1 [Published in Anthropology and Medicine vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, pp. 39-62] WRITING ON THE BODY: THE POETIC LIFE-STORY OF PHILIP LARKIN Nigel Rapport PART I. LIFE AS TEXT Writing and Cognition Raymond Williams once commented on the way the phenomenon of writing has become social-scientifically 'naturalised' in the academy: we ask 'what is the writing about?', 'what knowledge, facts and experience does it contain?', but we treat the process itself as non-problematic, as transparent and commonsensical, once the requisite skills have been acquired (1983:1). 1 Anthropologists, perhaps, have been less prone than others to this lapse, since they more often treat those who do not and may not seek to acquire the writing technique to which Williams refers. Hence, treating writing as a marker of literacy, anthropology has emphasised the historico-cultural specificity of such writing, and the effects which its arrival precipitates. Anthropology has postulated, inter alia , that the technique of writing represents an objectification of speech and a proliferation of words and meanings which causes more layering and less indexicality in sociocultural milieux, so that individual members become palimpsests who participate less fully and more sceptically, less securely and more selectively, in their traditions (Goody & Watt, 1968:57-8). Here is a technique for the fixing of discourse, preserving it as a possible archive of later analysis and translation, and the creating of a quasi-separate world of texts