This book carries on the process, initiated by Bryan Turner in his seminal work "The Body and Society", of re-establishing the importance of the body to the social sciences and the humanities. This volume reasserts the centrality of the body within social theory as a means to understanding the complex inter-relations between nature, culture and society. At a theoretical level, the volume explores the origins of a social theory of the body in sources ranging from the work of Nietzche to contemporary feminist theory. The importance of theoretical understanding of the body to social and cultural analysis of contemporary societies is demonstrated through specific case studies. These range from the expression of the emotions, romantic love, dietary practice, consumer culture, fitness and beauty, to media images of women and sexuality.
Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Asian Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. Previously he was Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge from 1998-2005. His research interests include globalization and religion, concentrating on such issues as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronic information, religious, consumerism and youth cultures, human rights and religion, the human body, medical change, and religious cosmologies. He is Joint Chief Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals.
Preface - Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth and Bryan S Turner Recent Developments in the Theory of the Body - Bryan S Turner Bringing Bodies Back In - Arthur Frank On Human Beings and Their Emotions - Norbert Elias a Process-Sociological Essay On the Civilizing of Appetite - Stephen Mennell The Discourse of Diet - Bryan S Turner The Body in Consumer Culture - Mike Featherstone The Midlifestyle of 'George and Lynne' - Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth Martial Arts as a Resource for Liberal Education - Donald N Levine The Case of Aikido Bio-politics and Social Policy - Martin Hewitt Foucault's Account of Welfare Genealogy and The Body - Scott Lash Foucault/Deleuze/Nietzsche The Art of The Body in The Discourse of Postmodernity - Roy Boyne Love's Labour Lost? A Sociological View - Margareta Bertilsson Biographical Boundaries - Graham McCann Sociology and Marilyn Monroe Carmen - or The Invention of a New Feminine Myth - Dick Pels and Aya Crebas The Mask of Ageing - Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth Sociological Discourse and The Body - J M Berthelot
`The editors are to be commended for their inclusion of perspectives from various cultures. With the increasing globalization, internationalization, and geographic movement of individual persons an understanding of cultural differences in valuation of bodily forms is becoming a necessary requirement for persons engaged in human services. This volume is a needed addition to the literature focusing on these issues' - Journal of Applied Rehailitation Counselling `This is a most important and interesting collection which does much to advance the sociology of the body...I congratulate the editors for a fine achievement and the editors of TCS for pioneering this new, and now much less secret, theorizing of the body and of the embodied self' - Contemporary Sociology
