Body: know thyself

Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar, editors; Duke University Press; 2007; 688 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 978-0-8223-3845-1

Writing a coherent review of Beyond the Body Proper is a difficult task, given that it is a collection of articles discussing multiple aspects of our perception of the biological, as well as the interrelation between mind and body, known as embodiment. With titles as diverse as “We Always Make Love with Worlds,” “Woman Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteen Century,” “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy Making,” “The Egg and Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male–Female Roles” and “Quit Snivelling Cryo-Baby, We'll Work Out Which One's Your Mama,” it needed a good editor to make sense of it all.

Fortunately, medical anthropologists Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar were up to the task, and skillfully led readers through the discursive thread and in the understanding of their proposition, which can be summarized as “... comparative scholarship in anthropology, history and the humanities shows that the problem of the body can be read from many kinds of discourses, mundane practices, technologies and relational networks.” The book draws from history, philosophy, anthropology and literature to paint a picture of the evolution of knowledge, perceptions and theories of the body and its role in culture.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is its discussion of “local biologies.” The term, used by the editors in the introduction, is the unifying theme of the collection: It refers to how every culture has a different view of the body, a context that is internalized and feels “natural” for the members of that culture. In a real postmodern way, the idea of a body “proper,” unified, constant through geography and history, is deconstructed to analyze its cultural context and multiple meanings.

Clinicians will be particularly interested in the last 2 sections, discussing “Bodies at the Margin, Or Attending to Distress and Difference” and “Knowing Systems, Or Tracking the Bodies of the Biosciences.” These texts examine how we are rethinking the body in contemporary context, including new reproductive technologies, molecular biology, “unusual anatomies” and even Body Worlds, the exhibition of plastinated cadavers that is touring internationally.

Unfortunately, the editors chose not to write a conclusion to their book, and this might be the main weakness of this collection. People interested in humanities or medical anthropology will already have had read some of the articles — classics from Walter Benjamin, E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Marcel Mauss. However, it is Lock and Farquhar's commentary that brings the book alive and gives it a specificity. When I finished the last page of the last essay, I wished to have a few more insights from the authors to conclude my reflection on embodiment. One can only hope that their intent was to lead the readers to draw their own conclusion on their personal internalization of the notion of body.