Introduction

Author(s):  
Mechthild Fend

The chapter introduces questions of skin and flesh tones via a discussion of Pedro Almódovar's 2011 film The Skin I live in. The film suggests a number of themes that are pertinent to this book: skin and identity; the relations between inside and outside; the nude and its colour; artificial skin and fantasies of the human creation of life; skin, touch and the haptic potential of vision; finally, the relationship between skin's role as a medium and the mediality of the image; issues of the colour of the nude and the longstanding association of skin, flesh and colour. The introduction also situates the book within the most relevant art historical studies on skin, flesh and the materiality of the image as well as within the scholarly field of the history of the body and of skin.

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-374
Author(s):  
David Kennerley

AbstractMusic has been steadily rising up the historical agenda, a product of the emergence of sound studies, the history of the senses, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity. This introductory article offers a critical review of how the relationship between music and politics has featured in extant historical writing, from classic works of political history to the most recent scholarship. It begins by evaluating different approaches that historians have taken to music, summarizes the important shifts in method that have recently taken place, and advocates for a performance-centered, contextualized framework that is attentive to the distinctive features of music as a medium. The second half examines avenues for future research into the historical connections between music and politics, focusing on four thematic areas—the body, emotions, space, and memory—and closes with some overarching reflections on music's use as a tool of power, as well as a challenge to it. Although for reasons of cohesion, this short article focuses primarily on scholarship on Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its discussion of theory and methods is intended to be applicable to the study of music and political culture across a broad range of periods and geographies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 1113-1129
Author(s):  
Kali Murray

This essay considers what tools should be used to study the legal history of intellectual property. I identify three historiographical strategies: narration, contest, and formation. Narration identifies the diverse “narrative structures” that shape the field of intellectual property history. Contest highlights how the inherent instability of intellectual property as a legal concept prompts recurrent debates over its meaning. Formation recognizes how intellectual property historians can offer insight into broader legal history debates over how to consider the relationship between informal social practices and formalized legal mechanisms. I consider Kara W. Swanson's Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk and Sperm in Modern America (2014) in light of these historiographical strategies and conclude that Swanson's book guides us to a new conversation in the legal history of intellectual property law.


Somatechnics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-455
Author(s):  
Danielle Kinsey

Author(s):  
William G. Pooley

The conclusion draws together ideas from the book, suggesting a few key points. First, it draws attention to the cultural agency of ‘exemplars’, or what folklorists have sometimes called ‘star performers’. Singers and storytellers like Henri Vidal, Marie Bouzats, or Catherine Gentes are not just important because they were typical, but because they played leading roles in local cultures. The conclusion argues that such exemplars allow historians to perceive changing cultures of the body which cannot be reduced to the simple advent of a ‘modern’ body. The example of the moorlands of Gascony suggests broader patterns in the history of the body during the period of modernization.


Author(s):  
William G. Pooley

This chapter situates the book as an intervention in discussions of the history of the body, suggesting that the experiences of the working population have often been absent from discussions of changing bodily cultures, which have instead tended to focus on elite discourses. The chapter suggests that the moorlands of Gascony in south-western France make a particularly powerful example, because of the scale and speed of top-down reforms of the landscape following a national law passed in 1857, which encouraged the forestation of the moorlands. The region also boasts one of the most impressive ethnographic archives, thanks to the work of the folklorist Félix Arnaudin (1844–1921). The chapter finishes with an outline of key methodologies drawn from folklore studies, including the study of performance, variation, and traceability.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-134
Author(s):  
Rob Boddice

The history of emotions has become a thriving focus within the discipline of history, but it has in the process gained a critical purchase that makes it relevant for other disciplines concerned with emotion research. The history of emotions is entangled with the history of the body and brain, and with cultural and political history. It is interested in the how and why of emotion change; with the questions of power and authority behind cultural scripts of expression, conceptual usages, and emotional practices. This work has reached a level of maturity and sophistication in its theoretical and methodological orientation, and in its sheer quantity of empirical research, that it contributes to emotion knowledge within the broad framework of emotion research.


Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes

Much of western philosophy, especially ancient Greek philosophy, addresses the problems posed by embodiment. This chapter argues that to grasp the early history of embodiment is to see the category of the body itself as historically emergent. Bruno Snell argued that Homer lacked a concept of the body (sōma), but it is the emergence of body in the fifth century BCE rather than the appearance of mind or soul that is most consequential for the shape of ancient dualisms. The body takes shape in Hippocratic medical writing as largely hidden and unconscious interior space governed by impersonal forces. But Plato’s corpus demonstrates that while Plato’s reputation as a somatophobe is well grounded and may arise in part from the way the body takes shape in medical and other physiological writing, the Dialogues represent a more complex position on the relationship between body and soul than Plato’s reputation suggests.


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