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 14
... give him trouble at times' (Freud, 1962: 38–9). In the following chapters, I stand at some distance from Freud's conception of the infantile nature of the first humans and their gods, and so I am less inclined to abuse them with the ...
... give a civic shape to human institutions, which I think we must revive if we are to defend ourselves against the equal excesses of subjective and subjectless science. Moreover, I believe that the vital issues in the complex civic ...
... give back what we ourselves have received. This is an essential condition of civic society. Unless it is realized, we are threatened with the prospect of a society – which I examine later – where there is little genuine sociability but ...
... gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit. (Vico, 1970: paras 236–7) The magnificent insight ...
... gives it its weight and significance, and fire gives speech its warmth. Thus the body's insides are projected outside in the body of speech, each proportioned to the other, like a garment. The Dogon say that to be naked is to be ...
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 |