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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... ourselves in machines: they are the natural extensions of our narcissistic selves. They magnify us, and at the same time amplify the world we have chosen to create for ourselves – the 'man-made' world. There is no escaping our romance ...
... ourselves. The truly unthinkable side of our civilizational discontent is that we may well be the first human society to think of itself as the last. Before such a prospect, we are obliged to rethink the human body to reconstitute its ...
... ourselves human. ation It is essential for us to proceed in this way. We cannot otherwise establish the radical grounds of an anthropomorphizing social science. The loss of the human in the social and literary sciences meets with equal ...
... ourselves of the fundamentally communicative body that is the moral basis of all society and of the practice of any social science. We cannot escape life among others. Our bodies commit us from the first moment of life to the company of ...
... ourselves. Although philosophers and moralists have decried our attachment to appearances and superficialities, as sociologists we cannot ignore the elaborate social construction of embodied appearances in which we are necessarily ...
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 |