Shilling, Chris.The Body: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Introduction

•       Body matters—obesity, morbidity, religious dress, prostheses, neural implants—are frequently debated by politicians, scientists, health experts, and religious authorities (1).

•    The Western philosophical tradition, particularly Descartes’ dictum “I think therefore I am,” has historically subordinated the body to the mind, treating the isolated mind as a generator of ideas (2–3).

•    A “marginalized history” of body-relevant philosophy exists: Nietzsche emphasized sublimation of bodily experience; Merleau-Ponty identified the body as “our vehicle in and vantage point upon the world”; Dewey analyzed habit and creativity; Foucault explored how knowledge and power act on bodies (3).

•    Three key themes organize the book: (i) social and technological forces shape our biological constitution; (ii) this changeability raises questions about how we should manage bodies; (iii) bodies and embodied subjects are valued in profoundly different and contested ways (4–5).

•    The author uses “bodies” mostly as shorthand for the embodied human as a whole, highlighting the physically and organically neglected dimensions of existence (6).

Chapter 1: Natural Bodies or Social Bodies?

•       Since the 1980s, an interdisciplinary field called “body studies” has emerged from the social sciences and humanities, addressing how physical appearances, capacities, and experiences bear the imprint of socially and culturally specific ways of living (7).

•    Six social/historical factors drove academic interest in the body: (i) second-wave feminism in the 1960s–70s politicized bodily issues such as health inequalities, rape, and pornography; (ii) political radicalism and ecological concerns highlighted the relationship between human bodies and the environment (8–9).

•    Additional factors: (iii) the ageing of populations in the Global North raised issues of dependency and ageism; (iv) the rise of consumer culture turned the body into an “object for display,” initially for women and later extended to men via the “metrosexual” male in the 1990s (9–11).

•    Two further factors: (v) post-9/11 security concerns intensified scrutiny of “alien” bodies through biometric surveillance; (vi) scientific and technological advances gave unprecedented capacity to reshape bodies, weakening the boundaries between bodies and technology (12).

•    Tattooing illustrates the individualization of body identity: once a marker of collective membership, it has become a means of expressing individual selfhood, with people creating unique designs sometimes incorporating ashes of loved ones (13–15).

•    Ted Benton argued in the 1990s that the social sciences could only adequately understand people’s actions if they explored the importance of our physical constitution and ecological surroundings (16).

•    Bioarchaeology—the study of biological remains from archaeological sites—has extended knowledge of gender inequalities, migration, and the effects of political oppression; skeletal remains in slave cemeteries evidence trauma associated with ill-treatment and hard labour (18).

•    Epigenetics has demonstrated that social and environmental factors regulate genes: the Dutch famine of 1944–5 affected not only those exposed but also the health of grandchildren, showing biological and social processes are inextricably linked (20).

•    The brain exhibits plasticity shaped by our actions and interactions; stem cell research and genetic engineering reinforce the significance of social developments for our biological constitution (20–21).

•    The field of body studies has proliferated meanings of “the body”: a vehicle of domination for feminists; a metric for ecological politics; a marker of identity in consumer society; a means of security control; and a technologically enhanced capacity—each perspective revealing different values (22–23).

Chapter 2: Sexed Bodies

•       The belief that fundamental and immutable biological differences between males and females determine social roles remains widely held; sociobiologists have argued these “facts” of biological sex constrain and direct social organization (24–25).

•    From classical antiquity until the end of the 17th century, bodies were understood on the basis of a “one sex/one flesh” model: the physician Galen argued that male and female bodies were homologous, with the vagina depicted as an interior penis and ovaries as interior testes (26).

•    In the Renaissance, sexed identities were not considered unalterable — as late as the 16th century, anatomists argued women could turn into men if their internal sexual organs were pushed outwards (27).

•    In the 18th century, science “fleshed out” stable categories of “male” and “female” as natural biological oppositions; it became generally accepted that women’s “chaotic and unstable bodies” threatened the rational potential of their fragile minds (27).

