3.27.2006
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3 (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This third volume of the Zone series, "brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling that function the organ of a larger body - the social body or the universe as a whole." (11)
"Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages" Jacques Le Goff: This short essay aims to emphasize "the potentia; contribution to be made by research into the application of bodily metaphors to politics and to suggest several lines of investigation." (13) In this it pretty much follows the line of the subtitle of the essay, ulitmately concluding that the head remains the cheif metaphor for the body politic.
"The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Public Martyrdom to Private Nightmare and Political Struggle" David Kunzle:An insanely exhaustive study of the visual representations of dentistry and teeth pulling in the 17th and 19th C. Europe. At first teeth pulling pictures showed poor people and mean dentists. Dentists were seen as charlatans or quacks. Teeth pulling was a public spectacle. By the 19th C, good dentist was distinguished from bad, good being properly trained. Dentistry became a private practice - but the dentist still remained a figure that abused his power, wielded through pain that claims to relieves pain. "The symbolic or substitute revenge of art [on dentists] served to release otherwise dangerous frustration, fear and anger, which, I have argue, were social and political as well as personal." (83)
"'Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur" Thomas W. Lacquer: All about the Clitoris! A history of the clitoris that contests the suppose discovery of it at any point in time - it was always part of female sexuality, orgasm, etc. The other point is "there is nothing natural about how the clitoris is construed." (92)
"Subtle Bodies" Giulia Sissa: I found this essay's argument hard to follow. That being said, it seems to be about positing Artificial Insemination procedures as a tool to uncork the ways in which the conception of virginity and the womb and the potency of semen have been seen since antiquity. "Women bear children, but men make them. The links of filiation are made and undone by men since it is they who are empowered to recognize, disown and adopt." (134) "The role of donated semes is simply that of an agent of fecundity. The identity of the genitor is not sought; all that matters is that he should be as much like the father as possible so that even the memory of that other body should not be detectable on the body of the child. It is perhaps by expunging the memory of the real link between the semen in the test tube and the child which it produces that the process of AID is made acceptable." (135)
"Semen and Blood: Some Ancient Theories Concerning Their Genesis and Relationship" Francoise Hertier-Auge: This essay comparatively links the conception of blood and semen across cultures and from antiquity to modernity to show the sophistication of early conceptions of blood and semen in terms of how close they are to modern scientific notions and also how similar these theories are even when coming from diverse cultures. "Sperm and marrow are of the same nature and contain the germ of life, stored away like kernels, and jealously protected in the hard parts of the body...Semen that has to be constantly renewed must be stored away somewhere inside the body; the tightly sealed bone capsules are the ideal place for it. At the core of the belief, what we find is matter." (174)
"Note on the Garbha-Upanisad" Lakshmi Kapani: This is a short note on the "Upanisad of the Embryo" which poses the question of "where this new individual [the embryo] is situated within the complex network of influence."(187) The Upanisad consists of the following network of parts: "the body's constitution and psychophysiology; the stages of embryonic and fetal development up until the eighth month; an aetiology of malformations; embryology and soteriology, the ninth month and birth; the corerelations between parts of the body and elements of sacrifice; and a brief anatomical recapitulation." (185)
"Bodily Images in Melanesia: Cultural Substances and Natural Metaphors" Bruce M. Knauft: This is a written and photographic anthropological study of the Gebusi of South New Guinea, focusing on "aspects of Melanesian body imagery and custom which were well established prior to Western intervention and pacification." (199) "Cultural conceptions of the body, being so merged with the reality of bodily perception and experience, seem uniquely natural and basic. While the body is eminently 'natural,' it is just this perception of naturalness that allows culturally variable concepts of the body to be so fundamentally ingrained in the collective psyche. In fact, images of the body everywhere embody social and cultural form." (201) "The body is Melanesia is intricately tied to cycles of fertility, depletion and regeneration...these processes tend to be linked as complementary parts of a single cosmological universe and to be instantiated through a holistic bodily economy...Melanesian cultural systems have always grown and changed in a dialectical and inconsistent fashion." (255)
