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.
Epilogue: Vulnerability and Values
Epilogue: Vulnerability and Values
This intellectual quest to renew sociological theory around the topic of the human body has involved three broad assumptions: the vulnerability of embodiment, the precariousness of institutions, and the interconnectedness of social life. This renewal of sociology requires us to grasp the political significance of embodiment in order to understand the transformations of modern society. The sociology of the body has to be more than simply a study of the body in its interactional context. There is a dialectical relationship between these three components of embodiment, vulnerability, precariousness and reciprocity, that becomes obvious as soon as one thinks about the processes of modernization. It is within this dialectical balance between vulnerability, precariousness and interconnectedness that modern medical technologies ...
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