Summary
Contents
Subject index
Originally published in 1984, The Body and Society flew against prevailing trends which asked sociologists to understand society in terms of abstractions such as structure, class and function. Instead, in a series of dazzling chapters, Bryan S Turner argued that the body should be the axis of sociological analysis. The Second Edition of this ground-breaking book includes a new introduction which analyzes the social changes which have given a special prominence to the body in contemporary social theory, and develops Turner's own notion of a ‘somatic society’, a society within which major political and personal problems are both problematized in the body and expressed through it.
Ontology of Difference
Ontology of Difference
To be sure, eating, drinking, and procreation are genuine human functions. In abstraction, however, and separated from the remaining sphere of human activities and turned into final and sole ends, they are animal functions.
K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844
Introduction
The general argument of this study has been that the social sciences have often neglected the most obvious ‘fact’ about human beings, namely that they have bodies and they are embodied. When they have taken this factual substratum into account, the results have often been trivial. Sociobiology in particular is a blind alley which suppresses an equally obvious ‘fact’ about human beings, namely that their biological presence is socially constructed and constituted by communal practices. Although the body has been suppressed ...
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