•    Historians suggest the shift toward naturalistic views of sex was an ideological solution to an Enlightenment dilemma: if bodies were similar, there was no justification for denying women equal rights; naturalistic views of bodies as unequal organic structures justified social inequalities (28).

•    Craniometrist Gustave Le Bon argued that women’s smaller skulls precluded mature brain development; a 1923 Board of Education report suggested girls’ “bodily disturbances” impeded their examination performance (28).

•    Sociobiology (developed at Harvard in the 1970s) held that sexual inequalities are inevitable outcomes of genetic differences, and that women evolved for nurturing while men were designed to compete; Richard Dawkins famously called individuals “survival machines” (27–29).

•    Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) argued that girls undergo “apprenticeships” into femininity that distort biological differences: “One is not born but rather becomes a woman” (31).

•    Raewyn Connell identified three stages in the construction of gendered bodies: (i) stereotypical views exaggerate male/female differences from childhood; (ii) these stereotypes initiate actual physical changes—differing muscle development, bone strength; (iii) physical changes are then interpreted as confirming the stereotypes (32–33).

•    Jennifer Hargreaves on Victorian women: “Middle class women fulfilled their own stereotype of the ‘delicate’ females… Women ‘were’ manifestly physically and biologically inferior because they actually ‘did’ swoon…” (33).

•    Endocrinology challenged the binary view: oestrogen and progesterone are often called “female” hormones, but women release testosterone and men release oestrogen; socialization, occupation, and ageing affect hormone levels, making it possible for a 70-year-old man to have higher oestrogen than a younger woman (35–36).

•    Judith Butler’s theory of “performativity” argues that the sexed body attains its significance through performances—using props like lipstick and high heels—that stylize the body to approximate social expectations of femininity or masculinity; these performances, when repeated enough, make the female or male body appear essential and unalterable (37–38).

•    Transgender footballer Jaiyah Saelua—born biologically male, a member of Samoa’s fa’afafine (third gender)—illustrates how body, appearance, and activities can be assembled to provide coherence to an individual’s gendered sense of self (38–39).

•    Butler’s performativity is criticized for failing to adequately address practices that physically harm bodies—such as foot-binding in Song dynasty China and modern-day female genital mutilation—which directly damage women’s capabilities (39).

Chapter 3: Educating Bodies

•       Educational institutions do not engage with a disembodied mind but seek to structure and direct people’s embodied capacities for experiencing and engaging with social, physical, and symbolic environments (42).

•    Marcel Mauss argued that societies transmit to each generation shared “techniques of the body”—particular ways of utilizing the body in activities from breathing and walking to combat—which attach individuals to their cultures (45–46).

•    Body techniques can differentiate people by class: in 18th-century Europe, the ruling classes treated walking as fit only for “the poor, the criminal, the young, and the ignorant” (46).

•    Acquiring high-level skills requires approximately 10,000 hours of sustained practice; the body is “our first and most natural instrument,” but complex skill acquisition is available only to those with the means to undertake prolonged apprenticeships (47).

•    John Dewey distinguishes anoetic knowledge (pre-conscious awareness inhering in the embodied self) from noetic knowledge (conscious reason and intellect); body pedagogics shape pre-conscious awareness on which thought and reflection are formulated (56–57).

•    Cristina Grasseni’s research on cattle breeders shows that visual judgements shaped by professional standards are learnt only after considerable education—children of breeders begin by playing with toy cows replicating aesthetic standards—and that these visual standards have transformed the appearance of animals through breeding (49–50).

•    Rane Willerslev’s fieldwork with the Yukaghir hunters of Siberia shows that tracking elk requires hunters to achieve a “double awareness”: they must see while moving through terrain and be aware of being seen by prey, mimicking passive postures while maintaining lethal intent (50).

•    Loic Wacquant’s Body & Soul (2004) details the acquisition of the “pugilistic habitus” through three years of training in a Chicago boxing gym; he describes his early sparring as total physical collapse: “My lungs are about to explode… I feel like I’m going to vomit up my lungs and pass out” (51–52).

