History Of Body Research Articles

Reclaiming the Past: Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History

This essay examines the connection between body, history, and nation in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1993). The novel dramatizes and responds to questions concerning national belonging and community, while at the same time it longs to escape or transcend nation and history. The dialectical push and pull of this desire to escape and return is animated through the way that The English Patient imagines the body as a contested and contesting space, a conduit into the past and the means through which that past might be reclaimed. As a consequence, I hope to nuance political assessments of the novel and of Ondaatje’s contribution to historiographical metafiction more broadly, as well as his dual status as both a postmodern and postcolonial writer.

Useless History

If you think you can know the body of history by simply reading it as a discrete entity, an independent body that can be walked around, wholly mapped, wholly disciplined, then you will never feel its breath. If you are here and the body is there, then you cannot think about the way in which that body continues its own minute motions, has its own momentum. Heart rate slowing, blood vessels pushing, pushing, pushing, against a loss of fluid and those labouring lungs flooded with the hope of final rest. How will these small changes tell their emerging stories? Neither long enough nor lived enough to be generational, these transformations cannot be told as history. They are the folds of the past from which new words emerge.

Ankur Barua, The Divine Body in History: A Comparative Study of the Symbolism of Time and Embodiment in St. Augustine and Ramanuja

Ankur Barua, The Divine Body in History: A Comparative Study of the Symbolism of Time and Embodiment in St. Augustine and Ramanuja

Multiple Ontologies and the Problem of the Body in History

ABSTRACT In this article, we return to a fundamental anthropological question: How can we understand apparently incommensurate perspectives on the human body? While applauding recent moves to place local people's perspectives on an ontological rather than epistemological footing, we suggest that both of these approaches fail to explain how different ontological perspectives can ever communicate with one another and how historical change takes place. To understand this, we offer a different model of multiple ontologies that also makes room for physical materials; we explore this through the ontologies of Native America and Western Europe from medieval times to the present day.

The Politics of Truth in Herbert of Cherbury

����� ��� What was Edward Herbert of Cherbury trying to accomplish when he published De veritate in 1624? Why was he most proud of this book, his earliest, more than of the other eight eventually published? 1 Like Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and other seventeenth-century thinkers appalled by the wars of religion, Herbert saw himself as establishing a philosophical basis for an ethics and a politics aimed at peaceful coexistence. Herbert asks, “Where, then, can an anxious and divided mind turn to find security and peace,” given “the multitude of sects, divisions, subdivisions and cross-divisions?” The answer is in his own pages (DV 75). 2 De veritate operates as a guide for the perplexed, tutoring them in how to discriminate among classes of truth and how to distinguish certainty from probability, possibility, and error. In the process, it issues a salvo against the fashionable skeptical opinion that nothing can be known (nihil scitur). While the political implications of his philosophy of mind are intimated in De veritate, they are more fully developed in his posthumously published Life and Reign of King Henry VIII (1649), one of Herbert’s last works and arguably his masterpiece. 3 For example, conformity and consent, key philosophical terms in De veritate, become simplified and politicized in The Life and Reign of King Henry VIII—as if historical events and pressures had deflated the aesthetic and metaphysical aspirations which Herbert attaches to these words. In my view, Herbert comes to terms with the political corollaries of his philosophy while composing his account of the Protestant Reformation for King Charles. These include a renewed appreciation for skills of arbitration and consensus; increased respect for Parliament and lawmaking; sympathy for neutrality as a political strategy; and support for a strong ruler capable of imposing order on quarreling factions, such as his idealized version of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, with his hopes for the consensual process envisioned for the Council of Trent. Herbert surely did not foresee his own career as a historian when he delivered his disparaging view of historical writing at the conclusion of De veritate. “The entire body of history . . . is best described as probability” (316),

The Wound Inflicted on the Body of History: Elsa Morante between Western and Eastern Spirituality

Elsa Morante scholars have long been aware of the author’s profound knowledge of oriental philosophical and literary traditions but, until now, there has been no examination of the theoretical and formal impact of this on her work. It is also well known, as Garboli notes, that during the 1960s and 1970s, Morante was deeply affected by Simone Weil and her work Cahiers, with its summation of oriental spiritualism – especially Hinduism – and Western religious and philosophical traditions. The principle of Weil’s mysticism, of the soul penetrated by grace, of the divine light capable of defeating pesanteur (gravity), is indeed the result of her fusing the Christian doctrine of Divine Illumination – recalling St John of the Cross – with the mystic light of oriental thought. The aim of this paper is, mediating through Weil, to investigate which interpretation of mystical illumination, western or eastern, Morante embraced in the 1960s and ‘70s, and to analyze its impact on her work La Storia (History). According to Weil, the experience of succumbing to divine light is made possible through a meditation on the ordeal of the cross, the unconsoled affliction that strikes the soul and permits the process of ‘decreation’. Morante’s interpretation of the Second World War and the wounds inflicted by it on humanity, that can only begin to heal through a spiritual process of decreation, can be read in the light of Weil’s philosophy.

