scholarly journals Biology as destiny? Rethinking embodiment in ‘deep’ old age

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (8) ◽  
pp. 1279-1291 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN PICKARD
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Sociological Imagination ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Feminist Methodology ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Explanatory Framework ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cultural Determinants

ABSTRACTDespite sociological understanding that bodies are social and morphological, material and discursive, there is a persistent, prevailing tendency within sociology to approach the old body – particularly in ‘deep old age’ – as non-social. No longer amenable either to reflexive (consumerist) choice, or expressive of the self, it is viewed rather through a biomedical explanatory framework in which it is held to succumb to ‘natural’ physiological processes of decline that lie outside culture. This paper critically questions such assumptions which it links to sociology's acquiescing in modernity's age ideology rather than taking it as a starting point for critique. This means that sociology's sensitivity towards ageing is displayed not in challenging models of the older body but in diverting attention away from the body altogether and focusing on structural and cultural determinants which are not considered to encompass physiology. Arguing, however, that biology and society do not exist on separate plains, and that the body in deep old age is, like other bodies, first and foremost a social body, the paper draws upon feminist methodology and epistemology for the purpose of dismantling such essentialism. It suggests that the sociological imagination will benefit from the eradication of age ideology through a clearer understanding not just of ageing but of embodiment at all stages of the lifecourse.

NATACHA LESUEUR, DES CLICHÉS IRONIQUES : UN FÉMINISME DISCRET1

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (25) ◽  
pp. 136-147
Author(s):  
Sandrine Ferret
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Methodology ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marc Chagall ◽  
Nuclear Tests ◽  
Light Flashes ◽  
Video Films

Natacha Lesueur is a French photographer, who discreetly conforms with the feminist tendencies, starting from her earliest works realized in the 1990s. Her first photographs depict compositions, in which fragments of the body, the head, the bust, the legs, etc., are adorned with intricately composed pieces of food, sometimes creating mysterious alphabets. The colour photographs are exceptionally painstainkingly processed – refined – and disorient the viewer with the vision of body fragments staged in weird situations. On the exhibition entitled White shadows, in the Marc Chagall Museum in Nice in 2014, Natacha Lesueur presented a work realized during several trips to Tahiti. Moved by the similarity of the Tahitian landscapes to her own shots, she would ask herself a question, how to use visual means to depict the reality in which the women and men of Tahiti lived, the reality so distant from the postcards which we all see in front of our eyes. Her choice included adopting these schematic representations as a starting point, together with introducing elements of destruction connected with colonisation, and especially with nuclear tests. She also considered voluptuous looks cast at young Tahitian women (wahine) by the colonizers. Playing with the Tahitian exoticism in an exaggerated way, undertaking strategic topics and perspectives (the landscape and wahine), Natacha Lesueur stages these subjects in order to introduce distortions into their perception. The light of the stroboscope lamp or red lighting make the viewers embarrassed, as they also perceive typical pictures from the well- known categories: the paradise lagoon, the lewd native, light flashes or overly erotic dance. Lesueur’s work criticises depictions of the Tahitian exoticism, with which it enters into a dispute, thus deconstructing it. The article analyses in detail two video films, Omaï and Upa Upa, shown during the exhibition mentioned. At the same time it attempts to answer the question, in what way, while making use of special lighting in her work, Natacha Lesueur utilizes the feminist methodology, whose aim is to deconstruct identity.

IRONIC STEREOTYPES: DESCREET FEMINISM OF NATACHA LESUEUR

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (25) ◽  
pp. 136-146
Author(s):  
Sandrine Ferret
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Methodology ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marc Chagall ◽  
Nuclear Tests ◽  
Light Flashes ◽  
Video Films

Sandrine Ferret Ironic banalities: the discreet Feminism of Natacha Lesueur Natacha Lesueur is a French photographer, who discreetly conforms with the feminist tendencies, starting from her earliest works realized in the 1990s. Her first photographs depict compositions, in which fragments of the body, the head, the bust, the legs, etc., are adorned with intricately composed pieces of food, sometimes creating mysterious alphabets. The colour photographs are exceptionally painstainkingly processed – re- fined – and disorient the viewer with the vision of body fragments staged in weird situations. On the exhibition entitled White shadows, in the Marc Chagall Museum in Nice in 2014, Natacha Lesueur presented a work realized during several trips to Tahiti. Moved by the similarity of the Tahitian landscapes to her own shots, she would ask herself a question, how to use visual means to depict the reality in which the women and men of Tahiti lived, the reality so distant from the postcards which we all see in front of our eyes. Her choice included adopting these schematic representations as a starting point, together with introducing elements of destruction connected with colonisation, and especially with nuclear tests. She also considered vo- luptuous looks cast at young Tahitian women (wahine) by the colonizers. Playing with the Tahitian exoticism in an exaggerated way, underta- king strategic topics and perspectives (the landscape and wahine), Nata- cha Lesueur stages these subjects in order to introduce distortions into their perception. The light of the stroboscope lamp or red lighting make the viewers embarrassed, as they also perceive typical pictures from the well- known categories: the paradise lagoon, the lewd native, light flashes or overly erotic dance. Lesueur’s work criticises depictions of the Tahitian exoticism, with which it enters into a dispute, thus deconstructing it. The article analyses in detail two video films, Omaï and Upa Upa, shown during the exhibition mentioned. At the same time it attempts to answer the question, in what way, while making use of special lighting in her work, Natacha Lesueur utilizes the feminist methodology, whose aim is to deconstruct identity.

