Читать книгу Introducing Anthropology - Laura Pountney - Страница 131

Anthropologists look at the body as both an individual and a social entity that reflects the values and beliefs of the wider society to which it belongs. It is also seen as something that people continually ‘create’ or reproduce. Anthropologists have studied the relationship between the body and society – the body as a product of social and cultural forces. Robert Hertz and Terence Turner, for example, explored the body as a tool for thinking: how the human body is used to classify – that is, to place things into categories to make sense of the world around us. Although everyone has a body, not everyone speaks the same language or shares the same culture or religion. One way of understanding the body is to look at how it is used in symbols, myths, ritual, ethics and the definition of the sacred and the profane.