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.

Toward a Sociology of the Body

2020 ◽  
pp. xviii-20
Author(s):  
Katherine Mason ◽  
Natalie Boero
Keyword(s):  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Sociology Of The Body ◽  
Methodological Choices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detailed Outline

This essay is designed to establish the theoretical framework and goals for The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment, foremost of which is delineating what a sociology of the body must entail. Critically, a sociology of the body must recognize bodies as both cause and consequence of societal forces. It must also investigate how bodies change in response to their surroundings: not just through the centuries-long process of evolution but within a single individual’s lifetime. We also suggest not only a sociology of the body but also the body in sociology. This approach holds that consideration of bodies—including both the body of the researcher as well as that of the researched—can help to enrich sociological understandings of a wide range of social dynamics and institutions. In sociological subfields ranging from law to labor, and from medicine to migration, attending to the social body has the potential to newly illuminate the mechanisms that underlie our social institutions. This handbook’s early chapters focus primarily on method, debating and elaborating the method(s) that the authors find most useful for studying the body in society. Subsequent chapters shift focus toward the presentation of empirical findings and analysis, but with a continuing focus on detailing their methodological choices and innovations. A detailed outline exploring the twenty-seven chapters of the handbook is provided in this essay.

scholarly journals Body experience in the east-slavonic culture tradition

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-82
Author(s):  
Ye. I. Kirilenko
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Body Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
Culture Tradition

In the modern science, the body is an object of interest not only to the natural science and medicine, but also the humanities. Of special interest, in particular, for the medical discourse, is the ethnic body experience. The paper reveals features of the body experience in the east-slavonic culture from the analysis of the mythological tradition. This experience is characterized by the pronounced interest and ambivalent attitude to the body’s life, natural body standards; and emotional intensity. The experience of the social body is of highest priority in the culture.

The Japanese Village in the Seventeenth Century

1952 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Vital Function ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Barriers ◽  
The Middle Ages

As in the Middle Ages in the West, so in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) men were fond of explaining the hierarchical society in which they lived by comparing it to an organism. Social classes, Confucian scholars said, were like parts of the body: each had a vital function to perform, but their functions were essentially different and unequal in value. In this scheme the peasants were second in importance only to the ruling military class. Just as the samurai officials were the brains that guided other organs, so the peasants were the feet that held the social body erect. They were the “basis of the country,” the valued producers whose labor sustained all else. But, as a class, they tended innately to backsliding and extravagance. Left alone they would consume more than their share of the social income, ape the manners and tastes of their betters, and even encroach upon the functions of other classes to the perilous neglect of their own. Only the lash of necessity and the sharp eye of the official could hold them to their disagreeable role. They had to be bound to the land; social distinctions had to be thrown up around them like so many physical barriers; and, to remove all temptation to indolence and luxury, they had to be left only enough of what they produced to let them continue producing.

Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-260
Author(s):  
Rim Feriani ◽  
Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani ◽  
Debra Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Abdelkebir Khatibi ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Sign Systems ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Theories Of Meaning

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms, in his introductory essay ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Bessure du Nom propre, ‘l’intersémiotique’, migrant signs which move between one sign system and another. Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Koran, from the body to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to a mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns of Khatibi with which he develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, the chapter goes on to propose new readings of a selection of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. These are writers working with and through that heritage – and importantly, as for Khatibi, including the Sufi heritage – and whose writing is also resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project concerned with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic.

scholarly journals “This journey has definitely changed me”: An ethnographic narrative exploring disabled peoples’ lives through embodied experiences and identity negotiation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Social Model Of Disability ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Embodied Experiences

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>

scholarly journals “This journey has definitely changed me”: An ethnographic narrative exploring disabled peoples’ lives through embodied experiences and identity negotiation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Social Model Of Disability ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Embodied Experiences

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>

The multispatial governance of social and economic policy

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Bob Jessop
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Body ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics Of The Body

This chapter distinguishes Foucault’s approach from the work of Anglo-Foucauldian scholars. The latter adopted a microsocial perspective, focused on the programmes and rationalities of government that work across multiple alliances between different actors, and argued for bottom-up civil society responsibilization. Foucault was not only state-phobic but also suspicious of political action based on civil society. His theoretical interests shifted from the micro-physics of disciplinary society and its anatomo-politics of the body to the more general strategic codification of a plurality of discourses, practices, technologies of power, and institutional ensembles around a specific governmental rationality concerned with the social body (bio-power) in a consolidated capitalist society. This is reflected in the statification of government and the governmentalization of the state. This led to his analyses of sovereignty, territorial statehood, and state power and the role of civil society in this regard and to less well-substantiated claims about their articulation to the logic of capital accumulation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document