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Body
Bryan S. Turner
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 223
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406062576

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Body
Bryan S. Turner

Abstract Contemporary academic interest in the human body is a response to funda-

mental changes in the relationship between body, economy, technology and society.
Scientific advances, particularly new reproductive technologies and therapeutic cloning
techniques, have given the human body a problematic status. Ageing, disease and death
no longer appear to be immutable facts about the human condition. The emergence of
the body as a topic of research in the humanities and social sciences is also a response
to the womens and gay liberation movements, and environmentalism, animal rights,
anti-globalism, religious fundamentalism and conservative politics. Further, the human
body is now central to economic growth in various biotechnology industries, in which
disease itself has become a productive factor in the global economy and the body a code
or system of information from which profits can be extracted through patents. In
modern social theory, the body has been studied in the contexts of advertising and
consumerism, in ethical debates about cloning, in research on HIV/AIDS, in postmodern
reflections on cybernetics, cyberbodies and cyberpunk, and in the analysis of the global
trade in human organs. The body is a central feature of contemporary politics, because
its ambiguities, vulnerability and plasticity have been amplified by new genetic tech-
nologies.
Keywords bio-economics, bio-politics, bio-tourism, genomics, post-human future

The Body and Embodiment

There are two distinctive and possibly separate traditions in the anthropology and sociological
study of the body. There is either the cultural analysis of the body as a system of meaning that
has a definite structure existing separately from the consciousness and intentions of individuals,
or there is the phenomenological study of embodiment that attempts to understand human
practices or the performativity of the body. These two perspectives are distinct, but not necess-
arily incompatible. The study of dance and dancing provides a useful illustration of these two
positions. We can clearly study dance as a cultural system, indeed as a language that has a
structure and form by which we can interpret the social world. The meaning of the contrast
between, for example, ballroom dancing and the classical ballet body is produced by differ-
ences between concepts in the discourse of dancing, but the meaning and significance of
dancing as a set of practices and performances can only be grasped by understanding embodi-
ment in motion. This is the difference between choreography as a text and the actions of a
body in motion.
Social anthropologists have contributed significantly to the analysis of the body as a method
of classification. The human body has been a potent and persistent metaphor for social and
political relations throughout human history. Different parts of the body have historically
represented different social functions. For example, we can refer to the head of state without
really recognizing the metaphor, while the heart has been a rich source of ideas about life,
imagination and emotions. It is the house of the soul and the book of life, and the tables of
the heart provided a perspective into the whole of Nature. Similarly, the hand occupies an

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London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 23(23): 223236. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406062576

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224 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

important position in shaping the imagination with respect to things that are beautiful
(handsome) or useful (handy) or damaged and incomplete (handicap).
The dominant political concerns and anxieties of society tend to be translated into disrupted
and disturbed images of the body, and hence we can talk about the somatic society (Turner,
1992). The danse macabre gave gruesome expression to the devastation of the medieval social
order that had been brought about by the ravages of the Black Death, and in modern society
the scourge of cancer and AIDS has often been imagined in military metaphors of invading
armies. Social disturbances are grasped in the metaphors by which we understand mental and
physical health. Body metaphors have been important in moral debate about these social
disruptions. The division between good and evil has drawn heavily on bodily metaphors; what
is sinister is related to left-handedness, the illegitimate side, the awkward side. Our sense of
social order is spoken of in terms of the balance or imbalance of the body. In the 18th century,
when doctors turned to mathematics to produce a Newtonian map of the body, the metaphor
of hydraulic pumps was used to express human digestion and blood circulation. The thera-
peutic bleeding of patients by knife or leech was to assist this hydraulic mechanism, and to
relieve morbid pressures on the mind. Severe disturbances in society were often imagined as
poor social digestion. These assumptions about social unrest producing disorder in the gut are
reflected in the basic idea of the need for a government of the body. Dietary management of
the body was translated into fiscal constraint, reduction in government expenditure and down-
sizing of public functions. In the language of modern management, a lean and mean corpora-
tion requires a healthy management team. In neo-liberal ideology, central government is an
excess a sort of political obesity. The modern idea of government is taken from these diverse
meanings of diet that stands for a political regime, a regimentation of society and a govern-
ment of the body. Regulating the body, disciplining the soul and governing society were merged
in political theories of social contract and the state.
Bodily fluids are potent, and they can have both negative and positive effects. Fluids exist
in a transient world, and disrupt the stability of categories. The secretions of saintly bodies
were collected by the faithful, and their healing properties were used by mothers to protect
their children. The Sufi saints of North Africa offered protection from the evil eye through
the fluids that flowed from their bodies during religious festivals. In Christianity, Marys milk
was a symbol of wealth and health, and the blood of Christ was a means of salvation. But
blood and milk can also contaminate and disrupt social relations. Red symbolized danger; white,
as in Marys milk, brought comfort and sustenance. There has been a universal fear among
men of female menstruation, because the leaking bodies of women are sources of pollution.
In early colonial times, speculation about the reproductive processes of native peoples conjured
up strange women who could avoid menstruation by having their bodies sliced from the armpit
to the knee. The Puritan Cotton Mather, in his sermons on Uncleanness, located filth with
sexual functions and the lower parts of the body, while the soul and the mind were in the
upper sections. Moral pollution has been generally measured by physical uncleanness, which
is wet and fluid. There was an important correlation between Gandhis preoccupation with
sex, diet and health reform, which illustrates the connections between the body politic and
the individual organism and its management (Alter, 2000).
Bodily fluids that flow from the inside to the outside are dangerous, fearful and contami-
nating, because external fluids challenge our sense of order and orderliness. When internal
liquids appear on the outside, they are certain portents of death, disease or change. Leaking
things are a warning of an alien annunciation. The inside/outside and upper/lower divisions
combine with wet/dry and red/white dichotomies to demarcate borders of social pollution.
For example, the anatomy lesson was long condemned by the Church Fathers as anathema,
because it exposed to the human eye what God as creator had chosen not to disclose visibly
but to enclose bodily. Where such diabolical anatomical operations took place, they were
inflicted on the bodies of criminals as a juridical and political punishment. The criminal body
had a double death first at the hands of the public executioner and, second, under the knife
of the investigative surgeon.