"Older Women, Stout-Hearted Women, Women of Substance" Francoise Heritier-Auge: "Can one say that male domination is universal? If so, what is the origin, the explanation for this fundamental inequality between the sexes?" (282) "Because...the raw material of the symbolic is the body - the prime place for the observation of sensory data...I would propose that the reason for this [hunters being more valued than gatherers] is possibly a feature anchored in the female body...What man values in man, then, is not doubt his ability to bleed, to risk his life, to take that of others, by his own free will; the woman 'sees' her blood flowing from her body...and she produces life without necessarily wanting to do so or being able to prevent it. In her body she periodically experiences, for a time that has a beginning and an end, changes of which she is not the mistress, and which she cannot prevent. It is in this relation to blood that we may perhaps find the fundamental impetus for all the symbolic elaboration, at the outset, on the relations between the sexes." (298)
"Personal Status and Sexual Practice in the Roman Empire" Aline Rousselle: This essay examines sexual behavior based on social status in the Roman Empire, men of position, women of position, slave women and slave men. "One simply did not feel the same emotions and desires for individuals of different statuses." (322)
"The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice and Pouring Tea" Thomas W. Laquer: Prostitution and Masturbation! "My general point is that talk about sex is about a great deal else than organs, bodies and pleasures." (335)So this is on the connection between the sexual and the social body. "While masturbation threatened to take sexual desire and pleasure inward, away from the family, prostitution took it outward...The problem with masturbation and prostitution is essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs...The paradoxes of commercial society that had already plagued Adam Smith and his colleagues, the nagging doubts that a free market economy can in fact sustain the social body, haunt the sexual body. Or, the other way around, the perverted sexual body haunts society and reminds it of its fragility." (340)
"The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend" Catherine Gallagher: Examines through a reading of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend "a pervasive pattern in mid-Victorian thought...that economic value can only be determined in close relationship to bodily well being."(346) Also a little bit about the reaction to the gloomy economists, Malthus, etc. "The attempt to resituate the human body at the center of economic concerns, to rewrite economic discourse so that it constantly referred back to the body's well-being, paradoxically, itself tended to do what it accused unreconstructed political economists of doing: separating value from flesh and blood, conditioning value on a state of suspended animation or apparent death." (347)
"The Meaning of Sacrifice" Christian Duverger: This is an essay on Aztec human sacrifice. Human beings were thought to have an excess of life force, life energy, ritual murder a way of storing energy because in natural death this extra energy was wasted. "The sacrifice was not the result of some inhuman, gratuitous barbarism. It was essentially a technology.
"The Sacrificial Body of the King" Luc de Heusch:This essay is on the role of the sacrificial king in Africa, a king destined for sacrifice. It tells of the "ambivalence toward the royal body...the people condemn the king to death for his very excesses." (389) "Sacred royalty is a symbolic structure that has broken with the domestic, familiar or linear order. It is a machination, a topological arrangement, which must be read as a meshing of human space and the space of the bush or forest in which the mysterious forces responsible for fecundity dwell; it can also be the bond that joins the earth and sky." (393)
"The Emperor-God's Other Body" Florence Dupont: This essay examines the rootedness of the idea of the monarch having two bodies - "one human, the other divine...the king is the conjunction of a private, human body and a political, divine body..." (397) - in the funeral rites of Roman emperors. "The sovereign was attributed a body that allowed him to straddle the two spaces, human and divine. He had a double body that divided when he died, yielding two bodies, one for men, one for the gods. It was his divine body that governed, present among men by virtue of the flesh, its material support. To avoid tyranny, the Romans invented an immortal imago, the divine body of absolute power." (418)
"The Body-of-Power and Incarnation at Port Royal and in Pascal OR of the Figurability of the Political Absolute" Louis Marin: This essay compares representations of the royal and divine body - the King and Christ. "One of these paths [to claim reign] is the process of figurability of the body-of-power: contemplate the divine body of suffering that, by its very dereliction, is the infinite body of love; contemplate it in the profane body of represented royal majesty, its portrait; contemplate, that is, examine on the spot the infinite distance of the difference of the one in the other."(446)
"Mapping the Body" Mark Kidel and Susan Rowe-Leete: Really awesome collection of images of mappings of the body, from all over the world, with pithy little quotes running alongside them.
"A Repertory of Body History" Barbara Duden: A partially annotated biography "dealing with the perceived body and the perceptual milieu."