•     With practice, Wacquant’s vision transformed: “From session to session my field of vision clears up, expands, and gets reorganised… I gradually acquire the specific eye that enables me to guess my opponents’ attacks” (53).

•    Tony Watling’s research on the Alpha Course (a 15-week evangelical Christian programme) shows how body pedagogics can stimulate religious experience: initiates seated on a stool have hands laid on them while others pray, often producing feelings of “release,” “surrender,” and rebirth (54–55).

•    Basil Bernstein suggests that modern cultures are becoming “totally pedagogized”—not just national education systems but also transnational, local, social, cultural, and religious groups promote their own versions of what education should take (45).

•    John Evans’s research at Loughborough University found that physical education initiatives designed to combat the “obesity crisis” have reinforced consumer culture’s deification of thin females, contributing to anorexia and other eating disorders (58–59).

Chapter 4: Governing Bodies

•       Bryan S. Turner identifies four unavoidable challenges governments face because citizens are embodied beings: ensuring viable population levels; regulating movement of bodies; ensuring physical expression of desires is compatible with social order; and maintaining consensus about self-presentation (60–61).

•    Michel Foucault traced a transition from medieval to modern governance via an “explosion” in “biopolitics”—“techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations”—replacing a medieval focus on death with positive management of life (62).

•    Foucault’s Discipline and Punish details the 1757 public torture and execution of Damiens: lumps of flesh torn with red-hot pincers, a “boiling potion” poured over wounds, limbs separated from his body while still alive—“a show to be enjoyed” by spectators (63–64).

•    The shift away from public torture in the late 18th/early 19th century led to incarceration aimed at rehabilitation, laying foundations for the modern biopolitical management of life (64).

•    Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon—a prison design with a central watch tower enabling surveillance of all prisoners—replaced physical punishment with visibility meant to encourage self-reflection and improved self-control (65–66).

•    Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” (from the 1890s) separated the conception from the execution of work and timed the fastest way to complete tasks, enabling employers to maximize profitability and treating the body as a motor (66).

•    Eugenics—developed by Francis Galton and applying Darwinian theory to improve the human race—led to the forcible sterilization of over 40,000 people in the USA by the onset of World War II, and was practiced in Sweden, Japan, and Canada (67–68).

•    Post-9/11, the Bush administration launched massive surveillance expansion: the NSA and CIA collected over 200 million text messages daily; surveillance encompassed allies as well as enemies (70–71).

•    Research on CCTV in the UK and USA suggests that selection criteria for surveillance target black males disproportionately (71).

•    Nikolas Rose identifies a shift in medical governance toward controlling “life itself” at the molecular level: genetic testing for disease risk and neuroscience suggesting brain “plasticity” can be managed have produced the concept of the “patient in waiting”—someone who governs themselves according to medical and scientific knowledge (75–76).

•    Giorgio Agamben argues biopolitics represents a move away from the political concern with “noble action” toward preoccupation with “bare life” — the basic biological processes of living (69).

•    The US “War on Terror” has taken a biological turn: the Pentagon’s DARPA now views infectious disease as a security threat, near dissolving the boundary between public health and bioterrorism (78–79).

Chapter 5: Bodies as Commodities

•       Marx argued that capitalism required formally free labourers to sell their labour; in societies dominated by the profit motive, appreciation of the senses and of others revolves around issues of ownership, reducing human life and nature to mere means of value production (80).

•    By the early 21st century, multinational corporations routinely require employees to embody a particular brand image—projecting authority, competence, cheerfulness, and caring—extending recently even to minimum-wage jobs in coffee outlets (81–82).

•    In Silicon Valley, plastic surgeons report growing use of Botox and other “age-denying” procedures among male tech workers in their thirties; in California, complaints of age discrimination reportedly exceed those of racial or sexual discrimination (83).

•    In South Korea, at least 20% of the population underwent some form of cosmetic treatment in 2008, directed not toward looking more Western but toward a Korean ideal of youth and high social standing that improves job prospects and marriage prospects (83).

•    Pierre Bourdieu argues that the cultivation of bearing, taste, manner, and speech has become a widespread marker of social class and status, with visual appearance and impressions “given off” by the body critical for accumulating value in social and economic life (83).

