Anthropology Of The Body Case Study

1.1 Anthropology of the Body
I chose to study L.A. society and their requirements of what a “good” person should entail, by examining the female body. By studying the body one can research a society more closely, because cultural and social norms could be presented through the body. Throughout previous decades anthropologists have debated how the body could be perceived. When I think about how I would describe a body, I immediately think of the Vitruvian Man (1490) drawn by Leonardo Da Vinci, portraying a depiction of the male ideal designed by math, not shaped by life. Solely a biological entity that functions the same for every human and can be ‘calculated’ instead of shaped by social life or culture. Some scholars used to see the body as

This suggests that what we communicate with our bodies, is a message about the self towards society. Turner perceives the skin as the concrete boundary between society and the ‘self’, and the skin represents a combination of natural and cultural components. So, instead of saying that the body is influenced and socialised by society and culture, like Csordas (1994) stated, the body can also function as a representation of the self towards the society, according to Turner (2012). The self can be seen as a cultural conception of a person, a conceptualization of the ‘‘Western’’ self can be characterized as autonomous and egocentric and the bases for one’s agentic self and its actions (Sókefeld 1999). Sókefeld says here that one’s true self is defined by someone’s autonomous, individual person and ego and one’s self forms the starting point for one’s decisions and

Foucault (1979) who examined the position of the (female) body as a subject to external, societal power, stated that forms of power can be a useful thing, in creating norms, perspective and reality. He refers to the body as an object that we can read in order to determine how fields of power are organized in society. His argument of the body’s performance shaped by societal standards and naturalised by what we see performed by others, leans to the debate of structure and agency. This ongoing debate is about whether people make decisions based on their own free will as agents or based on the influence of structural forces. Debra Gimlin (2002) reacts to Foucault’s approach of women as recipients of culture, and states that it is wrong to see women only as dupes of culture. She writes that it is a scholarly and political error to see women as incapable of reacting or any way of resistance, and argues that the female body can be an agentic force, instead of solely a site of oppression. She argues that by engaging in body work, women are able to negotiate normative identities by diminishing their personal responsibility for a body that fails to meet cultural mandates (ibid). With referring to ‘cultural mandates’ Gimlin seems to acknowledge that women do face expectations which they