SOCIOLOGY OF BODY

Sociology of Body

Sociology of Body

About the concept of Body

Perhaps the only consistent factor regarding conceptions of the human body in the United Kingdom from the seventeenth century to the present is that theories of corporeality are tied inextricably to political and social debates about the proper constitution of the body politic. Although concepts of the body were influenced by European culture, they also were shaped in part by colonial contact, slavery, the professionalization of science and medicine, and the call for women's and civil rights. Some may assume, incorrectly, that the history of the body can be interpreted solely as progressive, as a story of liberation from sexual repression and allegations of corporeal inequality. Such conjectures, however, obscure the variable understandings of the body during these eras. It is helpful, instead, to consider three aspects of the theory of the body-race, gender, and self-control - each of which involves several major changes from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The changes include the transformation from environmental to biological theories of racial difference, the shift from a one-sex to a two-sex model of gender identity and sexuality, and a movement from external to internal control of the body.

Discussion

The philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) tends to be blamed for the Western tendency to conceptualize the body in dualistic, oppositional terms. As such, the corporeal body became demarcated as the rightful object of natural scientific discourse, with the less tangible aspects of the person - the self, the soul and/or the mind - left for the arts and humanities. Consequently, anthropologists appeared content to leave the physical body to medical science, portraying social life as constituted through the more ephemeral, disembodied mind. Such a division of labour created a niche for the humanities to flourish, but it also permitted the notion of a stable, objective body to continue unchecked. It was against this background that many earlier theorists concerned themselves with what the body communicated or stood to represent rather with the corporeal body as something that was itself socially constituted. Mary Douglas's emphasis, for instance, was on the body's symbolic rather than physiological characteristics. The body was, she argued in Natural Symbols, a 'microcosm of society' (1973: 101). The collective 'social body' constrained how the physical body might be perceived, and the physical body delimited social structure. In respect of the latter, Douglas's work extends that of Hertz (1960), who, in his famous essay on the right hand, argued that the physical oppositions and complementarities of the body mirrored the social and cosmological order.

When the physical body appeared elsewhere in the literature, it did so mostly as a blank canvas, without much agency, onto which culture - in the forms of decoration, scarification, mouth plates, tattoos and the like - could be inscribed and then interpreted. Terence Turner's early essay 'The Social Skin' (1980), which analyses the significance of body decoration among the Kayapo of Brazil, exemplifies this genre. Foucault, however, argued for the body not as a source of representation - ...