•    The biotechnology industry—symbolized by Genentech’s 1980 Wall Street launch—has exploited bodily material for medical and other products, with capital investment in pharmacogenomics growing rapidly in the 1990s (84–85).

•    Medical anthropologist Joseph Dumit notes the average American is prescribed between nine and thirteen prescription drugs per year; pharmaceutical companies treat patients not taking medicines as “prescription loss,” selling “surplus health” to the “worried well” (85).

•    Thomas Jefferson introduced America’s first patent act in 1793; the TRIPS agreement (1994) provided a global basis for companies to pursue profitability of new products including medicines; in 1991 Craig Venter sought patent protection for genes found in the human brain (85–86).

•    Nancy Scheper-Hughes describes “transplant tourism” as “a global billion-dollar criminal industry involved in the transfer of fresh kidneys (and half-livers) from living and dead providers to the seriously ill and affluent” (87).

•    Transplant trafficking spans the globe: Moldova and Ukraine have large numbers of organ sellers; Turkey is where most clandestine operations occur; Brazilian kidney sellers travel to South Africa to do business with Israelis; up to 10% of households in some Indian localities contain a member who sold a kidney (88).

•    The ILO estimates that 2.5 million people are trafficked annually into modern-day slavery; the 2014 Global Slavery Index puts the total number in slavery as high as 35.8 million; the ILO estimates profits from this trade at $150 billion per annum (90).

•    The kafala system in the Middle East ties migrant workers to employers, removes their papers, and leaves them in debt; children are forced into slavery in Congo diamond mines and to fight in wars in Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Afghanistan (91–92).

•    Kant argued it was wrong to use people as mere means to ends; treating individuals or body parts as commodities for profit attacks the basis of what it is to be a human being (95).

•    The WHO reported 8.6 million extra blood donations from unpaid volunteers from 2004 to 2012, with a majority of countries collecting over 90% of blood from unpaid volunteers — showing the body’s implication in gift networks as well as market transactions (93–94).

Chapter 6: Bodies Matter: Dilemmas and Controversies

•       The book’s three themes are: (i) social/technological forces shape biological constitution; (ii) changeability raises uncertainty about how to manage bodies; (iii) contrasting and contested ways of valuing bodies (97).

•    Erving Goffman argued that face-to-face interaction imposes conditions—physical proximity, turn-taking, vulnerability, trust—that generally encourage mutual goodwill and moral behaviour; those who betray trust face social exclusion (99–100).

•    Vince Miller argues that digitally mediated communication weakens conditions that encourage moral responsibility: “flaming” (offensive messages) and “trolling” (provoking arguments) show individuals being rude without consequences (100).

•    Social worker Simone Black announced her suicide on Facebook in 2010 (“took all my pills, be dead soon, bye bye everyone”); her 1,082 “friends” responded with mockery; none alerted authorities and she died 17 hours later (100–101).

•    Religious institutions are responding to rapid social change with deliberate body pedagogics: Pentecostal Christianity uses carefully planned “sensational forms”—physical images and objects—to nurture and modulate religious emotions (103).

•    Saba Mahmood’s research on Muslim women in Egypt’s Piety movement shows that adopting conservative dress is a reflexive practice to stimulate a sense of propriety and shame, aligning exterior actions and interior self with Islamic norms, involving an internal “Jihad” with bodily desires (104).

•    Emile Durkheim argued that although the body appears mundane, it is frequently the location and source of sacred values “set apart” from daily life; in the contemporary era, bodies are rendered sacred by groups on the basis of youth, ethnicity, governability, skills, commodity value, and religious conceptions (106).

•    Violence follows transgression of sacred bodily norms: the Army of God attacked US abortion clinics in the 1980s; the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai for attending school and advocating girls’ education; Charlie Hebdo’s offices were attacked for depicting Mohammed (108).

•    Embodied individuals are always situated within a wider social and material environment they both shape and are shaped by; body matters provide key means of approaching social relationships, cultural ideas, technological developments, and historical change (108).

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