This book examines a type of object that was widespread and very popular in classical antiquity - votive offerings in the shape of parts of the human body. It collects examples from four principal ...areas and time periods: Classical Greece, pre-Roman Italy, Roman Gaul and Roman Asia Minor. It uses a compare-and-contrast methodology to highlight differences between these sets of votives, exploring the implications for our understandings of how beliefs about the body changed across classical antiquity. The book also looks at how far these ancient beliefs overlap with, or differ from, modern ideas about the body and its physical and conceptual boundaries. Central themes of the book include illness and healing, bodily fragmentation, human-animal hybridity, transmission and reception of traditions, and the mechanics of personal transformation in religious rituals.
From the tombs of the elite to the graves of commoners, mortuary remains offer rich insights into Classic Maya society. In Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul, the ...anthropological archaeologist and bioarchaeologist Andrew K. Scherer explores the broad range of burial practices among the Maya of the Classic period (AD 250–900), integrating information gleaned from his own fieldwork with insights from the fields of iconography, epigraphy, and ethnography to illuminate this society’s rich funerary traditions.Scherer’s study of burials along the Usumacinta River at the Mexican-Guatemalan border and in the Central Petén region of Guatemala—areas that include Piedras Negras, El Kinel, Tecolote, El Zotz, and Yaxha—reveals commonalities and differences among royal, elite, and commoner mortuary practices. By analyzing skeletons containing dental and cranial modifications, as well as the adornments of interred bodies, Scherer probes Classic Maya conceptions of body, wellness, and the afterlife. Scherer also moves beyond the body to look at the spatial orientation of the burials and their integration into the architecture of Maya communities. Taking a unique interdisciplinary approach, the author examines how Classic Maya deathways can expand our understanding of this society’s beliefs and traditions, making Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya an important step forward in Mesoamerican archeology.
"Fat People Don't Go to Heaven!" screamed a headline in the tabloidGlobein November 2000. The story recounted the success of the Weigh Down Workshop, the nation's largest Christian diet corporation ...and the subject of extensive press coverage fromLarry King Liveto theNew Yorker.In the United States today, hundreds of thousands of people are making diet a religious duty by enrolling in Christian diet programs and reading Christian diet literature likeWhat Would Jesus Eat?andFit for God.Written with style and wit, far ranging in its implications, and rich with the stories of real people,Born Again Bodieslaunches a provocative yet sensitive investigation into Christian fitness and diet culture. Looking closely at both the religious roots of this movement and its present-day incarnations, R. Marie Griffith vividly analyzes Christianity's intricate role in America's obsession with the body, diet, and fitness. As she traces the underpinning of modern-day beauty and slimness ideals-as well as the bigotry against people who are overweight-Griffith links seemingly disparate groups in American history including seventeenth-century New England Puritans, Progressive Era New Thought adherents, and late-twentieth-century evangelical diet preachers.
The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture explores the burgeoning eighteenth-century fascination with the human body as an eloquent, expressive object. This wide-ranging study ...examines the role of the body within a number of cultural arenas - particularly oratory, the theatre and the novel - and charts the efforts of projectors and reformers who sought to exploit the textual potential of the body for the public assertion of modern politeness. Paul Goring shows how diverse writers and performers including David Garrick, James Fordyce, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding and Laurence Sterne were involved in the construction of new ideals of physical eloquence - bourgeois, sentimental ideals which stood in contrast to more patrician, classical bodily modes. Through innovative readings of fiction and contemporary manuals on acting and public speaking, Goring reveals the ways in which the human body was treated as an instrument for the display of sensibility and polite values.
This interdisciplinary collection of essays, containing chapters from specialists in history, art history, medical history, and literature, examines how the intimately familiar language of the body ...served as a convenient medium through which to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world, both for the better and also for the worse. Its individual contributors demonstrate the myriad ways in which rethinking the human body was one way to approach rethinking the social, political, and religious realities of the world from the Middle Ages until the early modern period.
This is the first general monograph on ancient Greek dress in English to be published in more than a century. By applying modern dress theory to the ancient evidence, this book reconstructs the ...social meanings attached to the dressed body in ancient Greece. Whereas many scholars have focused on individual aspects of ancient Greek dress, from the perspectives of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, this volume synthesizes the diverse evidence and offers fresh insights into this essential aspect of ancient society. Intended to be accessible to nonspecialists as well as classicists, students as well as academic professionals, this book will find a wide audience.
Winner of the 2007 Everett Lee Hunt Award presented by the Eastern Communication Association Scripting the Black Masculine Body traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its ...contemporary manifestations in popular cultural productions. From early blackface cinema through contemporary portrayals of the Black body in hip-hop music and film, Ronald L. Jackson II examines how African American identities have been socially constructed, constituted, and publicly understood, and argues that popular music artists and film producers often are complicit with Black body stereotypes. Jackson offers a communicative perspective on body politics through a blend of social scientific and humanities approaches and offers possibilities for the liberation of the Black body from its current ineffectual and paralyzing representations.
This book investigates the limits of the legitimate role of the state in regulating the human body. It questions whether there is a public interest in issues of bodily autonomy, with particular focus ...on reproductive choices, end of life choices, sexual autonomy, body modifications and selling the body. The main question addressed in this book is whether such autonomous choices about the human body are, and should be, subject to state regulation. Potential justifications for the state's intervention into these issues through mechanisms such as the criminal law and regulatory schemes are evaluated. These include preventing harm to others and/or to the individual involved, as well as more abstract concepts such as public morality, the sanctity of human life, and the protection of human dignity. The State and the Body argues that the state should be particularly wary about encroaching upon exercises of autonomy by embodied selves and concludes that only interventions based upon Mill's harm principle or, in tightly confined circumstances, the dignity of the human species as a whole should suffice to justify public intervention into private choices about the body.
The Ponytail Broch, Trygve B
2023, 2023-01-01
eBook
Open access
This open access book adopts a cultural sociology of materiality to explore the hallmark of the female athlete: the ponytail. Studying a wealth of news articles about ponytails in sports and society, ...Broch uncovers this hairstyle’s polyvocality and argues that it is a total social phenomenon. By separating his approach from the cultural studies tradition, Broch highlights how hair is imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to understand, maneuver, and criticize social gender relations in deeply personal ways. Using multiple theories about hair, bodies, myths, and icons, he creates a multidimensional method to show how icons are imitated and used. As women navigate their practical lives, health issues, and gendered expectations, the ponytail materializes their dynamic maneuvering of cultural and social environments. Sporting a ponytail—itself an embodiment of movement—is filled with a performativity of social movements: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical.
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