Sociology of the body pdf

One of the many excellent works of this sort in the English language is the edited volume Writing on the Body Conboy et al. Masculinity studies such as those pro- duced by Australian theorist Raewyn Connell and North American Michael Kimmel shed light on the differently constructed bodies of males in terms of historical intersec- tions of class, race and gender. From a British perspective, Kobena Mercer deals among other things with racialized representations of bodies in art, media and culture, and George Yancey uses a phenomenological approach that probes the issue of the lived expe- rience of race as it has been hegemonically defined by a binary scheme that attempts to Downloaded from csi.

Theoretical movements addressing the body have often drawn on literary or other not- strictly-sociological sources.

Thus, authors who write on race and the body derive ideas from contemporary fiction, say, the works of Black feminist writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

Discursive exchange and experimentation sometimes takes a new turn, as in the work of the Portuguese thinker Miguel Vale de Almeida. Another innovative approach that proposes new narratives and sensibilities to bodies is the work of Canadian scholar Arthur Frank There is little in contemporary sociology which has not, to some extent, devoted attention to issues such as the intersection of class, race and gender and their embodied dimensions, or the theoretical issue of how the self is socially constructed as body, emo- tion and cognition Thus, we see that as major schools of sociologists engage in critical debate, their arguments must acknowledge the embodied dimensions of social existence and social action.

One good example of this methodological shift can be found by exam- ining the tension that runs through the debate between followers of contemporary theo- rists Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. He advances the thesis that we may be currently witnessing a veritable carnivalization of culture and society, that is, that the boundaries which once kept the transgressive space of the carnival at a distance from everyday life have been imploded.

Previously circumscribed carnivalesque attitudes and practices spill out into society, fueled by the instigations of consumerism and media yet linked also — or at times — to the building of subcultures as forms of resistance.

Thus, the concept of carnivalization may be seen as a fertile tool for rethinking the way we live in and through our bodies. Downloaded from csi. Thus, benefitting from this new field of studies, we may argue that our equine or canine companions are also cultur- ally constructed and embodied.

Empirical work As noted above, it is quite evident that a new sociology of the body has taken shape over the last few decades. Woven from different and diverse strands, it is nonetheless marked by a shared project of deconstructing facile dichotomies and understanding human sub- jectivity as embodied and forged through social relations that have profoundly corporeal dimensions. In this context, singling out particular works from the plethora of studies, as focal points for discussion, becomes a Herculean task.

Perhaps the best illustration of the scope and vigor of the field can be found in the texts published in the most significant international periodical on sociology of the body today, Body and Society.

Articles cut across disciplinary boundaries and range from philosophical and methodological to the empirical and ethnographic, focusing on embodied social and cultural phenomena from different corners of the globe, although primarily from English-speaking countries, thus making it harder to access and compare this work with what is being produced within Downloaded from csi. As Olga Sabido Ramos 36 has pointed out from a Latin American perspective, interest in the body and affect may be shared by scholars worldwide, yet thematic interests at a regional level reflect particularities, flow- ing from specific social problems and historical experiences and conditioned by the aca- demic and institutional contexts in which they emerge.

Nonetheless, research on the body has converged with a broad and highly creative project of revision of research methodologies in the social sciences. Exemplary in this regard is the work of anthropologist Emily Martin Her bold approach was precursor to a wide range of studies breaking with conventional humanist ways of thinking about human beings and human bodies, and in particular, the boundaries they have drawn around between the human and non-human, and human and machine cf.

Wilson, She proposes looking at procedures such as tattooing, piercing, brand- ing, scarification, stretching, suspension, surgical transformation by subdermal implants rather as David Le Breton suggested when he interpreted body art as public dis- course that problematizes normalizing regimes. The question of beauty standards has created a field in which media, activism and social cri- tique come together, through a series of diverse cultural productions that are influenced by and feed back into academic debate.

