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 41
... natural extensions of our narcissistic selves. They magnify us, and at the same time amplify the world we have chosen ... nature – or our power over life – is a power over ourselves (biotext) inscribed through the state and the economy ...
... natural and the functional. The same body, the working body, free, sovereign, poised, whose proportion, equilibrium and ... nature of the first humans and their gods, and so I am less inclined to abuse them with the faults of our modern ...
... nature, and social institutions may well be approached through our unavoidable interest in the human body. We shall see in some detail how the human body is an intelligent and critical resource in the civic production of those small and ...
... natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 146) The preceding distinctions are not meant to diminish the importance in our lives of the ...
... nature, society and the human body subordinating it to the industrialization of nature and the human family (Illich, 1982), which we shall discuss in later chapters. Thus I have reconstructed this history in terms of what I call the ...
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 |