Garden Walks: Physical Mobility and Social Identity at Dumbarton Oaks

In 1934, the sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss called attention to the “American” style of walking that Parisian girls copied from Hollywood movies. Mauss’s point was that kinesthetic habits are learned within time, place, and culture; he called them “bodily techniques.” ¹ The timing of Mauss’s analysis coincided with a history of more than forty years of accumulated study by European and American physicians, educators, and dancers in kinesthetic-awareness techniques for fundamental movements such as walking. That history of bodily techniques coexisted with a longer history of inquiry, by experimental psychologists, philosophers, and writers on art, into physiological aesthetics, which asserted that viewers respond to art and architecture primarily through muscular, vascular, and nervous systems.