Il corpo delle Donna dir. Newsom, USA, are documentaries of this sort, promoting critique through independent mass media. On another front, the performatic activism of the internationally disseminated Slut Walk movement enacts ways of repre- senting female bodies that are inspired by queer and feminist theories. Other interpretations, more attentive to the confessional apparatuses that this literature deploys, question editorial and commercial interests in sexuality, confronting the notion that through an exploration Downloaded from csi.

From another one of the many contexts wherein women live their bodies as embattled terrain, several young French writers Battarel et al. As Naila Eljaouhari points out, control over the bodies of Muslim women has been at the center of heated political and cultural conflict in which different groups have their own interests at stake, from Western feminists and French defenders of secularism to staunch Islamists.

What is at stake is the desire to guarantee control over territory, culture and iden- tity in these two nations. Lisa Beljuli Brown also writes at a distance from Euro-American realities.

On the other hand, the growing field of literature and research on bodily constructions that defy gender binaries brings resistance to the forefront. Certainly, among the many works that represent this latter trend, there is a veritable wealth of original research to be read and enjoyed. A recent vol- ume on Muslim women and sport Benn et al. In societies in which the management of health and illness has fallen within the dominion of Western biomedi- cine, studies on the body have often turned their gaze to the medical institution and its apparatuses.

In a similar vein, empirical research on surgical practices Doyle and Roen, , blood donation Copeman, , human organ traffic and medically motivated migration Roberts and Scheper-Hughes, ; Scheper-Hughes, and assisted human reproduction Martin, ; Tamanini, has made a major contribution to academic knowledge that problematizes the body in medicine today.

Meneses , for example, has carried out research in Mozambique that illustrates the close link between Western colonialism and biomedicine, as shown in state licensing of practitioners. Feminist work such as the classic history of women healers by Ehrenreich and English and that of Scheper-Hughes illuminating the cultural contexts of physical and mental illness, understandings of motherhood and infant mortality, show there are other forms of knowledge and understandings of the body and its processes that Western colonialist institutions have silenced or de-legitimated.

There are other rationali- ties that should be understood in their own light and in their contribution to the constitu- tion of hybrid knowledge and practices.

The term intermedicine has been coined to give theoretical and empirical space to the engagement strategies of persons with hybrid or multiple therapeutic cosmologies. Furthermore, other types of bodies have also become the object of a new field, disability studies.

Authors in this field have suggested the concept of ablism, or disabilism, to address the societal disqualification and cultural abjectification of peo- ple who have disabilities. Furthermore, disability studies, in interface with medical sociol- ogy, the sociology of health and illness and social theorizing on the body, has highlighted the power of biomedical institutions in naming and correcting disabilities. A significant and growing body of research takes on the issue of the body in war — bodies as subjects and objects of violence.

Paradoxically, the act of expressing pain thus becomes a necessary prelude to the collective challenge of reducing it. This is valid both for the medical issues of daily life and efforts to promote respect for human rights at the international level. Almost 30 years after Scarry, Zillah Eisenstein calls for the construction of a new vocabulary that can take us beyond decoys and deceptive binaries on sex, gender and race, whose contradictions become particularly visible during war processes.

Also Downloaded from csi. Gendered dimensions of bodies at war are also brought out by Hopton , who argues that, as national hero, the soldier becomes an extreme expression of hegemonic masculinity into which heroism, camaraderie and the competitive processes of medical classifications of the body pour. Kittler looks at the relationship between bodies, tech- nical development and war tactics, describing how trenches were transformed through the use of machine guns and motor vehicles during the First World War, rendering infan- try less effective and creating new training techniques focusing on elite troops and their use of armament and equipment in specialized attack functions.

Studies on the militarization of civil society, or the effects of war on those not directly engaged in it, provide another side to the picture. In this vein, rape and sexual violence have also come into focus, generating a new body of literature as the twentieth century drew to an end and the new millennium began.

Sabine Hirschauer argues that although rape has always been a regular element of war contexts and practices, it has only recently become a significant issue on the international public agenda, particularly in the aftermath of the Rwanda and Bosnia wars. Unfortunately, as we move into the second half of the second decade of the millennium, it also becomes increasingly important to Downloaded from csi.

