Turner - The Body and Society

Theory, Culture & Society

Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also publishes theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture, and new intellectual movements.

EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University

SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD

Roy Boyne, University of Durham

Scott Lash, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Roland Robertson, University of Aberdeen

Bryan S. Turner, National University of Singapore

THE TCS CENTRE

The Theory, Culture & Society book series, the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society, and related conference, seminar and postgraduate programmes operate from the TCS Centre at Nottingham Trent University. For further details of the TCS Centres activities please contact:

The TCS Centre

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Recent volumes include:

The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space

Scott McQuire

The Dressed Society: Clothing, the Body and Some Meanings of the World

Peter Corrigan

Informalization: Manners and Emotions Since 1890

Cas Wouters

The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy

John Tomlinson

Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Second Edition

Mike Featherstone

The Body & Society

Explorations in Social Theory

3rd Edition

Bryan S. Turner

Third edition Bryan S. Turner 2008

First published 2008.

Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society,

Nottingham Trent University

First edition published by Basil Blackwell Publishing 1984

Second edition published by Sage Publications Ltd 1996

Reprinted 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007

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ISBN 0 978 1 4129 2987 5 (pbk)

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Since the original publication of The Body and Society in 1984, I have been concerned to provide an ontological grounding to sociological theory, partly because existing theories of social action typically have what one might call a cognitive bias, thereby ignoring the corporeality of human life and the embodiment of the social actor. I have been motivated intellectually to take the quiddity or stuffness of the human condition seriously by addressing human embodiment as a basis for writing about politics, rights and human vulnerability. I had taught a course with Mike Hepworth on body, self and society at the University of Aberdeen in the late 1970s which laid the basis for a co-edited work on The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. Mike Featherstone and I subsequently co-founded the journal Body & Society in 1982 to promote greater awareness of these issues, and in a sense to promote the sociology of the body as a sub-field within the discipline. My approach to corporeality was first developed in the sociology of religion in Religion and Social Theory (1983) in which I argued that, unlike anthropology, sociology had not paid sufficient attention to embodiment in understanding religious belief and practice. Employing these concepts of the body and embodiment I sought to give a new foundation to medical sociology in such works as Medical Power and Social Knowledge (1987), Regulating Bodies (1992) and The New Medical Sociology (2004).

Over these three decades, in developing the sociology of the body, I have become increasingly critical of social constructionism as an epistemology. Instead I have explored the damaged human body in various publications and written with Steven Wainwright on the ballet dancer as a criticism of constructionist epistemology. The vulnerability of the human body has increasingly dominated my thinking about embodiment, and I have developed this theme with respect to such diverse topics as injury, old age, disease, and more recently, human rights. The critical intersection between medical science, demography and social change is particularly important as a basis for further developing the sociological understanding of the body in society.

This attempt to provide an ontological grounding for sociological theory is part of a broader project which is to establish the notion of human embodiment as a necessary precondition for any theory of action. Some of these issues were considered in Society and Culture (2001) with Chris Rojek, in which we attempted to develop a three-dimensional view of the social, involving embodiment, enselfment and emplacement.

The Body and Society was written in part as a response to the work of Michel Foucault. While many of the issues explored in the first edition religion, medicine and sexuality are still relevant, it appears necessary radically to revisit those concerns and perspectives. In this edition of the book, I have become increasingly interested in time and the body, and this issue of the temporality of the body with respect to illness, ageing and death necessarily leads one to the philosophy of being and time of Martin Heidegger. His preoccupation with boredom provides a stimulating context for thinking sociologically about age and life expectancy.

Many people have directly or indirectly contributed to this new edition: Gary Albrecht, Alex Dumas, Anthony Elliott, Mary Evans, John ONeill, Chris Rojek, Steven Wainwright, Darin Weinberg, Kevin White, Simon Williams and Zheng Yangwen. Various masters, doctoral and postdoctoral students Caragh Brosnan, David Larson, Rhiannon Morgan, Ruksana Patel and Nguyen Kim Hoa have over the years contributed to my sharpening awareness of the centrality of vulnerability to rights, health and politics. I owe a considerable debt to Chris Rojek who has over the years encouraged me to persist with the project of the sociology of the body.