The Body Flashcards
The Body
A biological entity (equation of corporeality with biology, and the correlated assumption that natural science has more direct access to the “truth” of the body), which is wrong because a body is dynamic and varies across cultural contexts
Body and social (dis) order
Social regulation through classification and racial/social hierarchies. Ethnic/racial profiling, eg apartheid south africa, segregation laws/Jim Crow laws in the US, women in WWII who took up work as men went to war and after the war, they were all sent back to the household because women bodies were not allowed to be in that space anymore
Body and identity
We see ourselves as sovereign subjects, as autonomous beings that exercise our own will. Body becomes central to self-expression, as individual or as group. The way you dress or express your body (eg tattoos) is important to your identity
Body and technology
Tools are extensions of the body, new technologies are an integral part of the body. This resists the assumption that machine and organism are fundamentally opposed
Body and consumption culture
You are what you buy. Grabs the specificity of the modern moment. What phone you have, what clothes you buy, purses, shoes, headphones etc
Body and health
Relates to medical anthropology. From what makes bodies ill to the compulsion of being healthy to the experience of illness, and much more
Embodiment
An interaction between environment and body that is formative to who you are. This includes representing, manifesting norms and values, or social order. It becomes a source of personhood, self and subjectivity.
Personal memory
Based on personal experiences, (auto)biography. Paul Connerton
Cognitive memory
Relating to general knowledge about the world. Paul Connerton.
‘Habit-memory’
Eriksen: “Connerton argues that habit-memory is, in highly significant ways, created and reproduced through bodily practices embedded in rules of etiquette, gestures, postures, handwriting and other acquired abilities, which the actors do not normally perceive as cultural skills but rather as mere technical abilities or even ‘social instincts’.”
Phenomenology
Study of experience (and consciousness)
Merleau-Ponty and perception
Claims that “all consciousness is perceptual consciousness”. Sees perception as active openness to the lifeworld through one’s own body; that is, through the senses. Perception is an ongoing dialogue between one’s lived body and the world which it perceives
Thomas Csordas and the senses
Originally focused on religion, then the senses and body. The body is something we have, are and become (object, subject and process/performativity)
David Howes and sensory models
Claims that sensory models can
Carry and recreate cultural meaning
Reflect on and generate social structure
Offer insights through analysis of ‘what’ by ‘how’: i.e. in processes of cultural transmission
Ocularcentrism
Western/Euro-American model where vision has been ranked the superior sense universally, this is ethnocentric
