The Explanatory Power of the Concept of Embodiment in Anthropology

As part of the author's cumulative research on the types of explanation, the structure of explanation and the explanatory capacity of key concepts in sociocultural anthropology, this paper looks at the concept of embodiment. The relevance of reappraising the explanatory power of this concept is manifold, above all on the interpretive, conceptual and paradigmatic level. Research suggests that the concept of embodiment – although very popular, commonly used in very influential scholarly monographs and academic papers, and even proposed as the cornerstone of a "new paradigm for anthropology" – has a very limited explanatory capacity. It seems that its use in no way contributes to anthropological argumentation on the level of explanation – neither cumulatively nor in terms of recontextualisation. Namely, it turns out that by deleting the word "embodiment" from the analyzed arguments nothing would be lost, and that the anthropological explanatory apparatus developed within the anthropology of the body, the anthropology of gender and the anthropology of kinship – whose use precedes contemporary popular uses of the concept of embodiment – does not have a smaller scope in terms of explanatory power.

Women’s Diets and Standards of Beauty

Looking beyond gynaecological issues, how did standards of beauty affect dietary recommendations, what women ate, and how they presented themselves? Obesity, while viewed differently than it is today, was considered a factor in women’s fertility. It was also related the sin of gluttony and other sins which demonstrated a lack of self-mastery of bodily appetites. Examining conduct literature is one way to gain access to cultural expectations of the female body. Religious concerns about self-presentation could also manifest in what has been called “holy anorexia.” The anthropology of the body suggest that what women eat and how they look are deeply embedded social constructs which reveal culture attitudes towards gender difference, women, and power.

Por uma Antropologia do corpo

Tradução do texto Towards an Anthropology of the Body, de John Blacking, publicado em The anthropology of the body (London: Academic Press, 1977), feita por Érica Giesbrecht, Laís Salgueiro e Ferran Tamarit Rebollo.

Heart of Darkness – Heart of Redness: Heartache and Pain in two Commonwealth Novels

Our study is conceived as a comparative analysis of Zakes Mda’s postcolonial and postmodern novel The Heart of Redness and Joseph Conrad’s canonical and colonial novella Heart of Darkness, from the viewpoint of a literarily encoded anthropology of the body. In both texts, body marks and body pain are prominent and recurrent motives, carrying along important cultural meanings, related to several classic themes of colonial and postcolonial literature: the birth and becoming of cultural identity and awareness, culture shock, cultural contacts, enculturation versus deculturation, and cultural memory, as a vehicle and repository of myths, history and (body) image stereotypes.