Self and Subjectivity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Exercises ◽  
Mind Set

This chapter investigates the concept of yati, the wandering ascetic of the Mānavadharmaśāstra. It highlights the phenomenology of the yati’s experience in relation to the overall architecture of the Manu cosmology. The wandering ascetic, having paid three debts, has his mind set on renunciation. The yati’s aim is to avoid being brought down by the collapse of the body as one nears death, but not to avoid death. Manu notes two spiritual exercises. One of imagined disembodiment: that is, one imagines the collapse and the fall into the alligator’s jaws, being brought down by old age and disease, how the very nature of embodiment is to be in pain. Manu’s second technique of the self aims to engender a sense of disgust in and alienation from the body.

Truly Embodied Sociology: Marrying the Social and the Biological?

2003 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Newton
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Sociology Of The Body ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physiological Analysis ◽  
Methodological Difficulties

This paper explores the relation between sociology and biology through an examination of issues relating to the sociology of the body, emotion and health. Arguments for a ‘biological’, and yet social, body are considered before developing a critique of work on the sociology of the biological body. It is argued that there are a number of difficulties with this latter project. Writers working in this area can be seen to have used rather emotional ploys to advance their promotion of a more ‘biologised’, or ‘material-corporeal’, account of the body, emotion and health. In addition though these writers eschew reductionist, naturalist, and dualist arguments, they nevertheless draw on studies that have some or all of these characteristics. Finally a variety of epistemological and methodological difficulties inherent in physiological analysis and in ‘interviewing’ the body are explored. It is concluded that we still remain near the ‘starting point’ of a sociology of the body that interrelates biology and sociology.

Representations and Techniques of the Body among the Mongols

Inner Asia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaelle Lacaze
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Social Integration ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Presence ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Physical Behaviour ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Starting Point

AbstractThe article provides an analysis of techniques of the body in childhood, adulthood and old age among a range of Mongolian cultures. Using Marcel Mauss's well-known observations on techniques of the body as a starting point, the paper develops his ideas (along lines suggested by the work of Roberte Hamayon) to include issues of classification, spatiality and symbolisation. In the context of Buddhist and shamanist cultures, Mongolian concepts of ‘soul’ and ‘vital energy’ are central for an understanding of techniques of the body. Analysing the life-cycle and indigenous notions of cyclicity, it is argued that the process of humanisation during the training of the child is for the Mongols the opposite of the process of dehumanisation of the elders. In both situations, a certain distance from full social presence is evident. Adulthood, on the other hand, is a period of social integration marked by a mode of mastery of the body and restraint in physical behaviour. Using both synchronic and diachronic modes of analysis, Lacaze concludes that while collective public pressures to conform to conventional norms are strong, there also exist a variety of more natural (‘wild’) behaviours that are allowed to certain social categories, this being related to concepts of animality.

SELF OR NON-SELF? CONSTRUCTING THE BODY IN IMMUNOLOGY

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 249-286 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Immune System ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Feminist Anthropology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

The article focusses on how the body is constructed for immunology. Specifically, the complex and tangled bio-political genealogy of immunity is analysed in detail as the understanding of it hovers between social and biological discourses. In addition, the controversy between different models of the immune system is examined. The social studies of immunology conducted by Donna Haraway and Emily Martin are also highlighted. In these studies, the body-immune system is understood as a diversified heterogeneous construction consisting of components belonging to different ontological orders. The construction of the immune system does not end in the labora-tory or in the clinic. It continues in other places by other means. Nevertheless, the relationship between the body and the immune system is situational: the immune system could be completely identified with the body or be a part of it. Emily Martin’s ethnography of immune systems and Donna Haraway’s feminist anthropology provide the means for understanding how the immune system, as both academics and non-academics explain it, can be juxtaposed to and also coincide with the body and even the self,but nevertheless conform to the scale, concepts, laws and metaphors of the social world of everyday life. The immune system and immunity are assessed in terms of the physiological body and the self. On the other hand, the body as a biological “self” is abstracted from the physiological and social body, and in a sense it “lives a life of its own.” Therefore, our body is the outcome of a complex coordinating effort among different bodies: the physiological body, the one identified with the self, and the body on a different scale - the biological “self” which turns out to be “non-self” and not belong to the subject

scholarly journals Ciało biologiczne w interakcjach społecznych — pomiędzy napiętnowaniem a akceptacją

2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
Honorata Jakubowska
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The Body ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Starting Point

The starting point for this article is Erving Goffman’s concept of stigma. Referring to her own surveys, the author analyses Tseëlon’s claim that the physical body can be treated as a stigma. She considers which aspects of the body – e.g. the natural odour, old age, illness or the absence of depilation – stigmatises a person most, and in which social groups. The explanation is that it depends on different approaches to the body and treating it as inherited vs. achieved.

scholarly journals Population Aging as the Social Body in Representation and Real Life

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Crampton
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Population Aging ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social

This article uses three levels of body analysis as presented by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock to compare old age as a construct in population aging discourse with research on lived experience of people aging in the United States and Ghana. I first describe how demographers construct social bodies as becoming “gray” through population statistics and how policy makers then use dependency ratios to rationalize intervention on behalf of older adults in the body-politic.  The construction of old age within this discourse is then compared with ethnographic research that suggests this construct leaves out much of the lived experience familiar to anthropologists of aging.  Rather than debunk the old age construct, however, the purpose of this article is to argue for study of population aging discourse as constituting a social body reflecting cultural constructions of nature and society.  Moreover, this representation is made real through policy and social intervention work, and with very real effect on people’s lives. As such, an anthropology of aging bodies can include the social life of old age as a social construct.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

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