Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self / Edition 1

by Thomas J. Csordas

Overview

Students of culture have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which cultural values are inscribed on the body. The unifying theme of these essays is that the body is at once a fount of symbols and the instrument of experience. This more complex and dynamic view is applied by the contributors to a variety of topics, including dietary customs, the expression of emotion, the experience of pain, and political violence. Their purpose is to contribute to a phenomenological theory of culture and self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521458900
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/17/1994
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology , #2
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: the body as representation and being-in-the-world Thomas J. Csordas; Part I. Paradigms and Polemics: 1. Bodies and anti-bodies: flesh and fetish in contemporary social theory Terence Turner; 2. Society's body: emotion and the 'somatization' of social theory M. L. Lyon and J. M. Barbalet; Part II. Form, Appearance and Movement: 3. The political economy of injury and compassion: amputees on the Thai-Cambodia border Lindsay French; 4. Nurturing and negligence: working on others' bodies in Fiji Anne E. Becker; 5. The silenced body - the expressive Leib: on the dialectic of mind and life in Chinese cathartic healing Thomas Ots; Part III. Self, Sensibility, and Emotion: 6. Embodied metaphors: nerves as lived experience Setha M. Low; 7. Bodily transactions of the passions: El Calor among Salvadoran women refugees Janis H. Jenkins and Martha Valiente; 8. The embodiment of symbols and the acculturation of the anthropologist Carol Laderman; Part IV. Pain and Meaning: 9. Chronic pain and the tension between the body as subject and object Jean Jackson; 10. The individual in terror E. Valentine Daniel; 11. Rape trauma: contexts of meaning Cathy Winkler; 12. Words from the Holy People: a case study in cultural phenomenology Thomas J. Csordas.

Editorial Reviews

"The authors of Embodiment and Experience broach several interesting paths for future research." William S. Lachicotte, Jr., Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

From the Publisher