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
Results 1-5 of 21
... experienced from the Canadian border of North America. Here events appeared both to challenge and to celebrate the social sciences that we were revisioning through continental phenomenology, hermeneutics and critical theory (O'Neill ...
... experience those aspects of the body I have differentiated as the physical body and the communicative body except as ... experiences of birth, death, pain, pleasure, hunger, fear, beauty, and ugliness. How, then, are we to regard the ...
... ) Today we witness a growing movement in post-industrial societies to redefine bodily experience as nothing more than sheer labor power, to be managed as the docile instrument of commercial, educational, and medical 5 Introduction.
... experience and upon the vulnerability and openness to one another that arises from the kind of communicative life we enjoy as embodied beings. Our bodies, then, are the fine instruments of both the smaller and the larger society in ...
... experiences with its mother. From its earliest moments, and long before it can apprentice to the rules of perception, language, and conduct, the child's body resonates with its social experience. The warm community of the child's world ...
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 |