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Problematizing Global Knowledge Body 225

Religious Paradigms of the Body

Religious institutions bind a people by their rituals and customs, and as a consequence
religions constitute societies. Just as the swaddling bands of a child bind his or her body to
the family, so religion binds the individual to society. The Abrahamic religions (Christianity,
Judaism and Islam) were inextricably based on notions of generation and reproduction that
occupy their core theologies and cosmologies. These religions were deeply patriarchal, and the
contemporary secularization of family life, sexuality and the sexual division of labour have had
profound, and largely corrosive, consequences for orthodox religious world-views. In modern
secular societies, gay liberation and womens movements have articulated a range of claims for
social equality and access to alternative sexual, familial or coupling arrangements, such as gay
and lesbian marriage. These legal and scientific changes create the conditions for experiments
in reproductive relationships that constitute a radical challenge to both traditional religion and
conventional forms of the family. The rise of fundamentalism can be partly explained as a
response to these changes, and it is for this reason that fundamentalists appear to be obsessed
with sexual topics homosexual practice, the role of women in society, the status of women
in the family and adolescent sexual behaviour.
There have been, in the history of human societies, a number of important, more or less
permanent, connections between religion, the body and sexual reproduction (Coakley, 1997).
The core of these cosmological connections is the principle of generation and regeneration of
the body. Social struggles over human reproduction have been reflected in controversies
between matriarchy and patriarchy as forms of authority over the body, and these political
controversies can be discerned even in the historical origins of the tradition of a high God.
There is much academic disagreement, obviously, about the origins of human mythologies.
One view is that, with the development of agriculture, the symbolism and cults of Mother
Earth and human fertility became socially dominant (Eliade, 1961). An alternative interpret-
ation is that with the growth of agriculture, the plough breaks up the earth and makes it fertile.
The plough is a phallic symbol that points to men taking gardening away from women and in
ancient Sumerian mythology Enki, the male god of water (semen), became the Great Father.
However, the development of the concept of a high god challenged many of these local fertil-
ity cults and occurred simultaneously in a number of regions of the world. This creative
religious period from approximately 800 to 200 BC was an axial age, because it was the crucial
turning point in the formation of civilizational complexes. Confucius, Buddha, Socrates,
Zoroaster and Isaiah, whose cosmological views had important common features, shaped the
axial age in the emerging agrarian civilizations, where city life began to emerge. It was the
cultural basis from which sprang the ethical, prophetic leaders of monotheism, which resulted
eventually in the so-called religions of the book in which divine revelation was recorded
(Weber, 1952). The prophets of the axial age addressed human beings in the name of a divine
moral being who could not be represented by an image and who could not be easily constrained
or cajoled by ritual or magic. Jahweh, the God of the tribes of Israel, was a jealous God whose
Name could not be named. Jahweh was opposed to idols and idolatry, and demanded unswerv-
ing commitment through a contractual relationship or covenant.
There is an important mythical role for a generative Father who is the patriarch of nations.
In the Old Testament Jacob and Israel are interchangeable. With the evolution of the idea
of sacred fatherhood, a range of problems about the body erupted. How are bodies produced
and reproduced? If they fragment and decay, then redemption is a problem (Bynum, 1991).
How can bodies be resurrected if they are incomplete? There have been (and continue to be)
major political and social issues over the ownership and the authorship of bodies. Who owns
bodies? Is there self-ownership (the principal doctrine of liberalism), does God own them
(through a divine Fatherhood) or does the state own them (in benevolent despotism)? Matri-
archy and patriarchy can be regarded as traditional principles for deciding the legitimacy and
ownership of bodies, especially parental ownership and control of children. In these cosmo-
logical schemes, there were common homologies between the reproductive work of a creator
God, the creative force of nature and reproduction with human bodies in family groups (Eliade,
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226 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