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This third volume of the Zone series, "brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling that function the organ of a larger body - the social body or the universe as a whole." (11)
"Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages" Jacques Le Goff: This short essay aims to emphasize "the potentia; contribution to be made by research into the application of bodily metaphors to politics and to suggest several lines of investigation." (13) In this it pretty much follows the line of the subtitle of the essay, ulitmately concluding that the head remains the cheif metaphor for the body politic.
"The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Public Martyrdom to Private Nightmare and Political Struggle" David Kunzle:An insanely exhaustive study of the visual representations of dentistry and teeth pulling in the 17th and 19th C. Europe. At first teeth pulling pictures showed poor people and mean dentists. Dentists were seen as charlatans or quacks. Teeth pulling was a public spectacle. By the 19th C, good dentist was distinguished from bad, good being properly trained. Dentistry became a private practice - but the dentist still remained a figure that abused his power, wielded through pain that claims to relieves pain. "The symbolic or substitute revenge of art [on dentists] served to release otherwise dangerous frustration, fear and anger, which, I have argue, were social and political as well as personal." (83)
"'Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur" Thomas W. Lacquer: All about the Clitoris! A history of the clitoris that contests the suppose discovery of it at any point in time - it was always part of female sexuality, orgasm, etc. The other point is "there is nothing natural about how the clitoris is construed." (92)
"Subtle Bodies" Giulia Sissa: I found this essay's argument hard to follow. That being said, it seems to be about positing Artificial Insemination procedures as a tool to uncork the ways in which the conception of virginity and the womb and the potency of semen have been seen since antiquity. "Women bear children, but men make them. The links of filiation are made and undone by men since it is they who are empowered to recognize, disown and adopt." (134) "The role of donated semes is simply that of an agent of fecundity. The identity of the genitor is not sought; all that matters is that he should be as much like the father as possible so that even the memory of that other body should not be detectable on the body of the child. It is perhaps by expunging the memory of the real link between the semen in the test tube and the child which it produces that the process of AID is made acceptable." (135)
"Semen and Blood: Some Ancient Theories Concerning Their Genesis and Relationship" Francoise Hertier-Auge: This essay comparatively links the conception of blood and semen across cultures and from antiquity to modernity to show the sophistication of early conceptions of blood and semen in terms of how close they are to modern scientific notions and also how similar these theories are even when coming from diverse cultures. "Sperm and marrow are of the same nature and contain the germ of life, stored away like kernels, and jealously protected in the hard parts of the body...Semen that has to be constantly renewed must be stored away somewhere inside the body; the tightly sealed bone capsules are the ideal place for it. At the core of the belief, what we find is matter." (174)
"Note on the Garbha-Upanisad" Lakshmi Kapani: This is a short note on the "Upanisad of the Embryo" which poses the question of "where this new individual [the embryo] is situated within the complex network of influence."(187) The Upanisad consists of the following network of parts: "the body's constitution and psychophysiology; the stages of embryonic and fetal development up until the eighth month; an aetiology of malformations; embryology and soteriology, the ninth month and birth; the corerelations between parts of the body and elements of sacrifice; and a brief anatomical recapitulation." (185)
"Bodily Images in Melanesia: Cultural Substances and Natural Metaphors" Bruce M. Knauft: This is a written and photographic anthropological study of the Gebusi of South New Guinea, focusing on "aspects of Melanesian body imagery and custom which were well established prior to Western intervention and pacification." (199) "Cultural conceptions of the body, being so merged with the reality of bodily perception and experience, seem uniquely natural and basic. While the body is eminently 'natural,' it is just this perception of naturalness that allows culturally variable concepts of the body to be so fundamentally ingrained in the collective psyche. In fact, images of the body everywhere embody social and cultural form." (201) "The body is Melanesia is intricately tied to cycles of fertility, depletion and regeneration...these processes tend to be linked as complementary parts of a single cosmological universe and to be instantiated through a holistic bodily economy...Melanesian cultural systems have always grown and changed in a dialectical and inconsistent fashion." (255)
