University of Chicago

About the Workshop

    In the last decades of the 20th century, the topic of the body became almost conventional in the human sciences. In fields ranging from anthropology to literary studies, history to political science, researchers expanded a classical social science concern with questions of consciousness and ideology, patterned behaviors and material determinations, to focus on a new hybrid terrain, that of the lived body. Phenomenological philosophy has long explored problems of embodiment, offering a dynamic understanding of contingency and diversity in human physical experience; but most of social science continued for a long time to treat bodies as the naturalized, essentially passive atoms or building blocks of society, which was itself the only proper topic of a science biased toward quantifiable prediction.

    The body for contemporary scholarship, however, is neither brute materiality nor mere symbolic representation. More recent approaches to material life and embodiment have highlighted the limitations of such classic binaries, incarnations of which include the individual-society divide, the mind-body relationship, and rational versus emotional ways of knowing. Consequently, the concept of embodiment itself—and therefore any theory of the body—can neither serve as the comprehensive alternative to language and other semiotic systems, nor be forced into a formal calque of these systems to facilitate study of embodied meaning and expression.  

    The Medicine, Body and Practice workshop brings together research and theorization that explore practice and experience as a middle ground between these formerly dominant polarities. It also seeks to provide a venue for reports on bodily matters from several disciplinary orientations and from a variety of non-Western settings.

Join the Medicine, Body and Practice mailing list here.

Website designed and maintained by tatiana at uchicago . edu. Last updated Sept 25, 2007.