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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... embodied politics (context). We shall see in Chapter 3, on the body politic that it is the neural body that is a model of hierarchical, male-brain society – with its potential for patriarchal sexism and racism. It is also the model for ...
... embodied beings. Our bodies, then, are the fine instruments of both the smaller and the larger society in which we live. Human dexterity is such that we are capable of an infinitely wide use of tools which in turn feed in and out of the ...
... embodied look of things, especially in the look of others and of ourselves. Although philosophers and moralists have decried our attachment to appearances and superficialities, as sociologists we cannot ignore the elaborate social ...
... embodied reality of everyday life. Of course, our carnal knowledge of embodied persons is always defeasible in the light of our further experience with them. And, as we find ourselves in situations further and further away from intimate ...
... embodied subjects (Barkan, 1975; Conger, 1922). Just as robots do the work in science-fiction systems, so literary systems do the work of artists confined now to clever ventriloquism no better than that of the official language which ...
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 |