I. Two Lives, One Unrecognized Problem
In the days before Christmas 1863, Hannah Cullwick, maid-of-all-work in a household at Kilburn, roasts a turkey and eight fowls for forty expected guests, cleans boots and knives, keeps the kitchen fire high, and bastes the meat “till I was nearly sick wi’ the heat & smell”. She carries the ham and pudding upstairs at midnight and comes down again at four to stir the fire. On Christmas Day itself, with the family gone out for the evening, she washes herself to visit a friend but has “such a headache & felt so tired & sleepy” that she sits in a chair and sleeps until five. Then she has tea, feels better, and walks out on “a beautiful moonlight night” to sit with other servants (Cullwick 1984: 143–145). Her relation to her work has not changed, and she has adopted no new account of her condition. What has changed is the practical possibility of the rest of her evening.
On 16 January 1918, in the Trobriand Islands, Bronisław Malinowski rises at a quarter past seven, goes out for gymnastics, and in a coconut grove reflects on “the meaning of a diary”: the readjustment of values, “the taming of my lusts, the elimination of lecherousness”, the harmony of individual and collective happiness. He walks back “full of lofty thoughts”. In his tent he then records “inability to concentrate; mental standstill. I fought against it, but work did not go well” (Malinowski 1989: 186). A morning of exercise and exceptional self-clarification has left his capacity to work exactly where it was.
These episodes belong together neither because they express a shared cultural belief about energy nor because their authors share a genre, a class, or a language, but because each records a change in what a living being is able to go on doing, and in neither does that change correspond in any straightforward way to the apparent state of the body.
Both diaries also record something that most accounts of fatigue and recovery leave out. Cullwick’s tiredness lifts when a telegram announces that Munby is on his way; Malinowski spends night after night under his mosquito net fighting what he calls “lecherous thoughts”, and on one occasion diagnoses his condition as “sexual hysteria, caused by lack of exercise” (282). Libido belongs among the conditions on which continued living capacity depends, and the two diaries show that it can deplete those capacities as readily as it restores them.
The question that connects the two lives is simple to state: what allows living beings to continue doing what they are doing, and what happens when the conditions of that continuation change? This article answers it through the concept of metabolic remediation and advances three propositions. Metabolic remediation is continuous, and in no way confined to experiences of illness or exhaustion. It proceeds through all five mediations together, never through an isolated body or an isolated mind. And its importance cannot be read off what diarists say about themselves, since their self-descriptions are selective symbolizations of a coordination already under way before any entry was written. The two diaries permit comparison because they preserve dated traces of how living capacities, desire among them, are continually sustained, interrupted, and reorganized.
II. From Metabolic Stakes to Metabolic Remediation
What metabolic remediation means
Any account of how people live must do two things that are easily confused. It must reconstruct accurately how people symbolize their own lives, and it must identify what is metabolically at stake in that living. The first task yields the diarist’s point of view; the second asks what the living recorded in the diary required in order to continue. Metabolic remediation names a central part of the second task. It may be defined as the continuous coordination through which living beings maintain, recover, redistribute, or transform their capacities for further living.
The concept gathers together sleep, food, exhaustion, illness, concentration, work, companionship, desire, and recovery. Each has usually been studied by different scholars with different instruments, and metabolic remediation gathers the stake running through them under one name so that it can be investigated as a single empirical concern. It is broader than physiological replenishment and more exact than a metaphor for feeling well. It encompasses sleeping, eating, exercising, recovering, changing an activity, receiving care, finding company, pursuing or restraining desire, and altering the symbolic demands one places on oneself, insofar as each bears on whether further living remains possible. The aim is to isolate the conditions of continued living capacity as something that can be observed, compared, and found to fail, without dissolving metabolism into everything.
Why the five mediations are indispensable
No single mediation explains remediation on its own. Multisensorial embodiment includes exhaustion, sickness, appetite, arousal, pain, sleepiness, movement, and the activity-specific competences of a practised body. Multispecies being-with includes assistance, company, intimacy, demand, obligation, care, conflict, and the presence or absence of others. Multiversal dwelling includes weather, temperature, moonlight and darkness, seasonal rhythm, and terrain. Multimateriality includes beds, kitchen fires, tents, oars, dinghies, cameras, letters, photographs, mosquito nets, padlocks and chains, and the whole arrangement of built living and working spaces. Multisymbolization includes diagnoses, diaries, resolutions, rules of sexual purity, professional expectations, explanations of weakness, and the categories through which a difficulty becomes recognizable at all.
These mediations cannot be treated as separate explanatory variables. A tired person cannot be understood by adding together five determinants of tiredness, and a desiring person cannot be understood by adding together five determinants of desire, because the object of inquiry is the changing coordination through which tiredness or desire arises, becomes consequential, and is negotiated.
Why recursivity matters
The five recursivity levels distinguish ordinary functioning from the recursive engagement of difficulty. At L1 a person moves among eating, working, resting, and talking without identifying any of these as remediation. At L2 something becomes felt: tiredness, pain, restlessness, arousal, relief, slackening attention, renewed vigour. At L3 the felt change is articulated. At L4 articulations are stabilized into rules, schedules, diagnoses, self-descriptions, or theories of recovery. At L5 those stabilizations are themselves questioned and reorganized.
