How Ideas about the Body Have Become an Important Part of Contemporary Culture and Society - Literature review Example

Ideas About The Body Have Become An Important Part Of Contemporary Culture And Society INTRODUCTION: The extent to which there is consciousness about the body and how people feel about them will vary throughout their lives and within different social contexts. During the teenage years for example, there is a likelihood of people becoming especially sensitive to the biological changes which their bodies endure and their altered appearance. Such changes can impact upon social relationships. Body-image, or how body is perceived, may in turn affect people’s ability to relate to others and will influence how others respond to them. The physical changes associated with ageing must also figure prominently in how the elderly feel about themselves, and form tangible reminders of mortality (Nettleton, 1998: 2). DISCUSSION: A central thrust of contemporary studies of the body is that it has a history. Hence, any analysis of empirical data must be placed in a broader context, according to Nettleton (1998: 4). There have been significant social transformations which have precipitated the current interest in the body and how it is experienced. The Body and Social Change: The growing importance of the body is related to a number of factors. Firstly, feminist writers revealed the political status of the body as a medium of exploitation. An example of this is the way in which women have attempted to reclaim control over their own bodies from a male dominated medical profession. Writers and activists who are concerned with disability provide another illustration of the political status of the body. Turner (1992:12-13) quoted in Nettleton (1998: 5) has argued that the body has come to form a central field of political and cultural activity, in that the major concerns for governments revolve around the regulation of bodies. In this context, he describes contemporary society as a “somatic society” which relates to the body as distinct from some other entity such as the mind. Second, demographic factors such as the “greying of populations” have highlighted the changing nature of bodies. Changes due to ageing raise moral and ethical debates on issues such as euthanasia, draw attention to tricky questions which pertain to the “ownership” of bodies. Another related transformation is the changing nature of the disease burden. Whilst people are living longer, they are not necessarily healthier as there has been a concurrent rise in people who suffer from long-standing limiting illnesses (Dunnell 1995) quoted in Nettleton (1998: 5). Biophysical changes have significant social consequences. Responses to chronic illness are not simply determined by either the nature of biophysical symptoms or individual motivations, but rather are shaped by the social, cultural and ideological context of a person’s life. An individual’s body image is socially mediated and impacts upon not only how they feel about themselves, but also on their social relations. For example, men and women suffering from arthritis articulated how their physical constraints made them uncomfortable in certain social settings, and how they feared that their altered bodies might undermine how significant others felt about them. However, they made particular efforts to improve on their appearance: to try and bring their perceived body-image more in line with ideal images, states Nettleton (1998: 18). A third social change is one which is associated with modern industrial societies and that is the rise of the consumer culture. Glassner (1989) quoted in Nettleton (1998: 5) has pointed to the proliferation of commercial goods and services which are consumed by those who want to keep fit, retain their youthful appearance or simply “maintain” their bodies. Featherstone (1991:186) quoted by Nettleton (1998: 5) argues that “appearance” becomes central to a person’s social acceptability. This in turn has important implications for ageing. In contemporary society, individuals do not wish to look older than their age. Neither do they wish to dress younger, and appear incongruous. Both circumstances prove to be detrimental in their social interactions. An individual’s body image is socially mediated and impacts upon not only how they feel about themselves, but also on their social relations. For example, men and women suffering from arthritis articulated how their physical constraints made them uncomfortable in certain social settings, and how they feared that their altered bodies might undermine how significant others felt about them. However, they made particular efforts to improve on their appearance: to try and bring their perceived body-image more in line with ideal images, states Nettleton (1998: 18). A further factor is the broader social transformations which are associated with the move from modernity to late or high modernity. The theme of uncertainty is central to the work of Giddens and a number of other commentators such as Beck (1992) and Douglas (1986) quoted in Nettleton (1998: 6) who have argued that a key feature of contemporary societies is risk. In post-traditional societies, people’s identities and their sense of self are not entitlements, that is, individuals can no longer derive their identity from their traditional place in society: be it class, family, gender, or locality. Rather, they have to rely on organized endeavour to realize their sense of self and identity. The self is embodied and with regularised control of the body, a biography of self-identity is maintained. The body used to be one aspect of nature, only marginally subject to human intervention. The body was a “given”, the often inconvenient and inadequate seat of the self. With the increasing invasion of the body by abstract systems, these concepts become altered. The body, like the self, becomes a site of interaction, appropriation and