Body Fascism in Britain: Building the Blackshirt in the Inter-War Period

AbstractIn recent years scholars have devoted a great deal of attention and theorisation to the body in history, looking both at bodies as metaphors and as sites of intervention. These studies have tended to focus on the analysis of bodies in a national context, acting for and acted upon by the state, and similarly the ever-expanding study of masculinity continues to try to define hegemonic masculinities. But what if we direct our gaze to marginal bodies, in this case Blackshirt bodies who act against the state, and a political movement that commits assault on the body politic? This article examines the centrality of the body and distinctive gender codes in the self-representation, the performance and practice, and the culture of Britain's failed fascist movement during the 1930s. The term ‘body fascism’ has taken on different and much diluted meaning in the present day, but in the British Union of Fascists’ construction of the Blackshirted body, in the movement's emphasis on the embodiment of their political religion through sport, physical fitness and public display of offensive and defensive violence, and in their distinctive and racialised bodily aesthetic illustrated in their visual and graphic art production we come to understand Britain's fascist movement as a product of modernity and as one potent expression of the convergence between populist politics and body fixation.

The turn of the body: history and the politics of the corporeal

This paper reviews the encounter of the body in historical scholarship from the recent Foucaultian past to the present. The “somatic turn”, it argues, did more than merely render the body temporarily fashionable in history writing; it fundamentally challenged the nature of history as a form of inquiry. The paper outlines Foucault’s anti-essentialist understanding of the body as developed through his concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics”, before discussing how the somatic turn impacted on the new cultural history. The latter’s representationalist mode of expression is discussed in relation to the “experiential” reactions to it and the space these open for a new and politically worrying kind of essentialism, “presentationalism”. Two other possible directions for the body in history writing today are considered, one radically neo-essentialist, the other not, in its effort to lay bare the politics of contemporary biologized life.

Véronique Bouillier and Gilles Tarabout (eds), Images du corps dans le monde hindou, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2002, pp. 509, illus., €42.00 (paperback 2-271-06060-5).

Véronique Bouillier and Gilles Tarabout (eds), Images du corps dans le monde hindou, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2002, pp. 509, illus., €42.00 (paperback 2-271-06060-5).

Sacred Embodiment: Fertility Ritual, Mother Goddess, and Cultures of Belly Dance

AbstractThis essay examines belly dance movement as a mimetic ritual of universal significance in its representations of the birthing of the human race and the worship of the Mother Goddess. In this examination, the contested politics of female fertility and birthing rituals will be discussed. The essay's scope expands to include discussions of the popular tropes of “body memory” and “in the blood,” fascinating instances of identity definition and ideological location before originary questions of human embodiment, descent, and gender tensions. Movement is directly connected to identity. Movement and choreography may function as story telling—a narrative of the body's history, a fluid and kinaesthetic record of the individual body, and, by extension, the community and in some ways humanity itself.

Modernism, memory, and desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

Introduction 1. An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo Poems 2. Mixing memory and desire: rereading Eliot and the body of history 3. Eliot, Eros, and desire: 'oh, do not ask, 'what is it?' 4. T. S. Eliot: writing time and blasting memory 5. Virginia Woolf, (auto)biography, and the Eros of memory: reading Orlando 6. Other kinds of autobiographies: sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the Lighthouse 7. Remembering what has 'almost already been forgotten:' where memory touches history Epilogue.

Addiction to Cosmetic Surgery: Representations and Medicalization of the Body

Contemporary social transformations of the body are essentially mediated by medical discourse. With the body conceived of as “soft and modifiable,” we are witnessing an unprecedented rise in recourse to medicine in order to validate primarily social conditions. In this context, plastic surgery functions as a modality of social control and management, not only of the physical body as such, but at the social level as well. Physical, because plastic surgery allows one to modify the external and visible organs (face, breasts, legs, nose, etc.), and social, because it proposes a social model of the ideal body that goes beyond the one inherited from the biological parents. If the past sheds light on the present, one might wonder whether there are any representations of the body in history that can help us understand better the contemporary phenomenon of cosmetic surgery. What do we mean by the medicalization of bodies? How does a psychosocial condition change from having a social status to a medical one? How can we explain the extraordinary popularity of plastic surgery as a socially acceptable, and desirable, behavior? To answer these questions, based on a review of the literature, this article analyzes the social trend towards the medicalization of bodies via plastic surgery. To that end, four main aspects will be examined: (1) a brief overview of the body’s representation throughout history; (2) a reminder that medicalization is a mode of social control; (3) psychosocial factors that influence the recourse to plastic surgery; (4) cultural examples that demonstrate how important cultural values are in shaping the different trajectories regarding plastic surgery. In conclusion, the author suggests considering social ties as a major component in the social intervention process.