Greater reflexivity does not reliably improve remediation. Malinowski’s elaborate resolutions, about work and exercise as much as about lust, often fail to produce the practical continuity he seeks. Cullwick repeatedly returns to effective activity without first formulating a theory of herself, and she almost never names her own desire. If the levels formed a ladder of increasing control, the more reflexive diarist would be the more reliably able to work, and the diaries show nothing of the kind.
The three recursive counterparts
Remediation also engages three types of recursive counterpart. A nonrecursive counterpart, such as a cracked oar, a padlock and chain, or a mosquito net, does not respond to the one who engages it. A selfrecursive counterpart is one’s own living organization, altering in relation to its own ongoing state, as when a body practised in scrubbing tires differently once it starts climbing and reaching for high shelves. An interrecursive counterpart is another living being whose responses respond to one’s own: a sister on a park bench, an employer inspecting the kitchen, a lover who arrives on the night train. A photograph cannot respond as a fiancée does, and an imagined conversation cannot secure a real reply, yet all may enter a single attempt at remediation. Comparing Cullwick’s responsiveness to Arthur Munby with Malinowski’s engagement with an absent fiancée depends on holding the three types apart.
Two necessary distinctions
Remediation must first be distinguished from restoration. A person may remain ill while recovering the ability to work, or remain physically capable while losing the ability to sustain a particular activity. Immediate coordination must, second, be distinguished from sustainable coordination: working through exhaustion may keep the present running while compromising the capacities the future will require. Metabolic remediation is therefore the ongoing achievement of viable continuation through changing conditions, and never simply the maintenance of an unchanged state.
III. Diaries as Evidence: An Ontologically Grounded Theory Method
Why diaries?
A retrospective account of a life selects what the narrator has come to think mattered, whereas a diary sequence often preserves minor transitions between activities before any such selection: meals, weather, sleep, interruptions, letters, headaches, failed work, exercise, unexpected pleasures, renewed activity. Diaries nonetheless do not transparently disclose living. Writing one is itself a materially and symbolically mediated practice that takes time, requires equipment and opportunity, and has consequences for the person who writes it.
Two very different acts of diary-writing
Cullwick wrote at Munby’s request, and the writing added to the demands of her working day. The published edition is Liz Stanley’s selection from seventeen diaries comprising several thousand quarto pages, chosen to convey Cullwick’s working life and her relationship with Munby (Stanley 1984: 26). Malinowski wrote in Polish, as part of an explicit effort to regulate his conduct, his work, and his attachments. The English text is Norbert Guterman’s translation, from which “a few extremely intimate observations” were omitted and from which the early Polish diary was excluded because it “antedates Malinowski’s anthropological career” (Malinowska 1989: ix). Both records of intimacy are therefore filtered: Malinowski’s by his widow’s omissions, Cullwick’s by an editor’s selection and by a relationship in which Munby himself later excised from his own diaries the passages describing “the training and teaching that I gave her” (Stanley 1984: 12). The comparison can be systematic within selected periods, but the documentary coverage is far from equivalent: a handful of entries from Cullwick across a decade, set against months of nearly daily entries from Malinowski in 1914–1915 and 1917–1918.
The OGT procedure
Ontologically Grounded Theory takes its primary categories from the ontology of living coordination, and it reads each diary in dated sequences rather than extracting every mention of tiredness, recovery, or desire. For each sequence it reconstructs the activity the diarist was trying to continue; what changed in the conditions of that activity; which mediations became difficult to coordinate; what the diarist, or someone else, did in response; what followed, so far as the text allows it to be established; and how the diarist articulated, explained, or failed to articulate the change. Observed actions, reported experiences, the diarist’s causal explanations, editorial interventions, and the analyst’s reconstruction are kept apart. A reported feeling of exhaustion, arousal, or sudden vigour licenses no inference about physiological mechanism, and a brief note of pleasure licenses no inference of successful remediation until one has looked at what came next.
The methodological importance of silence
A good day may leave a single line, and a crisis may fill pages, so the length of an entry is no measure of metabolic stakes. Malinowski’s gaps and Cullwick’s declared weariness with writing both bear on the analysis. Silence about desire is especially hard to read. Cullwick almost never names sexual feeling, while Malinowski names it constantly, and neither pattern measures how much desire mattered to the person writing. The absence of an articulated problem does not show that remediation was absent, and an absence of writing does not show that coordination was going well. That uncertainty belongs to the method, and interpretation should not be used to make it disappear.
IV. Hannah Cullwick: The Metabolic Remediation of a Working Life
Christmas 1863
The sequence of entries headed 23 to 26 December 1863 shows a household’s festive coordination resting on a particular distribution of metabolic demand. Upstairs there are forty guests, a play performed in costume, singers engaged for the night, and a hot mince pie carried up with a ring and a sixpence in it, over which the company “had good fun”. Downstairs, Cullwick records, “We had no fun downstairs, all was very busy till 4 o’clock & then to bed” (1984: 145). Fred Crook, who comes in to help, is welcome “as well as for company” (144). The warmth, food, and sociability the household enjoyed were produced in large part by her expenditure, and its unbroken night was paid for with her broken one, since the waits woke her at four “just in time” to stir the fire (144). The ease of some depended on the sustained exertion of another, and it is in the diary of the person doing the work that this becomes legible.
Christmas Day follows the same round of tasks until a gap opens when the family goes out for the evening. Cullwick washes to go and see Ellen, but headache, tiredness, and sleepiness intervene. She sleeps in a chair, has tea, and “felt better” (145). Sleep and tea do more than prepare her for the next round of labour: they reopen being-with. She walks up to the Grove by moonlight, sits with the servants there, has a little supper, and is in bed by ten. Recovery serves company here as much as it serves work.