1965). Mythologies have been constructed upon these generative homologies to form systems
of dichotomous classification between red menstrual blood as a symbol of transmission
between generations, and white semen and milk as symbols of food, sustenance and reproduc-
tion.
Jewish tradition held diverse views about women, marriage and sexuality (Biale, 1992).
While the early Judeo-Christian teaching about women was not uniform, its legacy included
a deeply negative understanding of women and sexuality. In the Genesis story, the original
cooperative and companionate relationship between man and woman was replaced after the
Fall by a relationship of domination. The Mosaic Law was addressed to a society in which
women were household property and could not take decisions for themselves. Women thus
appeared alongside domestic animals and children as chattels of the household. A wife who
did not produce children was not fulfilling her duty and infertility was a religio-juridical ground
for divorce. Barrenness in the Old Testament was a sign of divine disapproval, and polygyny,
concubinage and prostitution were tolerated as concessions to male sexual energy. Because
menstruation and childbirth were ritually unclean, women were frequently precluded from
participating in cultic activities. Israelite marriage was a contract between separate families,
and thus wives were dangerous to men, not only because they could manipulate men with
their sexual charms, but also because they were recruited from outside the husbands family.
These negative images of women and female bodies in the Old Testament have proved to be
remarkably resilient historically.
The underlying principles of Christianity were patriarchal in the sense that the structure
of Christian theology required the concept of Jesus as the Son of God in order to make sense
of salvation history as a redemptive act. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son
that human beings could be saved from sin. Because Christianity is fundamentally patriarchal,
the Virgin Mary has an ambiguous status (Warner, 1983). In theological terms, the virginity
of Mary was necessary in order for Christ to be without sin, but Christ also had to be of
woman born in order to achieve human status, and thus to experience our world. Over time,
Mary herself was removed from the possibility of any connection with sin, and became
detached from an association with the Fall of Adam and Eve. The doctrine of Immaculate
Conception was declared in 1854, and Mary was exempt from original sin.
Mary was ambiguous in other ways. She became, in a patriarchal world, the great medieval
symbol of motherhood. In the 14th century, the visions of St Bridget of Sweden pictured the
Virgin, following the birth of Christ, on her knees in worshipful adoration of the Child, and
by the 15th century paintings of the adoration of the mother were common. The Virgin was
also a vehicle in her own right of worship and adoration. The more she was exempt from sin,
the more her status approximated that of Christ. In oppositional theology, she was often
regarded as equal to Christ in the concept of co-redemption. Because she was spared from
sin, she was also exempt from the physical experiences of the typical female sexual inter-
course, labour and childbirth. She was removed from basic physical activities except for one
the suckling of the infant Jesus. As a result, a cult emerged around the breast of the Virgin
and the milk that flowed from her teat. The theme of the nursing Virgin or Maria Lactans
became an important part of medieval cultic belief and practice. In the absence of a powerful
female figure in the Gospels, medieval Christianity elevated the spiritual status of Mary, who
became the great champion of procreation.

Globalization: The Diseased Body and Bio-economics

The implications of cloning and artificial reproduction for human rights are far reaching, and
they have been addressed in academic debates about rights to reproduce. However, there is
an emerging issue for the body and society that concerns the social consequences of medical
science for ageing. In traditional societies, the relationship between resources (especially land
and the food supply) and life expectancy was, more or less, regulated by a Malthusian logic.
The possibility of extending the expectation of life in the rich societies of the North has clear
Malthusian implications for the world as a whole. Because there is a very close relationship
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Body 227

