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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... knowledge . Because society is never a disembodied spectacle , we engage in social interaction from the very start on the basis of sensory and aesthetic impressions : Saying that I have a body is thus a way of saying that I can be seen ...
... knowledge . The complicity between the embodied knower and the objects of scientific knowledge requires that anthropomorphism be regarded as a constitutive feature of modern knowledge rather than as an idol of human ignorance . Among ...
... knowledge and alternative socioeconomic institutions that are generated at these various levels of the body politic ( we shall examine the functions of biomedical dis- course in this regard in Chapter 5 ) . I would point out , however ...