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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... modern society we are devising a technology for rewriting the genetic code much as savage societies once rewrote the flesh – but in a different key, played first upon the body of desire: For capitalism is the stage in which all the ...
... modern technological fixation. Rather, I am concerned to rethink the civic legacy bequeathed to us in the sociopoetics of the first humans whose families and gods have survived most of the history of our own inhumanity and are still ...
... modern political economy exercises power over it by opening up, so to speak, the sexual body as a discursive channel into which we confess endlessly who we are and what we desire: Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by ...
... modern experience is based upon the removal of the human shape in favor of the measured – number, line, sign, code, index. Everywhere anthropomorphism, the creative force in the civic shaping of human beings, is in retreat. Such a fate ...
... modern science and those of our early ancestors is tiny compared with the inconceivable gap between a world anthropomorphized and sheer chaos. In short, it is the very continuity between modern and primitive thought that was guaranteed ...
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 |