between poverty and injustice, we should take this Malthusian question seriously, if we are to
understand the relationship between bodies, rights and poverty. In conventional gerontology,
the question about living forever might in practice mean living a full life in terms of achiev-
ing the average expectation of life. More recently, however, there has been considerable specu-
lation as to whether medical science could reverse the ageing process. Between the 1960s and
1980s the conventional view of mainstream biology was that normal cells had a replicative
senescence, that is normal tissues can only divide a finite number of times before entering a
stage of quiescence. Cells were observed in vitro in a process of natural senescence, and eventu-
ally experiments in vivo produced a distinction between normal and pathological cells in terms
of division. Paradoxically, pathological cells appeared to have no necessary limitation on repli-
cation, and immortalization was the distinctive feature of a pathological cell line. Biologists
concluded by extrapolation that finite cell division meant the ageing of the whole organism
was inevitable. These findings confirmed that human life had an intrinsic and predetermined
limit, and that it was pathology that described how certain cells might out-survive the
inescapable senescence of cellular life.
This framework of ageing was eventually overturned by scientists who isolated human
embryonic cells that were capable of continuous division in culture and showed no sign of the
replicative crisis. Certain non-pathological cells (or stem cells) were capable of indefinite
division, and hence were immortalized. The cultivation of these cells as an experimental form
of life has challenged existing assumptions about the boundaries between the normal and the
pathological, and between life and death. Stem cell research begins to define the arena within
the body that has reserves of renewable tissue, and suggests that the limits of biological growth
are not fixed or inflexible. The body has a surplus of stem cells capable of survival beyond the
death of the organism. With these developments in bio-gerontology, the capacity of regener-
ative medicine to extend the limits of life becomes a plausible aspect of medicine. This
interpretation of replication locates ageing as a shifting threshold between surplus and waste,
between obsolescence and renewal.
Because the World Bank sees the ageing populations of the developed world as a threat to
economic growth, there is considerable interest in the possibilities of stem cell research as an
aspect of regenerative medicine. Companies operating in the Caribbean are already offering
regenerative medicine as part of a holiday package, designed to alleviate the negative conse-
quences of degenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis or diabetes. The idea of bio-tourism
might become an addendum to sexual tourism in the world of advanced bio-capitalism. One
sign of the times was an academic event hosted by the Cambridge University Life Extension
and Rejuvenation Society in October 2004 at which Dr Aubrey de Grey attempted to demon-
strate that human beings could live forever, by which he meant that, within 25 years, medical
science will possess the capacity to repair all known effects of ageing. The average age at death
of people born thereafter would exceed 5000 years! In fact expectations of significant break-
throughs in the treatment of disease and significant profits by the large pharmaceutical
companies after the decoding of the human genome in 2001 were disappointing. The pharma-
ceutical industry was also hesitant to invest in new products that were designed for conditions
that affected small numbers of people. The fears associated with personalized medicine have
begun to disappear, because it is obvious that there are generic processes from which the
genomics companies can profit. Genetics-based medicine is poised to find better diagnostic
tests for, and generic solutions to, such conditions as diabetes, Alzheimers disease, heart
problems and breast cancer. These advances will certainly radically enhance life expectancy.
The human consequences of these changes will be rapid and radical, but little thought has
been given to the long-term social and political consequences of extended longevity. Although
it is mere speculation, it can be proposed that the social outcomes of a new pattern of ageing
would include: growing world inequality between the rejuvenated North and the naturally
ageing South, which would further inflame frustration and resentment of deprived social
groups; the inability of the labour market to cope with the increasing number of survivors
and similar crises in housing markets; the inability of the food supply to keep up with

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228 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

population expansion, which would require increasing use of genetically modified food,
increasing the dependency of the developing world on the rich, geriatric North; there would
be intergenerational conflicts over resources, in which existing economic crises around pensions
and housing would increase; and, finally, if we assume that genomic sciences could reduce
mortality, this would, at least in the short term, increase morbidity as chronic illness and
geriatric diseases increased.
The burden of dependency would have negative consequences for health care systems and
economic growth. The prospect of indefinite life would thus raise an acute Malthusian crisis.
These changes imply an interesting change from early to late modernity. In the early stages of
capitalism, the role of medical science was to improve health care to make the working class
healthy in order to have an efficient labour force. Late capitalism does not need a large labour
force at full employment and working full time, because technology has made labour more
efficient. In the new biotechnological environment, disease is no longer a negative force in the
economy but, on the contrary, an aspect of the factors of production.
It is inconceivable that we could live forever. More realistically, if life expectancy in the
advanced economies increased by, for example, ten years over the next five years by the appli-
cation of genetic science through the medium of regenerative medicine, then the global conse-
quences could be very damaging. The unintended consequences might include a major
depletion of natural resources and an increase in the speed of environmental decline through
increased industrialization, which would be necessary to support a rapid increase in the worlds
population. The negative consequences would be experienced primarily by people living in the
developing world. This economic and social crisis would result from our inability to find renew-
able energy. A pessimistic interpretation of this Malthusian crisis would suggest that the
exhaustion of the earths resources can never be finally overcome, because waste is unavoid-
able. Our enjoyment of longevity (the right to life) would be at the expense of their social
and economic security (given a Malthusian assumption about scarcity, relatively fixed resources
and the entropy law). It follows that vulnerability and precariousness are inescapable features
of human life, for which we need human rights as the basis of personal security. However, it
also follows that, for example, there must be limits to the right to life. It cannot be the case
that I have a right to live indefinitely at your expense. This limitation points to the import-
ance of the social dimension of rights, that the exercise of rights must be to our collective
advantage.

