Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

Abstract

Postmodernism, now fading partly into orthodoxy, partly into irrelevance, brought two new academic metaphors into common usage, especially in the fields of cultural studies and anthropology. The first is the metaphor of writing, derived mainly from work by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Using this metaphor, we can talk of discourses, textualities, inscriptions, readings, and deciphering. All experience and explanation is modeled on the act of reading and textual reception. For example, bodies may be described as “cultural artifacts, fabricated both in the writing and reading of ‘body texts.’...As soon as one ‘knows’ one’s own or another’s body, it has been written discursively;...Anatomy, epidemiology, psychology, medical sociology and other body-texts frame bodies...which exercise power over its reading” (Fox 1997: 45). The second decisive metaphor, associated in particular with Michel Foucault’s work on the history of madness and the evolution of clinics, is that of the human being as a body. For Foucault, the medical encounter is