Performing the Material Body: Enacting Passion, Madness, and Death on the Shakespearean Stage

Performing the Material Body:Enacting Passion, Madness, and Death on the Shakespearean Stage Trish Thomas Henley (bio) Gail Kern Paster , Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 288 pp. $35.00. Carol Thomas Neely , Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 264 pp. $21.95. Susan Zimmerman , The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 214 pp. £45.00. Shigehisa Kuriyama writes, "the history of the body is ultimately a history of ways of inhabiting the world" (237; qtd. in Paster, Humoring 134). Recovering that ontological and phenomenological history, though, is no easy task. Humans, regardless of the time or culture into which they are born, perceive through their senses, move through time and space, and die. The way we inhabit the world and the meaning we make of our experiences in it feel natural. Our tendency to assume certain human experiences to be universal and natural, to assume a pre-discursive essentialism, has produced innumerable flawed readings of other cultures. Many studies of the body's history recapitulate the flaw in Lévi-Strauss's theorization of the incest taboo. Lévi-Strauss's sex-is-to-gender-as-nature-is-to-culture analogy imagines sexual difference as a biological fact, a pre-discursive truth, but as Judith Butler has contended, any gesture to the originary, pre-symbolic body disregards the cultural construction inherent in the terms "sex," "body," and even "materiality" itself (Gender Trouble 37; Bodies 1–12). [End Page 113] One recent reiteration of this fallacy occurs in Michael Schoenfeldt's Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Schoenfeldt argues that the self-regulation of the humoral body allowed early modern subjects to "produce the parameters of individual subjectivity" (15) and claims that within this "discourse of self-regulation . . . [we] may begin to make a space for something recognizably modern" (39). Schoenfeldt also takes issue with Gail Kern Paster's reading of the humoral body in The Body Embarrassed, stating that Paster "tends to pathologize the leaky body" (15), rather than read it as a site of self-fashioning: "humoral theory encouraged not carnivalesque liquefaction but rather the careful maintenance of constitutional solubility" (15). Schoenfeldt's reading of humoral theory, though, ignores the inscription of class, race, and especially gender on the early modern body. As Paster points out in Humoring the Body, his reading "mistakenly presumes an unmarked "'individual' prior to biological—that is to say hierarchical—classification" (21). Our attempts to see ourselves, to inscribe our own ontological "realities" onto other cultures, also reveal themselves in the very foci of our studies. Since Burckhardt, numerous scholars have identified the Renaissance as the midwife to modern subjectivity, the moment when the concept of individuality was born. Even with our acknowledgment of the early modern period as pre-Cartesian, prior to the mind-body split, our studies tend to reproduce this rift: Paster's The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England and Katharine Maus's Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance are two of several such studies. Most recently, we have been obsessed with objects, reaching our hands into the past to finger fabrics, taste the exotic, and marvel at the technologies. The movement from new historicism to cultural materialism has ushered in a variety of deliberations on the materiality of the body and the cultural nexus of bodily discourses. How do religious and scientific explanations of the body affect the subject's lived experience in the world? This narcissistic scholarship is not in itself a bad thing, provided we are aware of our predilection to see ourselves in others and provided we resist the urge to view our "nature" and "natural" constructions as normative or pre-discursive. The critical writings of Burckhardt, Paster, and Maus offer us many insights into the culture of another time, but they also provide us with insight into ourselves. And though this scholarship sometimes rehearses modern dichotomous classifications, gifted scholars such as Paster and Maus always remind us of our own cultural constructions even as...

Corps et subjectivité à l'époque des Lumières

Is there such a thing as an enlightenment body ? Over the past few decades, the multiplication of objectifying perspectives on the body in history tends to the extreme fragmentation of such a topic. This article defends an exploration of the body as a singular and experienced reality which remains situated in a given historical context. The case of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, studied thanks to a particularly rich set of archives (diaries, letters, various notes) bears witness to the fact that Saussure, as an individual, elaborates and affirms the meaning of his private body according to experiences and to intimate knowledge and conviction which are forever being revised during his life. The historian can thus analyse the relationship between the scale of the singular body and that of the Enlightenment body.

