The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. (...) This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations. The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice. Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine. (shrink)

This book, a member of the Series in Affective Science, is a unique interdisciplinary sequence of articles on the cognitive neuroscience of emotion by some of ...

A provocative assessment of human thought and behavior, reissued with a new afterword, explores a range of conundrums from the ability of the mind to perceive three dimensions to the nature of consciousness, in an account that draws on ...

In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that the human mind is not bound inside the head but extends into body and environment.

In "The Quest for Consciousness," Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch explores the biological basis of consciousness.

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

[opening paragraph] -- Clark: The `astonishing hypothesis' which you put forward in your book, and which you obviously feel is very controversial, is that `You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: `You're nothing but a pack of neurons'.' But it seems to me that this is not so (...) astonishing a statement for a scientist to make. Isn't this what reductionist science has always believed? (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different (...) sort of externalism: an _active externalism_, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. (shrink)

"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No _précis_ is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, _New York Times Book Review _ "No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, _Man _ "Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history (...) can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, _The Savage Mind_, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas _must_ read it; everyone interested in human institutions _should _read it."—J. H. Plumb, _Saturday Review_ "A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, _The Observer_, London. (shrink)

Addressed to educated nonspecialists, they discuss such topics as Eastern bodywork, the body as healer, art as the speech of the body. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Western sociology of the body, despite its attempt to create a somatic approach to human existence, inevitably shares many of the rationalistic and Cartesian assumptions of wider Western sociology. A contrasting, and in many ways radically different approach is that found in both classical and contemporary Japanese thought. In this article two major contemporary Japanese theorists of the body - Ichikawa Hiroshi and Yuasa Yasuo - are introduced and their work examined as distinctive, and in the West virtually unknown, contributions (...) to body analysis. Their views are briefly contrasted with some of the major themes of Western, and in particular British, sociology of the body and the implications of their work for future investigation of the human body are sketched out. (shrink)

Through arresting narratives we meet a woman aiding refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, facing the chaos of a meaningless society and a doctor trying to stay alive during Mao's cultural revolution - individuals challenged by their societies and in existential moral experiences that define what it means to be human.