A further area for research might be comparative approaches to bodies and embodiment, encouraging not only the circulation of work by sociologists and social scientists from Africa, Asia and Latin America but also theoretical and methodological reflection on perspectives that may in fact have some significant differences in terms of their socio-cultural points of departure.

Another urgent task would be to build on contemporary work on emotions in social movements Jasper, , delving into their overt and subtle embodied dimensions, as Sutton has done in her study of women and resistance to Argentine neoliberalism Sutton, Funding The authors thank the Brazilian funding agencies CNPq and CAPES for travel and research grants providing partial support for the writing of this article, within the context of broader scientific projects.

References Adelman M Women who ride: Constructing identities and corporealities in equestrian sports in Brazil. In: Grenier-Torres C ed. Aldama AJ ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Almeida MV O manifesto do corpo [The body manifesto]. Revista Manifesto Lisboa 5: 17— Available at: www. Altman BM Disability definitions, models, classification schemes, and applications.

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sociology of Health and Illness 32 4 : — Paris: Gallimard. Barker M Consent is a grey area? Cambridge: Polity Press. Bartky S Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. London: Routledge. In: Cameron C ed. London: Sage. Berger J Ways of Seeing.

London: Penguin. Birke L and Vines G Beyond nature versus nurture: Process and biology in the development of gender. Women Studies International Forum 10 6 : — Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Body and Society 16 1 : 1—5. Sociology of Health and Illness. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bordo S Unbearable Weight. The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges]. Paris: Fayard. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again.

Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Show Summary Details Overview sociology of the body. Reference entries body, sociology of the in A Dictionary of Sociology 3 rev Length: words. View all related items in Oxford Reference » Search for: 'sociology of the body' in Oxford Reference ».

All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Cancel Save. The taken-for-granted five senses belong to those sensory modes that provide information about the world external to the individual. Those are our exteroceptive senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. It is easy enough to identify at least three more senses that provide information about the internal world of the human body, our interoceptive senses: the sense of pain nociception , thirst, and hunger.

Yet, eight is not nearly enough. What about the sensations that mediate between conditions in the external world and internal body, such as our sense of balance equilibrioception , movement kinesthesia , temperature thermoception , or even our sense of time at least in terms of polychronicity and monochronicity, if not more? Now our list has grown from five senses to thirteen, and still I experience senses that are not clearly accounted for in these categories.

After all, which category accounts for the sensual experience of orgasm? Assuming I can come up with an answer, which is doubtful, it is unlikely that we would agree—especially considering that even within the experiences of one individual, not all orgasms are the same.

Is that not, after all, an exercise in atomism and individualism so typical of Western culture? And finally, are we even so sure that sensations can be so clearly separated from emotions, or even from the material things that are the object of sensations see Geurts ?

What we do know for sure is that to think of the senses as only confined to five exteroceptive sensory modes is to grossly oversimplify human sensual experience, both within anyone culture and across cultures. Maybe that is the key point: modes of sensing inevitably blend and blur into one another, thus making their alleged boundaries fuzzy and indistinct in experience. It is this ecology of sensual relations that should be the focus of our attention see Howes ; Ingold As Zerubavel argued, the worlds in which we live are essentially continuous, and yet we experience them in discrete chunks.

This is especially true of the ever-discerning sensual body and the ever-selective nature of sensual experience. For example, as Zerubavel points out, it is by sheer convention that we perceive grape juice as similar to orange juice, and dissimilar from wine.

Yet, without the ability to lump and split, it is impossible to envision any mental cluster at all Zerubavel There are countless ways in which the human senses are subject to the reach of sensory communities across cultures and societies.

