This article argues that tattooing and body piercing in modern societies cannot be naively innocent acts; such activities cannot recapture primitiveness, because they take place within a social context, where social membership is not expressed through hot loyalties and thick commitments. Body marks in primitive society were obligatory signatures of social membership in solidaristic groups, wherein life-cycle changes were necessarily marked by tattooing and scarification. Modern societies are metaphorically like airport departure lounges where passengers are encouraged to be cool and (...) distant, orderly and regulated. The article is thus critical of recent attempts to discover and unearth Dionysian moments of creative tribalism in modern youth groups or working-class communities. Body marks are commercial objects in a leisure marketplace and have become optional aspects of a body aesthetic, which playfully and ironically indicate social membership. They cannot serve as charismatic entrance points to the primitive. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a considerable resurgence in the popularity of tattooing and piercing, a development that some have dismissed as a fashionable trend. Others have argued that the relative permanence of such forms of body modification militates against their full absorption into the fashion system. Drawing on interviews with a variety of body modifiers, the article examines this debate, and notes that certain tattooees and piercees appear, in some respects, to regard their tattoos and piercings as decorative accessories. At (...) the same time, however, such corporeal artifacts are approached and experienced as distinct from other, more free-floating products in the `supermarket of style'. Whether or not their meaning is fixed in these terms, tattoos and piercings are employed by some as a form of anti-fashion and as a way of fixing or anchoring the reflexively constructed self. In this sense they share both affinities and differences with other forms of contemporary body project. (shrink)

This article begins with a consideration of the `pure' unmediated relation between the human body and nature, exemplified, in different ways, by environmental expressivism, and Ingold's subtle analysis of affordance and the taskscape. It is argued that perspectives fail properly to incorporate the role of mundane technology in the mediation of human-nature relations. Drawing upon the work of Michael Serres, and, in particular, his concept of the parasite, I explore how these mundane technological artefacts - specifically, walking boots - intervene (...) in the circuits of communication between humans and the natural environment. This re-orientation traces how the local relation between bodies and environments is a complex movement between the material and semiotic, the local and the global. In the process, I draw upon four aspects of walking boots: first, there is the role of boots as mechanical technologies that can cause pain, dissolving identity and the relation between humans and nature; second, there is the role of boots as signifying style and identity; third, there is the role of boots as embodiments of procedures of standardization and objectification; and fourth, there is the role of boots as technological means of damage to nature. Finally, in concluding, I tentatively consider some of the political implications of this way of theorizing the relation between bodies and environments. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the differend between the body and the law, without conceiving the body as a material or natural object external to the rules of discourse. To do this I use Jean-François Lyotard's reflections on Franz Kafka's short story `In the Penal Colony' to reflect on the bodily mode of exposure to sensibility: that is, aesthesis. This exposure comes `before' the law and is radically heterogeneous to the binary organizations of discourse, and not simply its other. This (...) exposure to sensibility is a bodily mode that offers an other freedom to that prescribed by the law, and consequently it is this first `touch' of sensibility which the law must eradicate. By inscribing itself on to the body through body modificatory practices, it brings the body within its normative structures. I draw out the parallels between kafka's story and the simulated human currently on display on the Internet - the Visible Human Project. In this project, we can witness the materialization of a techno-scientific ideal of the body. As a form of inscription, it reproduces a `complete' body according to the rules laid down within the discursive practice of techno-science. It can do this only by actively forgetting this vital exposure to sensibility which precedes and disrupts it. The aim of this article is to think the violence of the law over this bodily mode of aesthesis and to bear witness to the wrong it institutes. (shrink)

Using qualitative data, this article makes a substantive and formal contribution to the growing academic literature on bodybuilding and the sociology of the body. Placing a question mark against existing knowledge claims, it argues theories ascribing bodybuilding to antecedent predispositions are not sufficient when accounting for the ongoing variable project of creating `the perfect body'. It is asserted that physique bodybuilding (as opposed to weight-training) in the late 1990s could be independent of the `masculinist imagery' of `the muscular body' alongside (...) feelings of gender and personal insecurity, but is increasingly dependent upon an acquired `ethnophysiological' appreciation of `excessive' muscularity. This phenomenological argument, which asserts the agency of bodies in social processes, focuses upon male participants' spatially and temporally contingent heterogeneous body-projects. (shrink)

The focus of this article will be on inserting the words of older women in prison into debates on time, agency and gendered identities in total institutions. Specifically, the article will address the complexity and contradictions of the time of ‘a mediated real’, and how this impacts on embodied identities within prison timescapes. This will be explored through looking at how prison-time as a ‘somatic identity cipher’ functions performatively in the construction of older women’s identities. The article will also examine (...) how female elders in prison become agents and negotiate techniques of discipline. The role of prison-time will be shown to be simultaneously experienced as further punishment while also being resisted as we draw out the relationship between temporality, spaces of incarceration and identification. First, we will locate the field in terms of issues of theory and method. Then we will look at performativity, identity and time in negotiating, acquiescing to and resisting the identity ‘prisoner’. This will enable us to understand the role and meaning of time in relation to how females in prison are compelled to reiterate and negotiate the identity ‘prisoner’ within the discipline of ‘the time of incarceration’. We hope to demonstrate through the voices of the women that there is no single abstract imprisoned body. These are real bodies, fleshy, sensate bodies that experience real pain; at the same time, these bodies are not simply given but also interpreted, mediated and in part constituted in social and cultural meanings. This enables us to show that the body can be both a generator and receptor of meanings. (shrink)

Dance anthropologists and ethnomusicologists are trained to treat the labels ‘dance’ and ‘music’ with caution, because the terms carry preconceptions that may mask significant aspects of the structured movement/sound systems they study. Yet many talk about ‘the body’ – the medium through which these systems come into being – as something given and ‘true’, without investigating its emic conceptualizations or looking into the implications these may have in terms of how music and dance are experienced. The article investigates the dancing (...) bodies of western ballet dancers and of Tiwi dancers of northern Australia. The latter have an extensive vocabulary for body parts, but no word for ‘body’ as a bounded entity, comparable to the ‘body’ conceptualized by ballet dancers. The article argues that for the Tiwi landscape and human bodies are unavoidably tied together and that the dancers incarnate both land and cosmology. While specific parts have a concrete practical existence, the whole body expands into the landscape so that the landscape becomes flesh. Through the aesthetic transformation of dancing, dancers and land become one, and life is sustained and the land revitalized. (shrink)