The next morning, blacking a kitchen grate so greasy that it must be washed first, she writes that she is “glad the Christmas was over so far for if it kept on long as it’s bin the last 3 or 4 days I should be knock’d up I think” (145). The sentence sets a temporal limit on the whole festival. The household’s coordination had succeeded, and Cullwick had kept it going, but what worked for four days could not have worked for eight. Present functioning is one thing, and the conditions of continued functioning are another.
July 1871: going out in order to go on
On 28 July 1871, at the Hendersons’ in Gloucester Crescent, Cullwick comes down to “the wretched-looking kitchen” feeling “so sick & bad from so much dirt & hard work”. She does not decide to rest. She decides to leave: “I felt that I couldn’t do any more till I’d bin out & forgot it a bit” (171). After dinner she and her sister Polly walk to the Exhibition “very slowly as if I hardly car’d whether I got there or no”. They leave a performance in the Albert Hall because the organ “sounded too loud”, find the gardens and terraces “so grand & pleasant”, look at the pictures, and then sit in the park watching the riders in Rotten Row.
There the sisters talk. Asked whether she would like to live a lady’s life, Polly says no: “with health & strength as you & I have I think it’s nice to work & get one’s own living.” Cullwick agrees, and adds the qualification on which everything turns. If service could be made as happy as it might be “& I could get out when I wanted without asking leave”, she would never wish for anything else. They walk back by seven, and Cullwick has tea and feels “so much better & ready for work again” (172).
Her report of renewed readiness deserves to be taken seriously without any pretence of knowing its mechanism. The afternoon altered her whole configuration of activity at once: walking at her own pace, withdrawing from a sound that was too much, gardens and pictures, a sister who answered her, talk of strength, work, and a possible future, and food on her return. The analytical question is how that changed configuration made continued activity possible, never which single element supplied the energy. The same passage forbids treating remediation as a freely chosen personal strategy, because Cullwick names the constraint herself: she cannot go out when she wants without asking leave. Access to remediation is organized through power. A week later, when Miss Margaret complains that the cleaning has not been done thoroughly enough, Cullwick is left “feeling quite sick with disappointment” (173), and the interrecursive field that had allowed the afternoon’s recovery takes part of it back.
September 1873: a body differently tired
By September 1873 Cullwick and Munby were secretly married, and she was living as his servant in his chambers in the Temple (Stanley 1984: 263). On 12 September she spends the afternoon dusting the books on two ranges of shelves beside the fireplace. “It was a dusty job & jumping up & down & reaching so high tired me worse than scrubbing does” (270). Exhaustion is not proportional to the apparent heaviness of a task. Scrubbing, which most observers would rank as harder, is the familiar movement of a body that has scrubbed for decades, while repeated climbing and reaching recruit a different posture and a different pattern of effort. Bodily competence is activity-specific, and so is tiredness.
That evening she finds a telegram announcing that Munby will arrive before eleven and wishes to see her “black work” the next day. She is “very much pleas’d as well as surprised”, and “took off the tired feeling I had” (270). She airs his room, scrubs the kitchen on hands and knees, washes, and dresses in the French servant’s costume he has asked for. When he comes down to the kitchen he “clasp’d his drudge & kiss’d her for ever so long”, and they talk until nearly two (271). Anticipating the encounter did change Cullwick’s felt capacity to act, but that change does not show that her earlier expenditure had vanished: the next day, after scouring a room while Munby watched and then dozed, she too lies down and falls asleep (272). What the passage establishes is that remediation can transform what further activity feels possible without any corresponding replenishment of bodily resources, and that one of the things capable of producing that transformation is desire.
Libido without consummation
The desire that lifted Cullwick’s tiredness took an unusual form, and it must be described carefully. For years before their marriage she wore a padlock and chain to which only Munby had the key, called him “Massa”, blacked her face and arms with lead, washed his feet, and on occasion licked his boots (Stanley 1984: 13). Stanley judges that the relationship “was almost certainly never sexual in any conventional and genital sense before marriage, perhaps not after it either”, while acknowledging that its chains, boot-licking, and blacking up are “replete with sado-masochistic and sexual overtones” (14). McClintock (1995) reads the same material through fetishism and the racial imagery of the minstrel show on which the blacking drew. The libido documented here is real and organized, but it is organized around work, dirt, and service rather than around intercourse.
The diary shows how this desire entered the ordinary rhythm of Cullwick’s days. On an evening in October 1863, after a full day’s work, she walks to Munby’s rooms, cooks his dinner, washes up, washes his feet, packs his portmanteau, and records that they “had a little petting” before she leaves at half past nine. The next evening, at his request, she blacks her face, does the same round of tasks with her face black, sits between his knees while he reads her verses he has written in her voice, kisses him “at all the best parts”, and again they have “a little petting”, after she has washed the black from her face “in the water I wash’d the feet in” (138; see also 140). In an overview of these years she calls foot-washing “what I am always so pleas’d to do for him”, a pleasure “I never can tire of, especially as long as I know M. likes it & loves me too” (54). In 1871, recording how Miss Margaret has told her to stay out of sight of visiting ladies, she adds that Munby was “sitting on my lap o’ Sunday” when she told him, and closes: “M.’s love I couldn’t do without” (170).
