History of Anthropology of Body (RQ)

As discussed in class, what was the key question of the monogeny versus polygeny debates?

What publication is seen to have ended this debate? Who is considered the first to attempt to classify humans? What did he conflate physical bodily difference with?

Who first placed humans in the primate order?

-The key question was are the "races of man" distinct species?. This debate ended with Darwin's publication, the Origins of Species

- Linnaeus was the first to classify humans. He was conflicted with moral judgement.

-Linnaeus

What did Morton use craniological science to try and "validate"? What ideological perspective did this reflect?

- Morton used craniological science to "prove" craniums capacity caried and could be ranked among races. The ideological perspective was scientific racism.

What measurement did Boas challenge that was cherished by the scientific racialists? Briefly sum up Boas' conclusion

- The measurement of the cephalic index. His conclusion was that the environment influenced the shape of the head.

What did Margaret Mead insist was important in the social production of sex roles?

-· Body rituals (e.g., singing, sitting, or dancing)

What was significant about Malinowski's publication "The Sexual Life of Savages" (1929)? What had the physical body "become"?

- "the body" is socially constructed according to cultural criteria and values. The physical body "become" the social body.

What was significant (in terms of the body) about Mary Douglas' publication "Purity and Danger" (1966)?

- · The body emerges for the first time in anthropological theory as a central object of study

What was the focus of Emily Martin's publication "The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction" (1989)?

-· Focused on women's embodied experiences (menstruation, birth and child-rearing, and meopause)

What did embodiment-based approaches in anthropology emerged out of? As discussed in class, briefly describe Descartes' mind-body dualism.

- · Emerged out of dissatisfaction with dualistic and binary interpretation of humanity that created divisions. Descartes' mind-body dualism is the mind and body are independent, seen as different entities.

As discussed in class, briefly describe what embodiment theory seeks to explore. Is the body an object to be studied?

-· Explores the ways that experiences are enlivened, materialized, and situated in the world through the body. The body is not an object to be studied in relation to culture but is the subject of culture.

What is the "affective turn"? What is meant by affect? Provide examples of what affective experiences may involve.

-· A theoretical framework that acknowledges and analytically tries to accommodate the power of feelings, sentimentality, intimatices, and emotions. Affect is the notions of emotions, feeling, and sensation. Affective experiences include intimacy, belonging, and exclusion.

Mascia-Lees, F. E. (2016). "The Body in Early Feminist Anthropology,"
- Briefly describe what feminist anthropology, and the larger feminist movement of which it was a part, was critiqued for in terms of its construction of the body and what it means to be a woman.

· What space within feminism did the fiction and non-fiction writing of women of color, such as bell hooks, open up (i.e., what bodies needed to be considered?) What did this usher in decades of scholarship on?

· In anthropology specifically, what did the volume Black Feminist Anthropology challenged white feminists to consider?

- Women are made not born. Women's body "enslaves her to the species." She is the "other" and "object" to a man. Women's body are marked by racial, ethnic, and other forms of difference.

· Opened up a space within feminism for consideration of the racialized body. · Ushered on the body and identity.

· Challenged white feminists to consider the contributions of black women's research and writing on such issues to the subdiscipline.

Mascia-Lees, F. E. (2016). "Anthropology of 'the Body',"
- Mauss is seen to have anticipated the emergence of the "embodiment turn" within anthropology in the later decades of the twentieth century with his concept of habitus. What is meant by Mauss' habitus?

- An important strand in theorizing the body in the 1980s took place at the confluence of feminist and medical anthropology. What did Emily Martin's 1987 publication, The Woman in the Body, reveal? What did this significant publication lead to by the early 1990s?

· In the same year, what blueprint did feminist medical anthropologists Scheper-Hughes and Lock provide to understand the body as multiple?

- "all acquired habits and somatic tactics that represent the 'cultural arts' of using and being in the body and in the world"

- Revealed how medical knowledge imposes control over women's minds and bodies, making significant contribution to a feminist medical anthropology by early 1990s providing critical examinations of the imbrication of inequalities in science, biomedicine, and reproductive technologies.

· 3 bodies: the body-self, the social body, and the body politic.

Mascia-Lees, F. E. (2016). The Embodiment Turn in Anthropology,"
-Briefly describe Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1962) notion of "embodiment."

· In Merleau-Ponty's (1962) phenomenological framework, how are the body and mind understood? In this perspective, briefly describe how are subjectivity and meaning are produced.

o How do body-selves come into being?

o Using the term "body-subject" to capture this, Merleau-Ponty rejects any absolute opposition between self and world. Briefly sum up what Merleau-Ponty argues instead.

- Offers a non-dualistic understanding of the body in which the body is not an object to be studied in relation to culture, but the subject of culture.

· Indistinguishable, we experience them together, subjectivity. Meaning are not internal, bodies continually become us and we become our bodies.

- o Through intersubjective co-production of the world.

-o Argues that such body-subjects are extended and immersed in multiple worlds, continuously shuttling between representation ad the immediacy, indeterminacy, and sensibility of the world, all in the context of making sense of lived experience in a intersubjective world of shared meaning.