The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology (original) (raw)
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Hydra: Interdisciplinary Journal of the Social Sciences , 2013
This article questions the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy followed by most Western academia. It compares and contrasts two ethnographies of the body that entail different theoretical conceptions of the body, casting doubt on the ‘Cogito ergo sum’ which reduces the body to this ‘common thing’ on which the authority of a superior private mind is exerted. The first ethnography - ‘The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the Indian State, and Utopian Somatics’ by Alter (1993) - seems to follow, at first, this tradition, defending the Foucauldian image of an inanimate and politically benign body inhabited by a multiplicity of external force relations called ‘power’. However, in his conclusion Alter (1993) questions the Foucauldian framework stating that the Indian wrestler does not express his protest rationally, but fundamentally embodies his opposition to state domination. The second ethnography - ‘Words from the Holy People: a case study in cultural phenomenology’ by Thomas Csordas (1994) - introduces his concept of ‘embodiment’ as the way bodies are inhabited in the world prior to all abstract objectifications of it. I conclude with Lambek’s original argument (1998) that the discussed mind/body problem arises from the human capacity of self-reflection and needs to be understood in its specific Western socio-historical context.
Review Article: Re-shaping the Space Between Bodies and Culture: Embodying the Biomedicalised Body
Sociology of Health & Illness, 1998
The context Over the past 300 years, the biomedical discourse on the body has become embedded in our modern culture. As scholars begin to position bodies centrally in the sociology of health and illness, those working in the field of biomedicine continue to devise ways to transform the boundaries of these bodies. Bodies have become more malleable as they become more healthy and less sick or vice versa. While health and illness are terms that are culturally and socially defined, all cultures have known concepts of these terms. These vary from culture to culture according to how sick and healthy bodies become visible and, more importantly, the extent and range of the scopic drive (Braidotti 1994), which makes these bodies visible. Whether sick or healthy, bodies are viewed as empirical objects to be quantified and classified. Alongside the scopic drive generated by biomedicine, a powerful desire to classify forms of deviance, locate them in biology and patrol them in wider social spaces exists in society. Since the 19th century, the somatic territorialising of deviance has been part and parcel of a larger effort to organise social relations according to categories denoting health versus pathology,
The concept of body in texts of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari What is the relation between body and power? How does capital use it for its own purposes? How does knowledge influence the biological? This paper will try to answer those questions on the specific field of the repression of the body. Its aim is to show the body as a real object of the repression of ideological apparatuses in the Althusserian sense.
The human body as a problem in post-modern culture
Church, Communication and Culture, 2020
The discourse on the body today appears problematic because the uncertain and changing characteristics of our culture, whose postmodern title is by now insufficient and controversial, place it at the crossroads of ethical, political and biomedical issues. In this paper, the theme is articulated around the dissociation between body and freedom, indicated by several parties as one of the characteristics of the modern subject. This dissociation is at the root of the fundamental ambivalence with which one looks at the body: on the one hand it is exalted as an image of one's own identity, on the other one attempts to control it in its dynamisms, in the name of individual self-determination. This ambivalence also concerns the progress of biomedical techniques: these are acclaimed if considered a resource for the management of one's body or, on the contrary, rejected if considered an obstacle to self-affirmation. The positive proposal presupposes an integral anthropology, which overcomes both a naturalistic vision of the body and a purely symbolic vision.
Publicacions Universitat Rovira i Virgili eBooks, 2011
(eds.). (2001) Critique de la santé publique. Une approche anthropologique. Paris: Éditions Balland. FAInzAng, Sylvie (2011) "La culture, entre représentations de la personne et politiques de santé. Mises en perspective avec quelques données occidentales", In godelIeR Maurice (ed.). Maladie et santé selon les sociétés et les cultures. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 111-127. FASSIn, Didier (1998) "Avant-propos: les politiques de la médicalisation", In AïAch Pierre et delAnoe Daniel (eds.
Universisté de Toulouse le Mirail, 2023
The notion of Person is part of a complex network of philosophical, religious, ideological and scientific references. It most often refers to the individual's right to exist on his own, to act in his own name, to create and control works, to give meaning and value to life, time, things, animals and people. To be a person is, in fact, to be able to manage the conditions that determine you, to resist the alienations that limit you, and to transform them into overcoming and conquest. But does becoming a person mean distancing yourself from others, withdrawing from the social game, cutting yourself off from cultural incentives and models? In other words, does reference to the person imply apology for selfish, egocentric and narcissistic behavior? Most ideologies of the person answer in the negative, insofar as they are based on beliefs and conceptions with collective, religious, moral or political aims... Becoming a person implies overcoming bodily and psychic burdens, as well as overly egocentric individual desires and interests - in a word, freeing oneself from the omnipotence of drives and the dictatorship of the ego, in order to gain access to the behaviors and values of conviviality or abstinence, adherence to a particular cultural dynamic, interpersonal cooperation and social integration. However, the apology of the integrative function runs the risk of minimizing the importance of the assertive function , i.e. the tendency of all individuals to assert themselves, to want to be free to act and choose, to dispose of their bodies and their intellectual and motor capacities. From this point of view, individual and collective attitudes and conceptions concerning a person's relationship with his or her own body are particularly revealing of the ideological stakes and paradoxes associated with the inter-structuring of people and socio-cultural institutions. To demonstrate this, I'll take a few examples from literary, mythological and scientific works. They will enable us to evoke the primary dynamic, the archaeology of the person.