Conclusion: Bio-politics
In contemporary society, the body is in one sense disappearing; it is being converted into an
information system whose genetic code can be manipulated and sold as a commercial product
in the new biotech economy. In global terms, the disorders and diseases of the human body
have become productive in a post-industrial economy. In terms of media debate, the new
reproductive technologies, cloning and genetic screening are important illustrations of public
concern about the social consequences of the new genetics. Improvements in scientific under-
standing of genetics have already had major consequences for the circumstances under which
people reproduce, and genetic surveillance and forensic genetics may also transform criminal
investigation and the policing of societies. The code of the body becomes a major tool of
criminal investigations.
These changes in biomedicine illustrate Foucaults perspective in terms of a division
between the study of the individual body and the study of populations (Foucault, 1979). In
the first distinction he referred to an anatomo-politics of the human body, consisting of disci-
plines of the body. In the second distinction, he discussed a bio-politics of the population,
which are the regulatory controls over populations. Anatomo-politics constitute the micro-
politics of identity. The clinical examination of individuals is part of the anatomo-politics of
society. The bio-politics of populations used demography, epidemiology and public health
sciences to examine and manage whole populations. The anatomo-politics of medicine involves
the discipline of individuals; the bio-politics of society achieves a surveillance and regulation
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Body 229

of populations. Foucaults study of the body was thus organized around the notions of disci-
pline and regulatory controls or governmentality (Foucault, 1991). The new genetics provide
enhanced opportunities for governmentality as a strategy of political surveillance and economic
production. The government of the body, as a consequence, remains a critical issue in the
management and regulation of individuals and populations in contemporary society.

References
Alter, J.S. (2000) Gandhis Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Biale, D. (1992) Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. New York: Basic
Books.
Bynum, C.W. (1991) Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in
Medieval Religion. New York: Zone.
Coakley, S. (ed.) (1997) Religion and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eliade, M. (1961) The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harper.
Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality. London: Tavistock.
Foucault, M. (1991) Governmentality, pp. 87104 in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester.
Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnological Revolution. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Turner, B.S. (1992) Regulating Bodies: Essay in Medical Sociology. London: Routledge.
Warner, M. (1983) Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage
Books.
Weber, M. (1952) Ancient Judaism. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Asia Research Institute at the National
University of Singapore and the author of The Body and Society (1996).

Embodied Habitus
Shun Inoue

himself physically. Herrigel didnt understand

Keywords communication, local knowledge,
what the master meant. How can one draw the
martial art, practical sense, tacit knowing
bow without exerting oneself? The master replied:
You must not draw the bow with your physical
strength; you must do it with your mind. It took

I
n 1924 the German philosopher Eugen
Herrigel (18841955) arrived in Japan to teach
at the Tohoku University in Sendai. While
lecturing on philosophy and the classics, he
became a student of the famous kyudo (Japanese
archery) master Kenzo Awa (18801939). The
reason why Herrigel chose kyudo was that he
thought, erroneously as it turned out, that his
experience in target shooting with rifles would be
useful. Later, in 1936, he looked back on his kyudo
training under the guidance of Awa in one of his
lectures in Berlin (Herrigel, 1936).
The training began by learning the proper
posture and motion of drawing the bow. In this
practice, the master advised Herrigel not to exert
about a year for Herrigel to learn the proper way
of drawing the bow with proper posture and
breathing, keeping his arm and shoulder muscles
thoroughly relaxed.
The next step was to shoot an arrow. Herrigel
had trouble with the timing of discharging the
arrow and the master advised him not to think of
the timing: Your intention of getting the timing
right causes your trouble. Dont make any
conscious effort of shooting. You must abandon
your intentions and just wait for the time when
the arrow leaves by itself. Being baffled, Herrigel
asked: Who on earth shoots the arrow, then? The
masters answer was: Once you have understood
that, you will have no further need of me.

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