Three points follow. First, for Cullwick erotic remediation runs through labour itself. The evening’s tasks at Munby’s rooms are additional work at the end of a working day, and they are also what she looks forward to. Any account that sets labour on the side of depletion and desire on the side of restoration will misdescribe her. Second, the remediation is mutual but asymmetric. Munby’s desire is satisfied by watching her work and by her dirt, and the expenditure that satisfies it is hers: on 12 September he “dwelt so long on seeing me work next day & being thoroughly black” that they did not sleep until two (271). Third, Cullwick is not simply the object of this arrangement. Stanley argues that she “used and encouraged Munby’s needs and obsessions” to bind him to her, so that “from out of the elements of her greatest powerlessness Hannah constructed her greatest power” (14). Her desire also had boundaries. She refuses the advances of workmen at the Temple, “I hate them to pretend making love to me” (270), and when she asks herself whether she “should have felt such pleasure for a common working man”, she answers that she might, if such a man “could love as purely” as Munby, but doubts that one could be found (272–273).
The marriage itself reorganized the conditions of this coordination. The day after Munby leaves she writes that she has “not felt dull today”, that “I’d begun to feel very tired, but all that was gone”, and that she can now “go out & come in when I please” (272–273). The woman who in 1871 could not go out without asking leave can now do so, though only as the secret wife of the man whose desire had shaped her servitude.
September 1873: the diary as one more demand
On 30 September Cullwick writes that Munby “only wishes me to write to the end” of the month, and that she is glad, “for I’ve got so thoroughly tired o’ writing what I think to most people must be very tiresome”; “by making me write for so many years he has quite tired me of it” (279). The source that informs us about her work was itself work, and part of the same relationship. It joined Munby’s desire to know her days to her bodily and temporal effort, and it had to be fitted into those days, after the same scrubbing. Cullwick is neither simply a victim of labour nor someone whose pleasure in work disproves her exploitation. The issue her diary raises is the changing viability of a living coordination whose conditions she controlled only in part.
V. Bronisław Malinowski: The Failure of Reflexivity to Secure Concentration
September 1914: the conditions of ethnographic work
The diary opens with a long ride out of Port Moresby that leaves Malinowski “very tired”, with his left leg gone numb, after which he gallops along the beach and watches tennis at Government House (12). On 27 September 1914 he writes that he cannot say he has felt fit. An excursion the previous Saturday has overtired him, and “Insomnia (not too marked), overtaxed heart, and nervousness (especially)” are the symptoms. He diagnoses himself: “lack of exercise, caused by an easily overtired heart, combined with fairly intensive intellectual work, is at the root of this condition.” He prescribes more exercise in the cool of morning and evening, judges arsenic “indispensable”, and resolves not to exaggerate the quinine. In the same entry, without transition, he turns to his fieldwork, whose explorations suffer from “two basic defects”: he has “rather little to do with the savages on the spot, do[es] not observe them enough”, and does not speak their language (13).
The juxtaposition is analytically significant. Observation and language learning are sustained living activities, depending on waking, walking, attending for hours, tolerating heat, sitting with people who may not wish to sit with the observer, and returning to the same tasks day after day, and a methodological ideal produces none of these conditions by itself. What the discipline later remembered as a programme of participant observation appears here beside an inventory of sleeplessness and palpitations and a prescription for exercise, and the problem of doing good fieldwork can be reconstructed, at least in part, as a problem of metabolic remediation.
January 1918: the tent, the oar, the rain
Early on 6 January 1918 Malinowski notes that “the purpose in keeping a diary and trying to control one’s life and thoughts at every moment must be to consolidate life, to integrate one’s thinking, to avoid fragmenting themes” (175). The entry for that Sunday then tests the purpose against the day. He is annoyed to discover a crack in one of his oars. Then comes “monstrous rain”, and with the flaps down the tent is “so dark that reading or writing is out of the question”, so he moves his table to the other side. One informant turns out to be a poor source; women begin to wail in nearby houses; “gradually my nerves got worse”. He also records difficulties with taking photographs, “characteristic helplessness, one of the main difficulties in my work” (176). Discouraged by the cracked oar, he does not take the dinghy out, does strenuous gymnastics instead, and struggles against “a fit of depression that assailed me at 4-5”. In the evening, drying himself by the fire, he notes a “completely changed outlook after strenuous gymnastics, the discomforts of camping now seem good fun” (177).
The diary’s aspiration to integrate life meets conditions that no resolution can reach. A tent must admit enough light, an oar must be sound, a camera must cooperate, and informants must be present, knowledgeable, and willing. Concentration is therefore an accomplishment of mesocosmic coordination across a damp tent, a cracked oar, a rainy afternoon, and other people’s availability, and cannot be located inside an individual mind. Yet the same entry also records a remediation that works: vigorous movement in the open, after which the very discomforts that had worn him down are revalued as fun.
16 January 1918: knowing and being able
The entry of 16 January, with which this article opened, is the clearest demonstration of the relation between recursivity and remediation. The meditation in the coconut grove is L3 articulation of a high order and an attempt at L4 stabilization. The diary is “conversation with oneself”, a means of “grasping the deeper currents in contrast to mere ripples”; “life must proceed at a slow pace if it is to run deep”; “systematic though monotonous work with a purpose should be enough for me”. He feels “a nirvanalike contentment with existence”. Back in the tent, “bathing in the sea felt in my bones; inability to concentrate; mental standstill” (186). Articulation and stabilization did not secure L1 functioning. A person may know what should happen, state it with eloquence, and remain unable to do it.
