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Anthropological interest in the body began in the early eighteenth century through the ‘naturalistic’ view. The main naturalist writings at that time regarded the body as the biological base from which developed the superstructure of the society.

According to this perspective, human bodies are defined by their physical characteristics. The biological model looks at the body very much as a machine that can break down and so requires physical repair. This perspective is still dominant in the medical model in Western approaches to the body and is held by many doctors, surgeons and health practitioners. The main assumptions of the medical model are physical phenomena, such as illness is caused by bacteria; illness can be classified; medical specialists identify illness; illness can be treated and often cured. The medical model argues that the body is a biological organism.

Criticism: This theory was criticized as being reductionist, because the body is explained as a result of some aspect of physical or genetic constitution. In other words, biological explanations completely ignored social influences and the role of society or social processes and representations in the shaping of the body.

The social construction of the body

In contrast to naturalistic views of the body, the socially constructed body is assumed to be the product of social processes, ‘constructed’ in terms of dominant social practices or cultural norms. This approach holds that the meanings attributed to the body, and the boundaries that exist between the bodies of different groups of people, are social products. Social constructionists consider that the way people view themselves and others is shaped not only by biology or nature but also by the social context in which they live. Foucault ([1973] 1994), for example, argues that the way humans view the body is influenced by dominant discourses (systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak). Views of the body will vary from society to society depending on the dominant discourses used in that culture. For example, in contemporary Western societies, discourses about the body, especially for women, privilege thinness, so a thin body shape is likely to offer higher status and to be sought after. Such constructionist notions of what humans think is ‘healthy’ and what is ‘illness’ are shaped not by biology but by dominant ideas and discourses about the body. For Foucault, the body is a direct way for certain members of the society to implement control. Institutional power such as that found in prisons, hospitals, political regimes, schools and religious disciplines shapes both the appearance and the practices relating to the individual body.

The social constructionist approach has had a profound influence on anthropological theories of the body, many of which originate from notions put forth by one of the founding figures of both sociology and anthropology, Emile Durkheim – in particular, his notion of the person as a double being consisting of an individual biological self and a social self. In this duality, the body stands for the profane or ‘natural’ self, the mind for the sacred or social self. Anthropologists and others have long acknowledged that religious thought recognizes this duality in our nature through its opposition between body and soul, flesh and spirit, profane and sacred (see Robert Hertz on handedness, pp. 72–3).

Criticism: Social constructionism is one-sided as a purely biological naturalistic approach. The body is not exclusively a social construction.

The body as symbol

This perspective focuses on the representation or symbolic nature of the body as a way of giving it a social meaning. Mary Douglas ([1970] 2003) explored the symbolic significance of the body, arguing that it may be viewed metaphorically as a text that can be read as a symbol or signifier of the world that it inhabits. The general theme in her work is that the social body constrains how the physical body is perceived and experienced. Douglas writes about ‘two bodies’, the physical (natural body) and the social (cultural body). In her book Natural Symbols, the argument is that the human body is the most readily available image of a social system and that ideas about it relate closely to dominant ideas about society. According to Douglas, the more the social group exerts pressure on its individual members, the greater the demand for conformity expressed by the control of the body; bodily control is thus an expression of social control. The body, in other words, is above all a metaphor of society as a whole. An example of this theory may be seen in Terence Turner’s ‘The social skin’ (see pp. 75–7).

Feminism and the body

Feminist anthropologists claim that gendered expectations and ideas about the body exist for both females and males. They point to the ways in which body ideals serve as mechanisms of social power and control. For most feminists, the rise of cosmetic surgery as a possible, and acceptable, means of self-modification represents the ongoing oppression of women by male concepts of beauty. They also claim that cultural institutions dominated by men, such as religion and medicine, also control ideas about women’s bodies (see more on gender and feminism in Chapter 10).

Phenomenological approaches

Although it may serve as a powerful symbolic medium, the body is also capable of participating in the creation of social meaning. Anthropologists have argued that the body is an active agent in the social world. According to Thomas Csordas (1994), the body is not an object to be studied in relation to culture, but is to be considered as the subject of culture, or, in other words, as the existential ground for culture. He seeks to understand human participation in the cultural world through embodied experience.

In his analysis of perception (how we become aware of the sensory world around us), the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1962] 2014) rejects the notion of dualism and uses the concept of embodiment, which is the phenomenological way of knowing and experiencing the world around us through our own body. This perspective looks at how self-image and self-identity are affected by and help to shape notions of the normal body. Their perception of how they look may lead people to pursue real changes through dieting, exercise or even surgery to alter their body shape and change identity. Phenomenologically oriented anthropologists tend to focus on issues of individual identities, while social constructionists and feminists focus more on social meanings.

embodiment A tangible or visible form of an idea, quality or feeling