Five Bodies: Re-figuring RelationshipsFive Bodies offers an introduction to some of the most urgent contemporary concerns within the sociology of the body. The book was first published in 1985 in the USA by Cornell University Press, and was nominated for the John Porter Award (sponsored by the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association). A path breaking book, it offered a framework for the growing field of the sociology of the body and opened up ′the body′ for sociological research. This new edition (the previous edition was published by Cornell University Press (1985) has been substantially revised and updated to address today′s issues of the body in modern life, community and politics. John O′Neill examines how embodied selves and relationships are being re-shaped and re-figured and how the embodied figures of the polity, economy and society represent the contested notions of identity, desire, wholeness and fragmentation. He focuses upon those cultural practices through which we map our macro-micro worlds: · articulating a cosmology · a body politic · a productivensumptive economy · a bio-technological frontier of human design and transplantation |
From inside the book
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... Vico's humanist The New Science ([1774] 1970) and Freud's melancholic reflections on the figure of prosthetic 'man' in Civilization and its Discontents (1962). The immediate context of my own body studies was the body politics of the ...
... Vico that it is inconceivable that we could ever constitute society in the will to contract all human relations outside of the great historical body of our family and civic society. Here, then, I appeal to a familied history without ...
... only faute de mieux the source of primitive peoples' cosmology. I would rather argue with Vico that the rationalist reconstruction of the cosmos is possible only on the ground of that first poetic logic 1: The World's Body.
... (Vico, 1970: paras 236–7) The magnificent insight in Vico's The New Science is that human society could not have been created from the start according to rationalist principles. Rather, Vico, like Durkheim much later, saw that our ...
... (Vico, 1970, para 405) What Vico conjectured may be seen in the story-shaped world of the Dogon, a West African people who were among the last to come under French colonial rule. Their distance from us should recede as we listen through ...
Contents
1 | |
9 | |
Social Bodies | 22 |
The Body Politic | 37 |
Consumer Bodies | 54 |
Medical Bodies | 66 |
Conclusion The Future Shape of Human Beings | 79 |
Bibliography | 89 |
Index | 95 |