Body, Geography of

Traditional Geographical View

Depending on the geographical school of thought, the body has been discussed in a variety of ways. Generally, geographical discussions prior to the 1990s broached the issue of the body mostly implicitly.

In the wake of the social movements of the 1960s, for example, Marxist geography critically discussed social development, condemning discrimination and inappropriate health standards. Nonetheless, scientists mostly concentrated on the cognitive side of the appropriation of space. The body took the form of a neglectable, transparent container. Typically, the body appeared as a point or line on a map. This was also true for medical geography up to the mid 1990s, which did not focus on the daily struggles of ill or disabled people but solely on the body as a carrier of viruses and illnesses. The outcome of such research was usually a map indicating the spread of certain illnesses. Similarly, applied geography like urban planning in the 1960s/1970s was said to “think fleshless,” that is, it disregarded the body and its significance. Bodily needs were ignored, with efficient, abstract planning preferred.

Another variation of the body as Other was provided by the phenomenologically inspired humanistic geography of the 1970s and behavioral geography of the 1980s. While the well-known humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan came to acknowledge the body's vital role in being in the world, most humanistic geographers restricted the meaning of the body solely to spatial perception and cognition. The attempt to develop a theory of the bodily mediated lifeworld was one step toward the recognition of the body as a central geographical protagonist.

Similarly, Torsten Hägerstrand's time-geography of the 1970s announced its intention to incorporate bodily needs and constraints into geographical thinking. However, he left the body itself under-theorized, treating it as the tip of a pencil leaving a path in space. The door to a more explicit discussion of the body nevertheless gradually opened.

The Body as Same

A number of social scientists have tried to oppose the Othering of the body and treat the body as a vital variable of social life. They argue that the body is central to knowledge, social relations, personal identity, and the notion of space. Particularly, feminist, structuralist, and ethnomethodological accounts have emphasized the significance of embodiment. All three approaches have been taken up by human geographers. The significant rush of studies on the body took place in the 1990s with the bodily (somatic/corporeal) turn.

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