Rediscovering Asianness: the role of institutional discourses in APEC, 1989-1997

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) emerged as the largest regional body in history and gave rise to two institutional discourses: open regionalism and Asian values. Open regionalism entailed the articulation of a non-discriminatory and inclusive regionalism. While endorsing the idea of an Asia-Pacific community, APEC has suffered as a result of clashes between two of its core constituencies, its Asian and Anglo-Saxon members. In reality, APEC had lost its articulatory role by the mid-1990s; no significant agreements have been concluded since the Osaka summit of 1995. However, Asian values have emerged as a vehicle for the advocacy of Asian identity, instead of the open regionalism of APEC. This paper, then, focuses primarily on these two institutional discourses and explores the evolution of APEC; how discourses on ‘Asianness’ have been articulated as an alternative to the idea of an Asia-Pacific identity.

Women, death and literature in post-Reformation England

Acknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction 1. A map of death Part I. Disposing of the Body: 2. The body of history: embalming and historiography in Shakespeare's Henry VIII 3. Humility and stoutness: the lives an deaths of Christian women 4. London's mourning garment: maternity, mourning and succession in Shakespeare's Richard III Part II. Sisters of Magdalene: 5. 'I might againe have been the sepulcure': maternal mourning and the encrypted corpse 6. 'Quod licuit feci': Elizabeth Russell and the power of mourning 7. The mat(t)er of death: the defense of Eve and the female Ars Morendi Codicil: 'A web of blacke' Notes Bibliography Index.

The Lex Mercatoria in Practice: The Experience of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal

INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL arbitration is one of the main engines powering the development of principles and rules of transnational commercial law, also known as lex mercatoria .1 This is especially so now that decisions of international arbitral tribunals, which are among the primary sources of the lex mercatoria , are becoming increasingly available to the public.2 This article will show that the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, by consistently applying principles of commercial law in many of its decisions, has contributed significantly to the stabilization and development of a multitude of principles and rules of the lex mercatoria . It will also show, through the experience of the Tribunal, that rules of transnational commercial law ‘can fulfil satisfactorily, in practice, the function of a proper law’3 in international commercial arbitration. Section II gives a brief overview of the genesis of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, the types of commercial claims it hears, and the law it applies in deciding them. Section III reviews the Tribunal's jurisprudence relating to a few selected principles of the lex mercatoria to illustrate the Tribunal's contribution to the development of those principles. The starting point for my research is the list of rules, principles, and standards of the lex mercatoria that have been developed by the Center for Transnational Law (CENTRAL) at Munster University in Germany (‘CENTRAL-List’).4 The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal (‘Tribunal’), which one commentator has described as ‘the most significant arbitral body in history’,5 was established on 19 January 1981 as part of an agreement intended to resolve an acute political crisis between the governments of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America.6 On 4 November 1979, some nine months after the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, militant Iranian students stormed the United …

Invariant size-frequency distributions along a latitudinal gradient in marine bivalves.

In the most extensive analysis of body size in marine invertebrates to date, we show that the size-frequency distributions of northeastern Pacific bivalves at the provincial level are surprisingly invariant in modal and median size as well as size range, despite a 4-fold change in species richness from the tropics to the Arctic. The modal sizes and shapes of these size-frequency distributions are consistent with the predictions of an energetic model previously applied to terrestrial mammals and birds. However, analyses of the Miocene-Recent history of body sizes within 82 molluscan genera show little support for the expectation that the modal size is an evolutionary attractor over geological time.

The Multiple Bodies of the Medical Record: Toward a Sociology of an Artifact

This article argues that the medical record is an important focus for sociological research. In medical work, the modern patient's body that Foucault has so aptly described is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work, and the medical record plays a crucial role in this production. It does not simply represent this body's history and geography; it is a central element in the material rewriting of these. Simultaneously, the record fulfills a core role in the production of a body politic. As the record is involved in the performance of the patient's body, it is also involved in the performance of the clinic in which that body comes to life. Finally, we argue that different records and different practices of reading and writing are intertwined with the production of different patient's bodies, bodies politic, and bodies of knowledge. As organizational infrastructure, the medical record affords the interplay and coordination of divergent worlds. Seen as a site where multiple stories about patients and organizations are at stake, including the interoperability between these stories, the medical record becomes highly relevant both analytically and politically.

The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"

tW ~ s hen a tussock of earth strikes the prayerful Aadam Aziz at the beginning of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980), the doctor's nose releases not only three drops of blood but also a stream of