reappropriation, linking organized processes and expert knowledge. Once thought to be the locus of the soul, the body has become fully available to be “worked upon” by the influences of high modernity. Currently, there are an increasing number of guidebooks and practical manuals to do with health, diet, appearance, exercise, and several other things, states Giddens (1991:218) quoted in Nettleton (1998: 7). According to Synnott (1993: 1-2), the body is not a “given”, but a social category with different meanings imposed and developed by every age, and by different sections of the population. As such it is therefore sponge-like in its ability to absorb meanings, but also highly political. Like the organs and parts of the body, the attributes of the body are eminently social. Our age, gender and colour roles are principal determinants of our lives and our social identities, the focal point of our self-concepts and group-concepts. Similarly, our unique attributes of beauty or unattractiveness, height and weight, physical handicaps, if any, not only affect social responses to the self, they also affect our life chances. The body, therefore, is the prime symbol of the self, and the prime determinant of the self. Other researchers concur that there is increasingly greater uncertainty about bodies, which are perceived to be more pliable and people are actively seeking to alter, improve and refine them. Shilling (1993: 5) quoted in Nettleton (1998: 7) also sees the body as a project. He argues that the body might best be conceptualised as an unfinished biological and social phenomenon, which is transformed, within limits as a result of its participation in society. For example, styles of walking, talking and gestures are influenced by the individual’s upbringing. The body is therefore in a continual state of “unfinishedness” the body is seen as “an entity which is in the process of becoming; a project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an individual’s self identity.” The identity of body and self is perhaps most clearly illustrated by body-change. Self-concepts change, often dramatically, at puberty, pregnancy and menopause. Body changes change the self. This self-change is particularly evident if the body-change is sudden and unexpected: a heart attack, stroke, or mastectomy, or an accident which results in the loss of a limb, or facial scarring: for the face is a prime symbol of the self. Cosmetic surgery can work wonders not only on the body, but also on the mind, and the sense of self. The sense of who one is, is highly dependent on the body: a point often not fully appreciated until the body changes or, of course, dies (Synnott, 1993: 2). To effectively protect the body against the threats of disease and illness, the immune system must be able to change and constantly adapt. In late modernity, people’s accounts and interpretations of their bodies are historically and socially contingent, and are conducive to broader social transformations (Nettleton, 1998: 7-8). APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE BODY: Within the theoretical debates on the body, tension revolves around the ontological or existent status of the body, between the foundationalists, who assume that the biological basis of the body is a universal given and affects peoples’ experience of the body, and the anti-foundationalists who maintain that the body is simply an effect of discursive processes or contexts. For instance, the social constructionists argue that the body is socially created. The body from this perspective is contingent on the social and discursive context in which it resides. The anti-constructionists on the other hand argue that the body exists independently of its social context, and like the foundationalists see it as a universal physical entity. The extent to which the body is socially constructed has been found to be significant. Most writers (Connell 1995; Scott and Morgan 1993; Shilling 1993; Turner 1992) quoted in Nettleton (1998: 8) state that it has to be accepted that the body has a material, biological base, and that this is altered and modified within different social contexts. Though they maintain that the body is socially constructed, they may disagree about the mechanisms and processes which contribute to its social variability. The Phenomelogical Approach to the Study of the Body: Developing the phenomenological approach to the study of the body is an alternative and useful method of integrating some of the approaches mentioned above, states Nettleton (1998: 9). A basis for all sound research is using theories, methodologies and research techniques which are appropriate to the research problem, or issue in hand. It is important to examine how people experience their bodies and in particular how they articulate their experiences. The phenomenological and, more generally, interpretative approaches are the most appropriate paradigms to work within. The epistemological standpoint, theoretical orientation and methodological technique which a social scientist adopts should be determined by the nature of the problem and level of explanation which is required. The phenomenological perspective focuses on the ‘lived body’, the idea that human beings and their consciousness is invariably embedded within the body. The human being is an embodied social agent. The work of Merleau-Ponty, in particular his text, The Phenomenology of Perception (2002), is critical to our appreciation of embodiment. Essentially he argued that all human perception is embodied, we cannot perceive anything and our senses cannot function independently of our bodies (Nettleton, 1998: 9). The body is not an external entity but is experienced in practical ways when coping with external events and situations. How individuals handle their bodies in social situations is crucial to their self and identity and has been empirically and extensively explored by ethnomethodologists. The