It would be too quick to conclude that his reflection was simply counterproductive. That evening he does gymnastics in the rain, “Controlled my nerves”, resolves that “I must never neglect gymnastics 3 times a day”, and returns feeling “mentally balanced”. The next morning gymnastics “removed slackness but introduced a certain nervous tension, nervous irritability, insomnia which I have not had for a long time”; by midday, after a visit that irritated him, gymnastics “calmed my nerves, restored my balance and put me in an excellent mood” (187). The real question is when reflection and exercise helped, when they failed, and why the same practice produced opposite effects on consecutive days. Intensive self-scrutiny can itself become one more demand on the capacities it is meant to govern.
What Malinowski’s exercise consisted of
The diary allows a fairly exact reconstruction of what Malinowski did when he “exercised”, although it never itemizes the movements of a single session. His repertoire had six elements. The most frequent is what he calls “gymnastics”, “exercises”, or, more specifically, “Swedish gymnastics” and “Swedish exercises” (150, 177, 179, 282, 283). The reference is to the system of free-standing movements derived from Pehr Henrik Ling, the regulated sequences of bending, stretching, turning, and lunging, performed to a set order and requiring no apparatus, that had spread through European schools, armies, and medical gymnastics by the turn of the century. That is what made it portable. Malinowski does his Swedish exercises at a water hole, in “the clearing near the mangroves”, “under the palms”, on “the cool side of the veranda”, on the road to a neighbouring village, in the rain, and once at night while a Trobriander named Ogisa “held the lamp; he was scared” (145, 150, 176, 187, 188, 282, 283). In January 1918 he plans “to clear a piece of ground where I can do my gymnastics”, and in the meantime does Swedish exercises “à plusieurs reprises” along a stretch of path where “the view is broader and more pleasant” (176).
The other elements are running, rowing, walking, sea-bathing, and occasional feats. He runs in short bursts, “for 4 minutes ran vigorously” at a water hole (174), runs “part of the way” on a morning walk or “now and then” around the island of Samarai (110–111), and on 17 January begins with “Running, then very intensive exercises” (187). Rowing his dinghy is the most consistent endurance exercise of the Trobriand period, and he often records it with an adverb of effort and an outcome: “I rowed energetically, and felt fine” (154); “Rowed vigorously; felt better” (203). On one day in January 1918 he takes the dinghy out at a quarter to one because he “felt the need for exercise”, runs for four minutes at half past four, and at six rows to Boymapo’u and back (174). Walking, often alone and often “around the island” or “around the village”, fills the evenings. He bathes and swims in the sea, once recording “a very invigorating bathe in the sea, swam, and lay in the sun. I felt strong, healthy, and free” (59). In early 1915, on board ship, he climbs the mast twice in one day: “Delightful feeling of freedom mixed with fear and depression, for I lost my ‘nerve’” (74).
He also graded his sessions. They are “light” (66, 191), “brief but effective” (177), “strenuous” (176), “intensive” (127, 188), or “very intensive” (187). And he attached explicit functions to them. Exercise is to repair the heart and nerves (13), to dispel a headache (134), to remove “slackness” (187), to serve as “an essential form of solitude and mental concentration” (187), and to give “an opportunity to escape” from the people around him and from “my own agitation” (188). The resolution to do gymnastics “3 times a day” (187) turns this repertoire into an L4 regimen, and the diary records the regimen’s limits as faithfully as its successes. Exercise sometimes fails to take: “A bit of gymnastics in the morning”, after which he “didn’t feel up to it” (199). It leaves him aching, “rheumatism or gymnastics?” (272). It produces insomnia (187). And on a moonlit night late in May 1918 it brings “severe nervous tension; a feeling as if hundreds of arms were coming out toward me from the mixed shadows” (284). The same practice, in the same climate, performed by the same body, has no fixed metabolic effect.
Letters, photographs, and novels
Malinowski repeatedly tries to stabilize his relationship with Elsie Masson through letters, remembered scenes, imagined conversations, and photographs. Looking at her photos brings a “violent surge of longing” (167). When the mailbag arrives on 7 January he feels “nervous strain rather than feeling of happiness” and sleeps badly; the next day he writes to her from ten until five and ends “exhausted”, needing “a brisk walk” (178). He concludes that “it is easier to love those who are not alive than the living” (179). Remembered and imagined responses can alter his feelings and his capacity to work, but a remembered reply differs from a live interrecursive encounter: it can soothe or unsettle without offering the correction a present partner would supply.
Novels show again that no activity has a fixed metabolic function. Malinowski calls reading them “simply disastrous” and goes to bed thinking “about other things in an impure way” (31). He resolves that he “must not read novels, unless I am sick or in a state of deep depression” (110), reads one on board ship until it produces “the desired effect” of sleep (98), and on a day when he “felt rotten” reads “trashy novels” that “did not hold my attention” (144). The same activity serves by turns as medicine, soporific, escape, obstacle, and, as the first of these entries shows, a stimulant of desire.
Lust, purity, and the mosquito net
No metabolic stake in the diary is articulated more often than sexual desire, and none is governed with more elaborate machinery. Malinowski’s resolutions are explicit L4 constructions: “purity in deeds depends on purity of thought, and I resolve to watch myself right down to the deepest instincts” (181); “Resolution to be pure. I must have no lecherous or sentimental thoughts about any other woman” (183); “I must have a system of specific formal prohibitions: I must not smoke, I must not touch a woman with sub-erotic intentions, I must not betray E. R. M. mentally” (268). He keeps a moral ledger in which concentration and desire appear on the same page, giving himself “a plus for not reading novels, and for concentrating better; a minus for mentally making love to the matron” (109). In the grove on 16 January he formulates the rationale: “The taming of my lusts, the elimination of lecherousness, concentrating on E. R. M. gives me happiness, contentment much greater than just letting go does” (186).