For example, our individual and collective memories include what we eat and drink, how food and beverages feel to the taste, and how those people dear and close to us are involved in tasting with us and establishing a sense of community around the foods we choose Serematakis The taste of prepared food—whether a recipe is well or poorly prepared, lavishly or modestly made—is also the subject of social norms, roles, and scripts that are passed down from generation to generation and observed in specific circumstances of commensality Choo ; Stoller ; Sutton The Purpose of this Book In our everyday life most of us pay little conscious attention to how we sense.

To be sure, as the opening paragraphs of this introduction have shown, we do pay a great deal of attention to what we sense, but the ways in which we sense most often recede into the background of our awareness.

In light of this lack of attention, most of us have become accustomed to think of our senses as neutral media that, when they work properly, perform like conduits of external stimuli. Take this book, for example. Perhaps this is why, after all, most people view perception as a rather cognitive affair and sensation as a purely physiological one. Grounded in binary oppositions, dualist ontology often separates mind from body Williams and Bendelow As one can glean from this model, not only are the body and the mind separate and distinct from one another, but so are raw sensations and cognitive perceptions, and so are the individuals and the objective worlds in which stimuli occur.

Dualisms of this kind—and many others could be identified—are gross simplifications of a complex and emergent ecological system that is, fortunately, much more interesting than such predictability-based dualist models propose. In doing so we posit an approach to senses and sensations that is thoroughly social. We are not the first to suggest that the human senses and sensations are a social matter.

As we will detail in the following section of this introduction, many anthropologists have been aware of the deeply significant cultural dimensions of the senses for at least two decades, and so have some philosophers e. Lingis ; Merleau-Ponty ; Serres historians e. Harvey ; Hoffer ; Smith , business managers and designers Lindstrom ; Malnar and Vodvarka , geographers e.

Yet, the existing scholarship of the senses seems to lack a comprehensive bridge between narrow research interests and analytical reflection. Since this growing interdisciplinary field of study has now more or less come of age, we believe that now is the time to write a book that in one sweep captures both empirical and theoretical literature, and original research. Thus, the purpose of this book is to produce the ultimate reference for anyone who is already immersed in the study of the social and cultural dimensions of the human senses, as well as for anyone who is new to this field and who is interested in exploring intersections between key sociological and anthropological topics and the senses.

While claims to academic trans-disciplinarity abound, few of these are actually realized in practice. Therefore, our very own claim of crossing disciplinary boundaries must be first qualified and then exercised with caution.

The three of us are trained in sociology; two Dennis, Simon of us make their living in sociology departments, and the third Phillip works in a school of communication and culture. While our published research has spanned across media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, human geography, and social anthropology, most of our publications are of a sociological nature.

To boot, the three of us have strong affiliations with symbolic interactionism: a classical sociological perspective—albeit a rather interdisciplinary one. Indeed, as we detail in later chapters, the key conceptual purpose of our book is to lay out the analytical foundations for a study of the senses as interaction.

In positing the senses as interaction we open up the field to anyone—regardless of disciplinary affiliation—keen on understanding sensuality as sociality, and human experiences as sensuousness. In light of the above, we believe that both a subject matter and a particular approach are the object of our attention, rather than the state of art of a particular sub-discipline.

We hope that besides crossing disciplinary affiliations, our writing will also bridge the gap between scholars and students who are interested in this field. Thus we have opted to write this book in a very accessible manner, albeit without shying away from consequential reflections and critical interventions. Indeed we believe that to separate audiences into initiate and non-initiate is itself a form of noxious dualism, and by writing an accessible book we intend to erase that caste-like division.

Besides utilizing our own ethnographic material for the sake of its rhetorical appeal and pedagogical convenience, we intend to advance with this book a thoroughly sensual agenda. Like quantitative research generally, this kind of writing is much too divorced from what it seeks to represent: everyday sensed experiences.

In contrast, we believe that a socio-anthropological understanding of the senses requires a different kind of knowing and hence, a different kind of writing. Thus, rather than just a sociology and anthropology of embodiment and the senses, the purpose of our book is to advance a carnal and sensual sociology and anthropology. The Historical Evolution of the Sociological and Anthropological Study of the Senses Attempts to outline the scope and history of the anthropology of the senses may be very recent, but certainly no longer new.

