This article addresses the tension between conceptualizations of the objective body, which are central to biomedicine, and conceptualizations of the expressive body. Within a metaphysics which can be an adequate grounding for the practice of alternative medicine, I argue, the natural body must be fully conceptualized as both object and as expressive. I draw on phenomenology and on actor-network theory to outline a new model of `biosocial nature' which is inherently figurative and which is constructed by a network of human (...) and non-human actors. I then look at two remedies within the homeopathic materia medica, arguing that their capacity to treat ill health by acting as nodes with a network of `imagined connections' is more explicable within a biosocial than within a modernist metaphysics. (shrink)

Taking as its point of departure Leder's phenomenological discussion of the `absent' body, this article explores the nature of human corporeality as a site of transgression. The body, I argue, using a process metaphysic, is first and foremost excessive, driven by human desire rather than animal need: a sensual mode of existence organized around the pleasure/pain axis. To be excessive/transgressive, however, implies the crossing of boundaries or limits which vary according to history and culture, time and place. These issues are (...) illustrated through a range of thinkers from Bakhtin to Kristeva, Irigaray to Deleuze and Guattari. A full-scale endorsement of the poststructuralist position is, however, rejected in favour of an approach which steers a middle ground between these transgressive, more fluid arguments and a foundationalist ontology of the emotional body as an ongoing structure of lived experience. The article concludes with some reflections on the complex pattern of corporeal `appearances', some more pleasant than others, which characterize our bodily-being-in-the-world. (shrink)

In this article I discuss some of the findings of an on-going ethnographic study of two once-weekly circuit training classes held in one of the growing number of private health and fitness clubs. The article has four aims. First, to demonstrate and explore the active role of the body in a central practice of body modification/maintenance: i.e. circuit training. Second, to demonstrate that circuit training is a social structure which both shapes the activity of the agent and is shaped by (...) that (shaped) agent. I aim also to explore this structuration process. Third, to draw out a number of aspects of the sociality of body maintenance/modification. Training, I argue, is a form of symbolic interaction, localized within specific and durable social networks. The final aim of the article is to weave these various claims together into a coherent overall account of circuit training as a form of body modification. As an investigation of the embodied nature of practices of body maintenance and the active role of social agents in relation to these practices the article rejoins an important strand of sociological investigations of ‘the body’. At the same time, however, the article seeks to challenge those approaches, often rooted in Foucauldian analysis, which portray the body as ‘docile’ in relation to body maintenance. Foucauldian inspired studies often reify practices of modification as ‘technologies’ or ‘apparatuses’, ignoring the active role of embodied agents in these practices and eliding the difference between texts which prescribe ways of acting and the more messy and complex reality of those ways of acting. (shrink)

Although scars never disappear completely, in time most people will basically get used to them. In this paper I explore what it means to habituate to scars against the background of the phenomenological concept of incorporation. In phenomenology the body as Leib or corps vécu functions as a transcendental condition for world disclosure. Because of this transcendental reasoning, phenomenology prioritizes a form of embodied subjectivity that is virtually dis-embodied. Endowing meaning to one’s world through getting engaged in actions and projects (...) is most successful indeed when one’s body is “absent,” “transparent,” or, at least, if it is not in the center of one’s attention. This taken-for-granted nature can be disturbed by discomfort, disability, and disfigurement. Incorporation, so I explain, aims at maintaining or restoring the body’s taken-for-grantedness. My analysis of the case of a woman who successfully habituated to her mastectomy scar demonstrates, however, that habituation to a perceptible scar can only be understood partly in terms of incorporation. Next to a decrease of explicit attention for the scar and the discomfort it produces, the scar should also stop being a sign that refers to something else than itself. This is only possible, I argue, by taking the body’s materiality seriously, rather than it being wiped out as a result of transcendental reasoning. (shrink)