Kent Dunlap (University of California Press)
The late writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron famously felt bad about her neck. Ephron’s concern, as expressed in her best-known essay , was ageing, and the neck in particular as a “dead give-away” of the passage of time. The visibility of the area and “the truth” it exposed was cause, for Ephron, to cover up with turtlenecks and scarves.
For Kent Dunlap, a biologist at Trinity College, Connecticut, it called for a closer look. In his first book, The Neck: A natural and cultural history, he argues that while the neck is only a small region, connecting head and torso, it is surprisingly central to the human condition. Not only do its muscles control head movements, and with this our attention, it also facilitates our speech and plays its part in providing our brains and bodies with blood, air and food. We adorn it with jewels, fine fabrics and fragrance. It plays a role in courtship rituals, self-expression, status signifying and even in our myths.
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Yet the neck’s importance is at odds with its essential weakness, from the risk of choking to permanent paralysis or fatal injury. Dunlap begins with Isadora Duncan, the dancer whose swanlike silhouette revolutionised the form in the late 19th century, and who died in 1927 from strangulation after her scarf was caught in the rear wheel of her convertible.
With a tension between “vitality and vulnerability” as his starting point, Dunlap sets out to explore how humans wound up with our type of neck (versus, say, the elongated one of a goose or giraffe) and the remarkably many ways in which it is pertinent to our survival and society.
In his lively account, Dunlap draws on his expertise as a lecturer in physiology and anatomy and wide-ranging sources to shore up his assertion that the neck has an under-acknowledged and “oversized role in our biology, psyche and culture”.
But it is his palpable curiosity and enthusiasm for his subject that makes his book so engaging, and even pacy. The Neck is so thick with trivia, it is easy to forget that the area itself amounts to less than 1 per cent of the human body’s surface area – and even that you are reading a book about necks. The angles that Dunlap finds on his subject are remarkable in their number and variety, yet he never seems to be padding: each inclusion is well argued and proportionately dealt with.
Naturally, Dunlap quotes Ephron as perhaps the only author before him to have expended such time and thought on the neck, and in fact concurs with her point that the area is especially revealing. It is a “reliable reporter” not just of age, Dunlap writes, but other aspects of demographic identity – take the different connotations of an aristocratic ruff or a tattoo. Consciously or not, we continue to judge men by their preferred necktie knot and women on their decolletage.
And in recent years, widespread disquiet about our reliance on technology and time spent on digital devices has manifested as concerns about “text neck”. It is true that tilting the head, typically when scrolling on a tablet or smartphone, exerts unusual force on the cervical spine, and may have long-term and even permanent consequences. But these are still emerging, and have yet to be conclusively researched.
It proves Dunlap’s point that this small apparent “transition zone” between head and torso can be seen to encapsulate both the strengths and weaknesses of the human species, and the incredible feat of evolution and its odd oversights.
His book may turn heads for its seemingly narrow scope – but it will surely open minds, too.
Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, UK
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