The diary shows desire both as a resource and as a drain. Concentrated on Elsie, it organizes his days, his letters, and his plans, and he can write that under the mosquito net “I want her very deeply and intensely. My thoughts do not deviate into any lecherous impasse” (174). Dispersed, it costs him sleep and work. After midday gymnastics in the Samarai heat he lies down, “but didn’t sleep; I was chasing away lecherous thoughts”, and by the afternoon “I was so exhausted I couldn’t do a thing” (111). After rowing back by moonlight and gorging himself on bananas and rice, he records “‘Subversive’ thoughts”, resolves “to control them”, and then: “But [gone] too far. Slept very badly. Weak heart, numb hands” (162). Under the net, a “surge of physical longing for E. R. M. passes gradually into indiscriminate lecherousness” (184). The mosquito net (tainamo) is the material site of this struggle: the place where the day’s coordination is suspended, the body lies still, and desire becomes most insistent.
Two features of this material bear directly on remediation. The first is that Malinowski treats exercise as a means of governing libido. When, in May 1918, he records that he “scandalously pawed” a Trobriand woman named Nopula on the same day that he had done Swedish gymnastics on the veranda, his retrospective verdict is “Diagnosis of yesterday’s condition: sexual hysteria, caused by lack of exercise” (282). The diagnosis applies a hydraulic model, in which unspent energy must find an outlet and exercise offers a respectable one. The diary’s own evidence tells against it, since gymnastics had not prevented the episode and on other days produced nervous tension rather than calm. The second feature is that his attempts at governance sometimes work through quite different means. Recognizing that he writes passionate letters to Elsie while “thinking of dirty things a la Casanova”, he notes: “When I realize this, my lecherousness vanishes of itself” (121). On another evening, aroused by bodies in the kitchen, he tries to “reverse the problem” by imagining whether men’s bodies arouse Elsie in the same way: “This pours cold water on me, and I physically shudder” (283). Here an L3 articulation reorganizes L2 feeling, and it does so through an imagined interrecursive counterpart rather than through a rule.
The diary also records the costs of Malinowski’s desire to others. The women he records having “pawed”, Nopula, Jabulona, and an unnamed girl in a village (256, 282, 298), appear only as occasions for his guilt and his resolutions. Their own purposes, and whatever they made of being touched by a powerful white man whose presence in their villages they had not chosen, are entirely absent from the record. An OGT reconstruction must say so plainly. A libido that is remediated, in Malinowski’s own terms, through exercise, letters, and self-reproach also drew on the bodies of people whose capacity to refuse him was structurally constrained.
July 1918: when success leaves little trace
On 16 July 1918 Malinowski writes: “For two weeks haven’t kept the diary. Throughout that time my health was good, my capacity for work was excellent, and I worked a great deal” (296). The fortnight was not free of difficulty, since he was mourning his mother and walking alone every day to weep, but the passage settles one point beyond doubt: the frequency of diary-writing cannot be equated with the intensity of living or the significance of what occurred. The most productive fortnight in the diary is represented by a retrospective sentence.
Malinowski’s diary is a prolonged attempt to govern living through symbolic reflexivity, through rules about work, exercise, reading, and desire, and it repeatedly shows that living cannot be secured by symbolic reflexivity alone. Where Cullwick reveals how work and recovery are coordinated under another person’s authority, Malinowski reveals the limits of attempted self-government.
VI. Libido as Metabolic Remediation
Read together, the two diaries show that libido belongs within metabolic remediation and resists being treated as an energy stock. The most influential modern account of sexual desire did treat it in exactly that way. Freud’s libido theory described a quantity of sexual energy that could be dammed up, discharged, displaced, or sublimated into cultural and intellectual work (Freud 1953 [1905]), and Malinowski himself would spend the following decade arguing with Freud about the universality of the Oedipus complex (Malinowski 1927). His diary, written while those arguments were taking shape, is saturated with the same economic picture. Lust must be “tamed” for work to proceed; desire concentrated on one woman yields more happiness than desire dispersed; an episode of uncontrolled touching is “sexual hysteria, caused by lack of exercise”. He records a dream “of the Freudian type”, combining “feeling of sinfulness, evil, something loathsome” with lust (290).
What the two diaries actually document is something else. Desire in them is a changing configuration across all five mediations, and never a fixed quantity passing from one channel to another. Embodiment enters as arousal and its aftermath: Cullwick’s tiredness lifting, Malinowski’s sleeplessness, numb hands, and pounding heart. Being-with enters through the presence or absence of a partner: Munby in the kitchen at eleven, Elsie as a correspondent in faraway Melbourne. Multimateriality supplies the media of desire: padlock and chain, black lead, a foot-bath, a French cap and frock on one side; letters, photographs, a mosquito net, and even Vaseline on the other, since putting it on his hands “aroused in me sensual longing, deep, sentimental” (174). Dwelling supplies moonlight and night: Cullwick walks home from Munby’s rooms after dark, and Malinowski’s struggles intensify on moonlit evenings and under the net. Multisymbolization supplies the names Massa and drudge, the verses written in Cullwick’s voice, Malinowski’s rules of purity and his diagnoses.
