an ethnophysics of energy: perhaps ‘witchcraft’ is as good an equivalent as we can find, but mana corresponds to all forms of power, the physical as well as the ‘mystical’ (Codrington Citation1891).

13 As similarly, with Ayurevedic medicine in its Westernised appropriation (Zimmerman Citation1992, Zysk Citation2001) where its more ‘violent’ aspects (surgery, catharsis) are now downplayed in favour of the gentle and soothing.

14 In China, Maoism had sought to purge TCM of its more energetic considerations which were seen as magical or religious (Wu Citation2013). At the end of the Cultural Revolution of the 1980s, hundreds of forms of the old Taoist practice of qigong suddenly became popular, often in the most ‘extreme’ form (‘spontaneous qigong’ which exhibited emotional catharsis – laughing, crying and convulsions). Ots (Citation1994) found that participants described this practice as emotional release and as the ventilation of previously hidden emotions. There was a government repression of these types, leading to a more concentrated attack on the official qigong umbrella organisations.

15 Although this is of course informed by conventional scientific theories, Peng and Knowles (Citation2003) argue Chinese are more contextual in their folk physics, emphasising gravity and medium whilst Americans are more dispositional, emphasising internal characteristics.

16 An analogous situation might be the experience of certain psychoactive substances. Do they yield an experience which makes certain social representations more plausible (Carstairs Citation1951)? Or are they physiologically purely arbitrary? How do the bodily properties of a substance or experience translate into symbolisations? Could we anyway have an understanding of orgasm that is relatively culture-free? Mah and Binik (Citation2001) suggest there is poor agreement about human orgasm in either sex, even of its definition whether as physiological or psycho-social, but they do suggest clitoral orgasm is more localised and intense, a sharper and more psychological experience, and (Mah and Binik Citation2002) more related to social context. To pick a few characteristics from their list, there is a build-up and release of ‘tension’, the whole body is involved, rhythmic sensations radiating throughout, with an impending feeling of inevitability, excitement and global pleasure, then exhaustion and/or relaxation, catharsis, and emotional excitement and fusion. To which we might add, a temporary loss of the sense of the conventionally embodied experiencing self (French: petit mort). So, we might comment that the only likely psychophysiological aspect relevant is a similarity to other brief violent and intensively pleasurable exercise. Is orgasm then just an intensification and concentration of habitual somatic experience (cf. Abrahams Citation1986), emotion recollected in tranquillity (Littlewood Citation1993)? – which would make it a good candidate for the elaboration of an idiom of ‘energy’. Our paper explores this energy as it is perceived by those who experience it. It becomes clear that ‘energy’ (like other meaningless signifiers) is a metaphor for social relationships, but the way it is physically experienced, defined by the discourse which surrounds it, leads to the production of specific social forms.

17 It may be represented in paintings (generally as a dove or less commonly as water or fire), but hardly in three dimensions: Bernini’s sculpture of the ecstasy of St. Theresa is famous for its ambiguity. The ‘emptier’ an empty signifier, the more opacity it offers to representation; the more it is able to be personified, the less.

18 Greek Πνεύμα: wind, breath or vital spirit; see A.V. translations such as Mathew 28, 19 and Acts 2, 4.

19 Durkheim’s idea of effervescence rather cut across his emphasis on the social as always being explained by the social: here, rather the appreciation of the physiological leads to the social. Crossing discourse domains is always tricky whether for Durkheim or us: we cannot say that the naturalistic orgasm ‘causes’ the cognition of energy. Nor are we concerned here with the general import of Durkheim’s concretisations of totemism and religion, but instead with borrowing the ethnographic process he chose and elaborated. We are talking here of mechanism, not social power or (primarily) sociality. Durkheim says little about the precise nature of effervescence, merely seeing it as a form of enthusiastic aggregation felt in the collective air. Recent interest in effervescence tends to see it as a sociological variable which explains, or does not explain, Durkheim’s account of the origin and persistence of religion as society (e.g. Olavesen Citation2001).

20 Allen (Citation1998) emphasises that Durkheim’s effervescence is rhythmic: like masturbation?

21 ‘[T]he greatest solemnity’ (Spencer and Gillen Citation1904, 179) although two rather more ‘ecstatic’ experiences are described (Spencer and Gillen Citation1899, 350, 365).

22 Codrington (Citation1891, 120) argues without elaboration that ‘all [Melanesian] power and influence’ are ‘supernatural’, yet earlier (page 119) he has merely said mana ‘effect[s] everything which is beyond the ordinary powers of men, outside the common processes of nature’.

23 When referring to ‘therapeutic religion’, we mean those acts of healing – however, it is defined – through the use of religious or spiritual symbols. The best-known example of this in anthropology is of course Lévi-Strauss’ (1963) discussion of the Cuna birth ritual. Csordas (Citation1994, Citation2002) goes further to highlight the importance of embodiment and embodied transformation in the process of healing, and the relationship between symbol and bodily experience.

24 Akin to the purely aesthetic Altered States of Consciousness sought in the psychedelic ­counter-culture, or perhaps a better example might be American action painting (Abstract Expressionism): indices paused before entering representation.

25 Classical authors hint at orgasm in connection with the rites of the adherents of Dionysius or the Magna Mater, but a more contemporary (if still debateable) example would be the sociologist George Woodcock describing the Canadian Doukhobors’ ‘irresistible excitement [as] Fire had become its own end, a passion that excited some arsonists to the point of orgasm as they watched the deadly splendour of their handiwork burst out against the night sky’ (Woodcock and Avakumovic Citation1968, 346). Public orgasm just seems too bodily, too antinomian and perverse to become generally ritualised: Reynolds (Citation1967) suggests there are analogues of effervescence among chimpanzees whilst Ramp (Citation1998) argues that Durkheim’s account involves expenditure, excess and exhaustion, and thus the violation or inversion of the normal order.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant number PTA-031-2006-00298].

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