4th Global Conference
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Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 5A: Body and Embodiment
Chair: Louise Penner
The Fit of Health: The Embodiment of an Ideal and
its Implications
Naomi Adelson
Department of Anthropology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Health is never simply the expression of the condition of one’s body. Rather, it is a fundamental expression of how we define ourselves as social, cultural and political beings. Why, for example, is health so often equated with a particular sense of individual fitness, control and youth in urban, industrialized societies and how is that equation linked to a biomedical rationalization of the human body? In this paper, I will examine these valuations of health and contrast them with an alternative model of well-being. In the Aboriginal Canadian (Cree) context, health is centered less on an individual’s level of fitness or wellness and more on the relationship between the individual and his or her social, cultural and environmental networks. Without idealizing either model of health, I critically address how notions of “health” not only reflect larger cultural metaphors but how those metaphors are embodied and hence naturalized and normalized. Moving from the study of “health” as regulative (Crawford, 1985; Lupton, 1995) towards a critical analysis of health as the embodiment of cultural norms, I draw from these two ideal types in order to highlight the ways in which health is constituted as normal and natural. These idealized, embodied expressions of health however, can also impede communication of health knowledge(s) across cultural, social and political divides. I conclude this paper with a brief discussion of the implications of these barriers.
Human Body – A Social Track From
Health to Illness and From Illness to Health
Magdalena Gajewska
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology,
University of Gdansk,
Gdansk,
Poland
I prepared my presentation with a purpose of inviting
the audience to passage
through the land of human body’s social meaning – considering
healthy, ill and recovering body. Body is a biological existence and
the moment it gets unwell it starts to send singals which are recognised
and diagnosed by medicine. But even before medicine starts to diagnose
the problem, body – as a social existence - sends different kinds
of signals. And those are readable for the patient himself, for his environment,
and for his doctor as well.
Body as a social existence comes under valorization and social techniques
which give sense and social meaning to it. By saying ‘body techniques’ I
mean, according to Marcel Mauss’ definition, traditional way in
which people and societies use their bodies.
In this presentation I would like to focus on those body techniques that
make us able to transmit information about our health state. Very often
those techniques stay out of our conscious mind. Unconsciously we transmit
and receive information showed by gestures, movements, our pose or face
mimic. Behaving in a certain way we inform everybody around us about
the state of our mind and health. In 3 main parts of my presentation
(dedicated to social ideas of different types of body – healthy,
ill and recovering one) I want to show the techniques of healthy and
ill body considered in modern world by presenting various kinds of behaviours,
rituals, gestures, reproduction techniques, social practices, costume
and sexuality importance.
By doing it I want to signalise main reasons of misunderstandings, which
may be caused by their wrong interpretation. Body techniques and their
meaning are deeply inveterated in culture of origin. They are results
of very first socialization that we are given in our families and social
classes. Inability of interpretation or wrong interpretation of patient’s
gesture may lead to wrong diagnosis or disregard of signals sent by his
body. In times of social migrations doctors should be very sensitive
to questions which may help them diagnose quickly the exact state of
patient’s health. Same time we should not forget that patients
are same sensitive to information sent by doctor’s body, which
may be in the result the source of important information for them.
Some Thoughts on Physicians and
Metaphysicians
Iain
Brassington
Centre for Professional Ethics,
University of Keele,
Keele,
Staffordshire, United Kingdom
This paper will begin by considering what
disciplines like medicine tells us about our attitude to the body and
the circumstances of embodiment. I shall suggest that tradition draws
a distinction between the individual – the
object of therapeutic concern – and the body; by altering a person’s
body, we can, and sometimes ought, to “save” a person from
unfortunate circumstances. Yet the conception of the self presented
by such thinkers as Heidegger suggests that this picture of our relationship
with the body is mistaken: here, the “self” is fundamentally
worldly – existentially predicated on and inseparable from apparently
contingent facts and circumstances. This suggests that an alteration
of the world, part of which is the body, will have a profound existential
impact on the person.
I shall trace the implications of such a position
for medicine, suggesting that it may have to be thought of not as something
with the power to liberate us from disability, illness or death (there
being nothing to liberate),
but as something that mediates the relationship between ourselves, the
world, and our projects. We might still wish to be rid of a condition,
but medicine this cannot release us from circumstance so much
as respond to a desire that our future selves (with which the identification
of our present selves could only be provisional) be founded in a particular
set of circumstances.
Though I shall avoid making normative claims, the
thoughts I shall pursue are ethical, because they deal with our place
in, and relationship with, the world: our ’ethos or “accustomed
place”;
the relationship between ethics and existential analysis is much closer
and more dynamic than may appear at first to be the case. Taking such
concerns into account allows room in our understanding of our relationship
with the world for reconciliation, rather than simply domination.
Beyond Biomedicalisation: Mind/Body Models of Health & Illness
Gillian Bendelow* and
David Menkes**
*School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies,
University of Sussex,
Falmer,
Brighton, United Kingdom
**Professor of Psychological Medicine, Wales College
of
Medicine and University of Wales
The past twenty years has seen an explosion
of interest in embodiment in
social science (Featherstone et al. 1991, Turner 1996, Shilling 1993),
but
criticism has been levelled at the abstract nature of the conceptualisation
of the body. More recently, embodiment has been linked to empirical
research (Nettleton and Watson 1998) and to medical sociology (Freund
and
McGuire 2001, Williams 2003), but the 'emotionally expressive' body within
health and illness still remains relatively underexplored.
Central to
this understanding is the critique of Cartesian dualism in
scientific medicine in the separation of mind and body and the creation
of
'body machines'. Social sciences and humanities associated with
medicine,
particularly medical sociology, philosophy/bioethics and health psychology,
have shaped modern ideas about health and illness and over the course
of
the twentieth century formed a major challenge to the narrow philosophical
grounding of biomedicine. Furthermore, illnesses of 'late modernity'
feature multifactorial aetiologies and complex mind-body relationships
which require traditional categories, formulations and management
strategies to be re-evaluated; hence the turn to more holistic
models of
health and illness, which are now permeating medical education and practice
(Wade and Halligan 2004).
In the light of these developments, more sophisticated
conceptualisation
of terms such as 'stress' and 'wellbeing' are needed to demonstrate the
intertwining of emotion and embodiment in illness and disease. This
presentation will explore the limits of the divisions between 'mental'
and
'physical' illnesses through a range of so called 'psychosomatic
'disorders or conditions involving 'medically unexplained symptoms'
and
will consider the role of innovative specialisms such as liaison
psychiatry to transcend some of these problems.