Within this configuration, libido remediates in three distinct ways, and depletes in three corresponding ones. It can restore present capacity, as when the telegram “took off the tired feeling” and Cullwick works on until two in the morning; but the restoration does not replenish the body, which sleeps beside Munby the next afternoon. It can organize activity over time, as Malinowski’s concentration on Elsie organizes his letters, plans, and moral regimen; but the same concentration costs him whole days of writing and nights of broken sleep. And it can secure relationships, as Cullwick’s cultivation of Munby’s needs secured a bond that had little else to hold it; but the securing was paid for with her labour and her visibility, since the marriage could exist only as a secret.
The comparison also exposes an asymmetry of social position. In both diaries one person’s libido is remediated through another’s body. Munby’s desire is satisfied by Cullwick’s dirt and service, and she is the one who scrubs. Malinowski’s desire is managed, in his own account, through exercise and self-reproach, but it also reaches Trobriand women whose responses he never records. Cullwick’s diary preserves her own account of what it cost her and what it gave her. The diaries of the men who touched or watched others offer no such account for the people touched and watched. Libido, like rest, has unequal conditions of possibility, and the archive of desire reproduces the inequality.
Recursivity, finally, sorts the two diarists sharply. Cullwick seldom articulates desire above L2. She records actions, “a little petting”, a kiss “for ever so long”, and occasionally an L3 summary, “M.’s love I couldn’t do without”, but she builds no rules around it. Malinowski articulates desire continually at L3 and tries to govern it at L4, and the governance mostly fails. The comparison does not show that inarticulacy is better. It shows that the remediation of desire, like the remediation of fatigue, proceeds through coordination that symbolization can participate in but cannot command.
VII. Two Diaries, One Phenomenon: The Comparative Synthesis
Remediation precedes its symbolic recognition
Both diarists perform ordinary restorative activities without identifying them as instances of one process: Cullwick sleeps, eats, works, walks, washes feet, and seeks company; Malinowski alternates gymnastics, running, rowing, bathing, reading, writing, fieldwork, rest, and correspondence. Their explanations differ, Malinowski speaking of nerves, heart, arsenic, and lust, Cullwick mostly of nothing at all, while the practical problem of sustaining living capacity recurs in both. Their shared object is a form of living coordination that exists before any particular account of energy is articulated, and in no sense a cross-cultural or cross-class belief about energy.
Activity and recovery cannot be assigned to opposite categories
Cullwick is restored by a change of activity and by additional work done for Munby; Malinowski’s concentration fluctuates despite deliberate regulation through rest, gymnastics, and reflection, and gymnastics can calm him one day and keep him awake the next. None of this makes bodily energy irrelevant. Four more days of Christmas would have knocked Cullwick up, and Malinowski’s overtaxed heart was not imaginary. What the cases demonstrate is that bodily capacity is never the only condition determining whether a particular activity remains possible. The simple opposition between expenditure and replenishment, and with it the hydraulic picture of libido, can therefore be rejected without denying physiological constraint.
Remediation has unequal conditions of possibility
Cullwick often had little control over her time or her access to rest, had to ask leave to walk out, and could be summoned to new labour by a telegram. Malinowski commanded his own routine, including three sessions of exercise a day if he chose, but depended on Trobrianders, boats, transport, supplies, and informants who were not always willing. Ranking them on one scale of freedom would miss the point: the capacity to remediate is never merely an individual attribute. Power structures which responses to exhaustion, illness, failing concentration, and desire are actually available, distributing differently the ability to stop, alter, delegate, refuse, or continue an activity. The privileged party in each relationship, Munby in one and Malinowski in the other, could draw on others’ bodies for his own remediation, while the people drawn on had far less room to refuse.
Successful living can remain less visible than its difficulties
When living coordination works, diarists seldom examine it. When something becomes difficult, they record more, explain, resolve, and reorganize, and the archive therefore tends to overrepresent difficulty. Cullwick’s detailed descriptions of exhausting work coexist with brief notes of routine accomplishment. Malinowski abandons his diary during his most productive fortnight, and records his struggles with lust far more often than the evenings on which desire posed no problem. Far from being a mere shortage of data, this follows from the way living becomes available to description: successful coordination tends to remain at L1 and L2, while difficulty is what calls for articulation at L3 and resolution at L4. The successful accomplishment of metabolic remediation may be among the least explicitly represented achievements of everyday life. Writers can and do describe pleasure at length, and Cullwick’s “I’ve not felt dull today” is itself a record of something working, so the hypothesis concerns a recurrent asymmetry rather than an absolute rule.
Remediation is temporally asymmetric
Remediation concerns the continuing possibility of living, but the future for which any activity prepares someone is never fully knowable. Sleep may make future work possible without determining what that work will be, and gymnastics may calm the nerves in the afternoon and keep one awake at night. Remediation is thus intrinsically future-oriented without necessarily involving an explicit future-directed goal: Cullwick’s sleep in the chair was aimed at nothing, yet it made her evening possible. Three temporal possibilities can be distinguished: maintaining established forms of living, recovering capacities that have become temporarily unavailable, and transforming living arrangements so that different forms of activity become possible. The third prevents remediation from being reduced to a return to normality. Cullwick’s position in 1873, able to “go out & come in when I please” as Munby’s secret wife and servant in the Temple, restores nothing from before; it is a new arrangement of work, desire, and movement, with consequences that neither she nor Munby could foresee. The comparative finding can be stated in one sentence: the two diaries document the continuous reorganization of living capacities under conditions whose future consequences remain only partly knowable, rather than the management of an internal stock of energy, sexual or otherwise.
