F. Mascia-Lees – A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment

Автор: F. Mascia-Lees
Название книги: A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Прочая историческая литература
Страницы: 554
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment offers original essays that examine historical and contemporary approaches to conceptualizations of the body.

In this ground-breaking work on the body and embodiment, the latest scholarship from anthropology and related social science fields is presented, providing new insights on body politics and the experience of the body
Original chapters cover historical and contemporary approaches and highlight new research frameworks
Reflects the increasing importance of embodiment and its ethnographic contexts within anthropology
Highlights the increasing emphasis on examining the production of scientific, technological, and medical expertise in studying bodies and embodiment

Once the province of medical science and certain schools of philosophy, “the body”
emerged in the late 1970s as a central site from which scholars across the humanities
and social sciences questioned the ontological and epistemological basis of almost all
forms of inquiry. In anthropology “the body” became such a central concept and
significant object of study that by the mid-1980s, the study of “the body” burgeoned
into a fully formed subfield: “the anthropology of the body.” For many anthropologists
at the time, it was clear that the questions of power and oppression that were on
the agendas of many scholars could not be addressed without first challenging
ideologies that naturalized sex, gender, and racial difference through discourses and
representations of the body. At the same time, medical anthropologists, imbricated in
these agendas in multiple ways, revealed how conceptions of the body were central to
substantive work in medical anthropology and began the work of problematizing
“the body” (see Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987).
Since then, “the body” has come to be understood as simultaneously subject and
object, meaningful and material, individual and social and has served as the basis of a
stunningly large number of inquiries in the discipline. Whether understood as text,
symbol, or habitus, the body has proved a fertile site from which anthropologists have
mounted refutations of abstract, universalizing models and ideologies and interrogated
operations of power, systems of oppression, and possibilities for agency and
political change. The volume simultaneously reflects this history of inquiry; represents
the most current approaches, insights, and conceptualizations of the body; and
illuminates the newest arenas in which it is being investigated. Within its chapters,
authors address a broad topic – ranging from “aesthetics” to “virtuality” – assess the
treatment of that topic within the history of the discipline, contextualize their own
research within that history, and demonstrate the significance of their ideas and
conclusions for future work in the area.
Two of the most significant insights that have become central to the anthropology
of the body since its inception are evident in the title of many of the chapters. The first
suggests that the very construct “the body,” reproduces assumptions about universality
and normativity. This necessitates that “the body” be specified – the virtual body or
dead body, for example – or pluralized: thus, many authors focus on “bodies,” not “the
body.” “They,” not “it,” are “mediated” and “hybrid”; “they” are constituted by, and
constitutive of, political economic formations, whether colonialism, post-socialism,
late capitalism or neoliberalism.
The second insight is that bodies cannot be divorced from their lived experiences,
requiring a focus on embodiment: a way of inhabiting the world as well as the source
of personhood, self, and subjectivity, and the precondition of intersubjectivity (see
Van Wolputte 2004: 259). A focus on embodiment marks an epistemological, indeed
a paradigmatic, shift within “the anthropology of the body” whose significance to
contemporary research is reflected not only in the title of this Companion but also in
the number of chapters in this volume focused on it: everything from personhood,
gender, race, pain, masculinity, and impairment to forms of creativity, legacies of
genocide, aesthetics, transnationalism, neoliberalism, avatars, bioethics, and “camp”
are enlivened by being understood as embodiments. The shift to embodiment has
required a change in how anthropologists research and write about bodies. Although
the best work in anthropology has always had strong ethnographic content, it is nearly
impossible today to theorize or generalize about embodiment without mining rich
ethnographic details and writing vivid descriptions. The chapters in this volume thus
not only represent the main concerns in anthropology today on topics related to
bodies and embodiment but also illustrate the deep intertwining of “theory” and
“data” that has come to characterize the field. Since the 1990s, the emphasis on
embodiment has been accompanied by, and intersected with, another significant
insight, which appears across many chapters as well: that the senses, emotions, and
affect are the essence of our embodied materialities and socialities.
The bodies in this volume are deeply “sited”; that is, they are grounded in actual
worlds. The bodies in some of the chapters stay put in particular geographic locales;
in other chapters they move, whether patients or corpses, across international
boundaries. A number reside in scientific labs and medical clinics, others in the more
ephemeral space of the scientific imagination and cyberworlds, reflecting the
ever-increasing recognition of the necessity of examining the cultural and political
contexts of the production of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge,
expertise, and authority for understanding the lived body today. New theoretical
frameworks and agendas are offered in this volume, as are fresh conceptual categories.
The hope is that as a compendium of the most current research being undertaken
today, the Companion will offer readers not only fresh ideas and insights about bodies
and embodiments but also guideposts for launching future research agendas.