Stoller ; Pink , theoretical interventions e. Howes and special issues of various journals [e. Ethnos 4 , Etnofoor 1 ; and outside of anthropology see Culture and Organization 3 , Journal of Social History summer ]. The same cannot be said of sociologists of the senses, and it is with them that we intend to start this brief overview of the field. Like other academics, sociologists tend to feel that a new subdiscipline has taken a firm hold when a new study group or section is established within one of their major professional associations.

If the existence of a section within a major professional organization is believed to be too stringent a criterion, however, perhaps other criteria ought to be considered.

Coalitions based on subdisciplinary interest may form, for example, around university departments with a particular research and teaching emphasis, small research networks either standing on their own feet or built around minor professional organizations, or around periodic thematic conferences.

But on the basis of these criteria as well, one would be hard pressed to say that a sociology of the senses is clearly recognizable as a full-standing substantive sub-field like, for example, the sociology of the body is today.

At this point our readers might wonder whether we, as the authors of this book, should even claim to be dedicating our attention to a field that is so new that it barely even exists. In spite of its appearance, however, the sociology of the senses is not too far behind its cousin, the anthropology of the senses.

Furthermore, we believe that combining sociology and the anthropology of the senses will foster the progress of both. So, is there a sociology of the senses at all, then, given what we said above? Our answer is yes. On the other hand, American Pragmatist philosophers such as Mead, Dewey, and James showed throughout their scholarship how sensing is an active and interpretive process rather than a passive reaction to external stimuli endowed with pre-formed meaning.

This very early period of interest in what today can be defined as a crypto-sociology of the senses was later developed by interactionists such as Becker and Goffman.

While neither can be pegged as a sociologist of the senses, both these founding fathers of modern sociology inspired the contemporary interest in a sociology of the senses. It was not until the s that sociologists on both sides of the Atlantic became more comfortable with novel topics, such as the sociology of the body, and later the sociology of the senses. Ushered in by postmodern theory, post-structuralism, and cultural studies, the cultural turn of the s further solidified, if not legitimized, various forms of non-positivist sociology.

The emergence of new discourses prompted the rapid growth of fields like the sociology of culture, of gender, of the emotions, of food, of music, of the arts, of popular culture and the media, and the rapid institutionalization of qualitative research traditions like interpretive ethnography and visual methodology.

At the same time, this turn also allowed for the renewal of interest in qualitative social psychological perspectives, such as those represented by various strands of symbolic interactionism. While phenomenological investigations of lived bodies now exist in the literature, they are vastly outnumbered by other approaches that ignore the carnal sensations of actual human beings and their embodied relations with others.

A sociology of the senses must thus be understood as a reaction to the theoretical excesses of a sociology of the body in which the body has morphed from an absent presence cf. Shilling to a presence silenced by theoretical noise. While the last few years have certainly seen the emergence of a coherent sociological approach to the senses, the terrain is far from smooth.

Furthermore, as mentioned above, the absence of a founding text capable of bridging disciplinary divisions has stood in the way of the building of a unified front. Writing from North America puts us in an interesting position from which to advocate for a sociological approach to the senses.

While we are somewhat removed from the few loose and informal groups that have coalesced around this topic in the UK, it is in North America that recent advances in both ethnographic methodology and interpretive social psychological and socio-cultural perspectives such as symbolic interactionism and performance theory have a deeper hold. This remark of course is not intended to generate barbaric continental divisions.

And the key step in doing so is by building upon the contributions of the anthropology of the senses, while striving to fill its gaps. The Anthropology of the Senses Whereas a sociology of the senses is at best in its infancy, an anthropology of the senses has almost reached maturity.

Since David Howes has carefully outlined the intellectual development of the anthropology of the senses, it is best to avoid repetitions of that work and only briefly summarize it here. According to Howes anthropologists have always had a latent interest in the senses.