VIII. Why Anthropology Has Studied the Fragments but Missed the Common Phenomenon
Reconstructing the native’s point of view is indispensable, and Malinowski’s own programme made it the discipline’s signature. It does not exhaust the investigation of what is at stake in people’s living. A reported experience of weakness should not be equated automatically with either a biomedical deficiency or a culturally specific expression of psychological distress, and a reported struggle with desire should not be read automatically as either a quantity of energy seeking discharge or a symbol of something else. Both require investigation of the practical coordination within which the symbolization occurs.
Medical anthropology has studied many fragments of this problem with great care, among them idioms of distress (Nichter 1981, 2010), the complaint of kamzori or weakness in South Asia, anxieties about semen loss that articulate libido directly as metabolic depletion (Alter 1997), and “nerves” as lived experience (Low 1994). Four tendencies have nonetheless limited what such work could see. The first is symbolic overreach, in which the interpretation of an experience displaces investigation of the living problem it articulates. The second is a residual body–mind dualism, in which bodily complaints are read chiefly as expressions of an underlying psychological or social condition. The third is a preference for culturally distinctive phenomena, which obscures the pervasiveness of ordinary requirements for sleep, nourishment, movement, care, intimacy, concentration, and recovery. The fourth is that scholarship notices what goes wrong, while the continuous achievement of successful living remains comparatively unexamined.
The historical argument should be measured. Kleinman’s attention to illness as lived experience (1988), the idioms-of-distress literature, social reproduction theory’s insistence that the capacity to labour must be regenerated daily (Bhattacharya 2017), models of allostasis that treat physiological stability as achieved through change (Sterling and Eyer 1988; McEwen 1998), and Canguilhem’s account of health as a margin of tolerance for the infidelities of the environment and a capacity to institute new norms (1989) have each illuminated part of the problem. What none provides is an integration in which embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolization are held together with recursivity levels and recursive counterparts as aspects of one process. Social reproduction theory sees the labour Cullwick spent keeping a household running but has no place for Malinowski’s cracked oar; allostasis sees anticipatory regulation in the body but not the telegram that lifted Cullwick’s tiredness; Freud’s economics of libido sees desire but reduces it to a quantity; Canguilhem comes closest, yet his normative capacity remains a property of the organism rather than of a multiply mediated coordination. The two diaries show what such an integration makes possible empirically.
IX. Conclusion: The Work of Continuing
Cullwick sleeps in a chair and then walks out by moonlight to sit with friends, and nine years later finds her tiredness gone at the news that Munby is on his way. Malinowski clarifies the meaning of his life in a coconut grove and cannot work in his tent; he rows, runs, and does his Swedish exercises three times a day, and still lies awake under the mosquito net. None of these episodes is adequately understood as the expression of a culturally distinctive idea of health or vitality, and none can be explained by a universal scale of physiological or sexual energy. They concern changing living capacities whose maintenance depends on continuous coordination across embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolization.
The argument has three registers. Empirically, it identifies a common phenomenon across two highly dissimilar diaries, and shows that exercise and libido belong to that phenomenon as fully as sleep and rest. Theoretically, it gathers under the concept of metabolic remediation a problem already explicable through five mediations, five recursivity levels, and three types of recursive counterpart. Methodologically, it shows how Ontologically Grounded Theory can investigate the living processes that diary entries selectively symbolize, including those that remain largely unarticulated because they proceed successfully.
More fundamental than intellectual accomplishment, physical endurance, sexual satisfaction, or the ethical formation of an individual self in Foucault’s sense, the achievement these diaries record is the continuous, largely unremarked accomplishment of remaining capable of living. Metabolic remediation names that achievement, and the difficulties through which it sometimes becomes visible.
Selected References
Alter, Joseph S. 1997. “Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 11 (3): 275–298.
Bhattacharya, Tithi, ed. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press.
Canguilhem, Georges. 1989. The Normal and the Pathological. Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen. New York: Zone Books.
Cullwick, Hannah. 1984. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant. Edited and introduced by Liz Stanley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; London: Virago.
Freud, Sigmund. 1953 [1905]. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books.
Low, Setha M. 1994. “Embodied Metaphors: Nerves as Lived Experience.” In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, edited by Thomas J. Csordas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malinowska, Valetta. 1989. “Preface.” In Bronisław Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, 2nd ed. London: Athlone Press.
Malinowski, Bronisław. 1927. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Malinowski, Bronisław. 1989. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. 2nd ed. Translated by Norbert Guterman. Introduction by Raymond Firth. London: Athlone Press.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.
McEwen, Bruce S. 1998. “Protective and Damaging Effects of Stress Mediators.” New England Journal of Medicine 338 (3): 171–179.
Nichter, Mark. 1981. “Idioms of Distress: Alternatives in the Expression of Psychosocial Distress. A Case Study from South India.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 5 (4): 379–408.
Nichter, Mark. 2010. “Idioms of Distress Revisited.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 34 (2): 401–416.
Stanley, Liz. 1984. “Introduction” and section introductions. In Hannah Cullwick, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Sterling, Peter, and Joseph Eyer. 1988. “Allostasis: A New Paradigm to Explain Arousal Pathology.” In Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health, edited by Shirley Fisher and James Reason, 629–649. Chichester: Wiley.