The philosopher "Descartes (1596-1650) tends to be blamed for the Western tendency to conceptualize the body in dualistic, oppositional terms. As such, the corporeal body became demarcated as the rightful object of natural scientific discourse, with the less tangible aspects of the person – the self, the soul and/or the mind -left for the arts and humanities. Consequently, anthropologists appeared content to leave the physical body to medical science, portraying social life as constituted through the more ephemeral, disembodied mind. Such a division of labour created a niche for the humanities to flourish, but it also permitted the notion of a stable, objective body to continue unchecked. It was against this background that many earlier theorists concerned themselves with what the body communicated or stood to represent rather with the corporeal body as something that was itself socially constituted. "Mary Douglas’s emphasis, for instance, was on the body’s symbolic rather than physiological characteristics. The body was, she argued in .Natural Symbols, a ‘microcosm of society’ (1973: 101). The collective ‘social body’ constrained how the physical body might be perceived, and the physical body delimited social structure. In respect of the latter, Douglas’s work extends that of "Hertz (1960), who, in his famous essay on the fright hand, argued that the physical oppositions and complementarities of the body mirrored the social and cosmological order.
When the physical body appeared elsewhere in the literature, it did so mostly as a blank canvas, without much agency, onto which culture — in the forms of decoration, scarification, mouth plates, tattoos and the like – could be inscribed and then interpreted. Terence Turner’s early essay ‘The Social Skin’ (1980), which analyses the significance of body decoration among the Kayapo of Brazil, exemplifies this genre. "Foucault, however, argued for the body not as a source of representation — as Douglas had conceptualized it — but as the product of representation (e.g. Foucault 1977). Consequently, in social constructivist accounts the corporeal body disappears altogether.
But as ethnographic research in contexts less captivated by Cartesian dualism affirms, such radical distinctions between physical and non-physical aspects of the body have more to do with powerful disciplinary narratives than with how people actually perceive and experience their bodies. The apparent lack of mind/body dualism in Hindu thought identified by Marriott (1976; 1989), for example, points to the cultural specificity of such a construction. In South Asian society, Marriott argued, there is no radical distinction between biogenetic and moral aspects of the "person, and the boundaries between individual bodies are more fluid than in Western societies. Certainly, Marriott-inspired work in other parts of the world — notably "Marilyn Strathern’s approach to the body and person-hood in Melanesia (e.g. 1999) — suggests that alternatives to a mind/body split are not exclusive to the Indian subcontinent. Michael Jackson’s (1990) account of shape-shifting among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone — where human beings are sometimes seen to occupy the bodies of particular animals — presents a dramatic challenge to the idea of a stable, bounded, body. So does the wider literature on Shamanism (Lewis 1971; Boddy 1994; Bowie 2000). The radical split between Western and non-Western notions of the body that Marriott’s work implied has, rightly, been nuanced by ethnographic work indicating significant variations within particular cultural milieu; showing, for example, that bodies conceived of as fluid during spirit possession might otherwise be considered stable.
Not all European thinking on the body is rooted in Cartesianism, however, and some approaches (notably Csordas 1990) owe at least as much to early twentieth-century phenomenological theory, as elaborated by Merleau-Ponty (1962). Such theory puts embodied experience, rather than knowledge of experience as interpreted through the mind, at its centre.
Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘habitus’ — initially used in a more limited sense by Mauss in his work on bodily techniques (1973 [1934]) — likewise collapses mind/body duality in favour of a focus on the embodiment of our social experience (Bourdieu 1990). Wacquant’s (2004) account of boxing on Chicago’s South Side exemplifies such an approach, demonstrating how an emphasis on embodied practice can tell us more than the conventional focus on disembodied words and thoughts. Mol (2002), drawing theoretically both on "Judith Butler’s (1990) emphasis on performativity and on "actor network theory (Law and Hassard 1999; Latour 2005) takes a similar tack, presenting what she dubs the ‘body multiple’ as a semi-permeable, fluid object that is enacted in different ways through networks of relationships with machines, ideas and other objects. Such bodies are increasingly conceptualized as hybrid or as cyborgs (Haraway 1991), in some cases — such as organ transplant recipients (Lock 2002), or those with prosthetic limbs — literally constituted by the parts of others or by objects. Such thinking opens up possibilities of considering the body as an assemblage of parts which might be interpreted differently cross-culturally (Staples 2003). The kidneys, identified as repositories of yin and yang in Chinese medicine, for example (Sharp 2000), might be understood in multiple ways. Detachable parts, such as nail clippings, sputum, blood and hair (cf. Leach 1958) might also be invested with particular harmful or curative properties.
Anthropological thinking about the body shifts in line with disciplinary shifts, as is well charted by Csordas’s account of the body’s ‘career’ in anthropology (1999). But it also shifts in response to wider socio-political change. The contemporary body of late capitalism, for example, might be conceptualized and experienced as a set of assets which one owns and might invest in (Sharp 2000) or market (Feath-erstone 1991). New reproductive and other technologies likewise call for new formulations in anthropological considerations of the body, further blurring any remaining radical differentiation between social and physical bodies (e.g. Becker 2000).