"Older Women, Stout-Hearted Women, Women of Substance" Francoise Heritier-Auge: "Can one say that male domination is universal? If so, what is the origin, the explanation for this fundamental inequality between the sexes?" (282) "Because...the raw material of the symbolic is the body - the prime place for the observation of sensory data...I would propose that the reason for this [hunters being more valued than gatherers] is possibly a feature anchored in the female body...What man values in man, then, is not doubt his ability to bleed, to risk his life, to take that of others, by his own free will; the woman 'sees' her blood flowing from her body...and she produces life without necessarily wanting to do so or being able to prevent it. In her body she periodically experiences, for a time that has a beginning and an end, changes of which she is not the mistress, and which she cannot prevent. It is in this relation to blood that we may perhaps find the fundamental impetus for all the symbolic elaboration, at the outset, on the relations between the sexes." (298)
"Personal Status and Sexual Practice in the Roman Empire" Aline Rousselle: This essay examines sexual behavior based on social status in the Roman Empire, men of position, women of position, slave women and slave men. "One simply did not feel the same emotions and desires for individuals of different statuses." (322)
"The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice and Pouring Tea" Thomas W. Laquer: Prostitution and Masturbation! "My general point is that talk about sex is about a great deal else than organs, bodies and pleasures." (335)So this is on the connection between the sexual and the social body. "While masturbation threatened to take sexual desire and pleasure inward, away from the family, prostitution took it outward...The problem with masturbation and prostitution is essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs...The paradoxes of commercial society that had already plagued Adam Smith and his colleagues, the nagging doubts that a free market economy can in fact sustain the social body, haunt the sexual body. Or, the other way around, the perverted sexual body haunts society and reminds it of its fragility." (340)
"The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend" Catherine Gallagher: Examines through a reading of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend "a pervasive pattern in mid-Victorian thought...that economic value can only be determined in close relationship to bodily well being."(346) Also a little bit about the reaction to the gloomy economists, Malthus, etc. "The attempt to resituate the human body at the center of economic concerns, to rewrite economic discourse so that it constantly referred back to the body's well-being, paradoxically, itself tended to do what it accused unreconstructed political economists of doing: separating value from flesh and blood, conditioning value on a state of suspended animation or apparent death." (347)
"The Meaning of Sacrifice" Christian Duverger: This is an essay on Aztec human sacrifice. Human beings were thought to have an excess of life force, life energy, ritual murder a way of storing energy because in natural death this extra energy was wasted. "The sacrifice was not the result of some inhuman, gratuitous barbarism. It was essentially a technology.
"The Sacrificial Body of the King" Luc de Heusch:This essay is on the role of the sacrificial king in Africa, a king destined for sacrifice. It tells of the "ambivalence toward the royal body...the people condemn the king to death for his very excesses." (389) "Sacred royalty is a symbolic structure that has broken with the domestic, familiar or linear order. It is a machination, a topological arrangement, which must be read as a meshing of human space and the space of the bush or forest in which the mysterious forces responsible for fecundity dwell; it can also be the bond that joins the earth and sky." (393)
"The Emperor-God's Other Body" Florence Dupont: This essay examines the rootedness of the idea of the monarch having two bodies - "one human, the other divine...the king is the conjunction of a private, human body and a political, divine body..." (397) - in the funeral rites of Roman emperors. "The sovereign was attributed a body that allowed him to straddle the two spaces, human and divine. He had a double body that divided when he died, yielding two bodies, one for men, one for the gods. It was his divine body that governed, present among men by virtue of the flesh, its material support. To avoid tyranny, the Romans invented an immortal imago, the divine body of absolute power." (418)
"The Body-of-Power and Incarnation at Port Royal and in Pascal OR of the Figurability of the Political Absolute" Louis Marin: This essay compares representations of the royal and divine body - the King and Christ. "One of these paths [to claim reign] is the process of figurability of the body-of-power: contemplate the divine body of suffering that, by its very dereliction, is the infinite body of love; contemplate it in the profane body of represented royal majesty, its portrait; contemplate, that is, examine on the spot the infinite distance of the difference of the one in the other."(446)
"Mapping the Body" Mark Kidel and Susan Rowe-Leete: Really awesome collection of images of mappings of the body, from all over the world, with pithy little quotes running alongside them.
"A Repertory of Body History" Barbara Duden: A partially annotated biography "dealing with the perceived body and the perceptual milieu."
# posted by SMRT : 1:35 PM
