Body Matters: Exploring the Materiality of the Human Body (original) (raw)

Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the matter of their bodies. This volume offers an assortment of contributions from Anthropology, Archaeology and Medieval Studies, with case studies from northern Europe, the Near East, East Africa and Amazonia, which variously draw attention to the multiple shifting materials that comprise, impact upon and co-create human bodies. This lively collection foregrounds myriad material influences interacting with and shaping the human body. Govier, Feyers-Kerr and Steel examine how minerals such as carbon (smoke), cinnabar, mud and plaster co-mingle with human bodies in Çatalhöyük, Kenya and the Near East respectively whiles Walsh highlights the ways in which bodies are shaped through handling pottery, drawing upon Bronze Age Kerma. Attala explores the bodily consequences of ingesting hallucinogens (Ayahusca) and Rahmen considers how substances such as water and tobacco combine with bodily flesh to produce the intangible and invisible aspects of a person for the Amazonian Warakena. Burton and Webster draw our attention back to the very flesh, blood and bones constituting the matter of the body in Medieval Europe, while Coard examines its disintegration into dust. All these papers come together then to illustrate the fundamental fleshy, bony, suppurating, leaky and oozing physicality of being human. Ultimately, by reminding the reader of their indisputable materiality, Body Matters seeks to draw people and the rest of the material world together to illustrate not just that bodies seep into (and are part of) the landscape but equally that people and the material world are inextricably co-constitutive.