Key ideas and terms

The Body as a social construct

• Bodies are not just biologically neutral but are shaped through shared culture

• Anthropology has challanged the idea that there is a natural, pre-social body

• Established most clearly by Mauss

The Mind-Body Divide

• Has been a tradition of treating the mind and body as separate → Anthropology has pushed back agasint this Cartesian Dualism

• This is the central critique of Scheper-Hughes and Lock

Embodiment

• The idea that we are our bodies not just in them

• Experience, knowledge, and identity are grounded in bodily being-in-the-world.

Power and the body

• Power shapes, disciplines, and co-modifies bodies

• Political oppression, racial hierarchy, capitalist exploitation, and state suspicion all inscribe themselves in how bodies move, are used, are valued, and are read.

Habitus

• Bourdieu

• The ingrained habits, dispositions and skills we acquire through social upbringings

Biopower

• Foucault

• Modern states regulate populations through managing their bodies e,g health

Docile Bodies

• Foucault

• Bodies that have been disciplined and made useful and manageable through institutions (prisons, schools, etc)

Techniques of the body

• Mauss

•  The culturally specific ways people know how to use their bodies

• Transmitted via imitation and socialisation

Three bodies

• Scheper-Hughes & Lock Framework

1.  The individual body → phenomenological, lived experience

2. The social body → the body as natural symbol used to think about society

3. The body politic → regulation and control of bodies by institutions and states

Desubjectification

• Fassin and d'Halluin

• Medicalization of asylum seekers' claims turns them into bodies to be assessed rather than active agents