management of bodies in everyday life serves to structure the self and social relations. It is important to recognise the preciousness of the body as well as humans’ remarkable ability to sustain bodily control through day-to-day situations. Most individuals to a significant extent, take their bodies for granted whilst going about their daily routines. However, the body is very evident in the mainstream of everyday life. An example is: when people are either interviewed or observed, they appear to be aware of their bodies (Nettleton, 1998: 11-12). A number of writers have emphasised that in daily life, bodies are ‘absent’ or are taken-for-granted. Individuals become aware of them only when they are in pain or suffer from disease or illness: when they are dys-functional. An example is: Seymour’s (1998) empirical study of twenty-four men and women who experienced profound and permanent body paralysis. As the title of her book, Remaking the Body, suggests she reveals how these men and women go about remaking their bodies and accordingly, in doing so, remake their worlds (Nettleton, 1998: 12). Social controls and internal controls of the body and the self are inherently interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Body-Image: The image that individuals have about their bodies will to a greater or lesser extent impact upon how they experience their bodies in everyday life. It may impact upon their sense of self, their degree of confidence in social situations and the nature of their social relationships. Body-image is shaped not just by what the body is perceived to look like, but what is seen and how the vision of the body is interpreted, in the social and cultural context. An example is anorexia. In this eating disorder caused by a distorted body image, the individual has a false notion about being overweight, when in fact they are not, and they cut down their dietary intake to dangerously minimal levels to achieve continued weight loss (Nettleton, 1998: 17). In a study conducted by Dunkley, Wertheim and Paxton (2001), the researchers examined the perceived role of three types of sociocultural agents (peers, parents, and media) in influencing body dissatisfaction and dietary restraint in adolescent girls. While current body size strongly predicted ideal body size and body dissatisfaction, perceived influence of multiple sociocultural agents regarding thinness also had a direct relationship with body ideal and dissatisfaction which strongly impacted dietary restraint. The findings support the idea that those girls who show the most body dissatisfaction and dietary restraint live in a subculture supporting a thin ideal, where dieting is encouraged (Dunkley; Werheim and Paxton, 2001). Wienke (1998) states that among men, the muscular body type represents the dominant cultural ideal.. Men develop a number of complex strategies to negotiate the meaning of their bodies in view of cultural ideals of male physiques. Exposure to bodily imagery in advertising, film, and other visual media not only makes individuals more conscious and aware of their own bodily state, inducing them to seek out models of physical beauty, but also more vulnerable to the allure of the consumer market (Parker, 1996) as quoted in Wienke (1998). In his book Black Skin, White Masks, nearly fifty years ago, Frantz Fanon described the damaging effects of what he termed the "epidermalization" of blackness under colonial relationships of power. Epidermalization refers to the reduction of blackness to a matter of surface, a bodily effect that produces a thoroughly negative consciousness in the black individual. As blackness takes the form of negative body-image experience for the white man, so the black man is correspondingly reduced in the white imagination to a purely biological being (Waksman, 1999). This fact Jimi Hendrix tried to change with the power of his electric guitar. His musical innovations depended largely upon the new vocabulary of electronic sounds offered by the electric guitar. In interviews he often enunciated the view that the music generated by such sounds might have the power to effect transcendence of racial and other differences on both a personal and a social level. CONCLUSION: In this paper, the significance of the ideas of the body as a part of contemporary culture and society and the embodiment of personal identity are studied. The basic concept of individuals’ body image and their social relationships, experiences and sense of self are found to be interrelated. The necessity for conforming to socially determined norms about the body regarding age and gender, to realize oneself as a part of society is observed. Disability and chronic illnesses, as well as colour bias based on racism form negative connotations for socialization. “Appearance” is central to being socially acceptable in current day society. In order to be maintain their body’s fitness as well as to improve their appearance, individuals resort to consumerism, from a widely available array of strategies and cosmetic remedies. ------------------------------------------------- REFERENCES Dunkley, Tracy L; Paxton, Susan J; Wertheim, Eleanor H. (2001). “Examination of a Model of Mutliple Sociocultural Influences on Adolescent Girls’ Body Dissatisfaction and Dietary Restraint”. Adolescence, Vol.36, 2001. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Nettleton, Sarah. (1998). The Body in Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Synnott, Anthony. (1993). The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society. London: Routledge. Waksman, Steve (1999). “Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, The Electric Guitar and the Meanings of Blackness”. Popular Music and Society, Vol. 23, 1999 Wienke, Chris (1998). “Negotiating the Male Body: Men, Masculinity and Cultural Ideals”. The Journal of Men’s Studies, Vol.6, 1998. 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