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THE CULTURAL IMAGE OF BODY AND ITS MODERN TRANSFORMATIONS

100%
Brocki M.
Lud
|
2007
|
vol. 91
35-54
EN
The human body is not only physical. It is associated with many beliefs and ideas, which make it a cultural construct. The cultural image of the body is composed of beliefs about its optimal shape and size, borders of body, internal structure, how it functions, and about the attire, decorations and marks on the body. The image of the body offers us a framework for the right perception (in a given cultural order), ordering and interpreting corporeal experiences. It also means that it is a type of social control (power) over individual physicality. This power, although scattered, invisible and embodied into our everyday practice, controls the body of the individual so that it has the 'desired' shape, size, attire, proper diet, hygiene, health, attitudes and behaviours. At the same time this power equips the body with a symbolic capital thanks to which 'investment' into the body is perceived as investment into the quality of life. Today we also observe how the body is gradually becoming a 'commodity' and how it is 'medicalised'. This is a process, which is accompanied by tensions and conflicts. Despite the fact that modern culture is considered to be very liberal, that a 'cult of the body' dominates in it, systems of control over the body (the 'microphysics' of power over body) are more extensive and more deeply hidden than was the case in the past.
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL SELF-REFLECTION ON THE TRANSLATION BETWEEN GENERATIONS

100%
Brocki M.
Lud
|
2004
|
vol. 88
169-186
EN
Anthropology, as a systematic critical reflection on popular ways of understanding mechanisms of life, should, according to James Boon, attempt to make more native what is alien and more alien what is native. To do that, it must be equipped with critical distance and irony, ability of critical self-conscious thinking not only about the 'objects' of its research but also about the tools used to describe and interpret them. As a result of this approach we have distrust of 'universalia' and, consequently, of comparisons between cultures and generalisations based on these comparisons. Knowledge shared by anthropologists is also a form of 'local knowledge' - this is important modification compared to the beliefs of anthropologists from before the 'critical breakthrough' on what anthropology is and what its tasks are. The 'New Polish Ethnology' rightly pointed to the special status of linguistic data in the research practice of ethnology, emphasizing that the classificational and descriptive character of the natural language helped to reconstruct cultural classification patterns and social functions of the phenomena studied, which directed the scholars' attention to informality and everyday language, which the author considers an important feature of the entire 'anthropological trend' in Poland. Creative treatment of the notions of 'text', 'myth' is also an original 'fulfilled project', which has retained its significance. However, theoretical thinking is not sufficient to understand the world. Therefore, the 'field' is an indispensable part of anthropological experience and approach. The 'field' makes an ethnologist particularly sensitive to attempts at making 'local forms of knowledge', 'scientific meta language' or 'obviousness of one's own culture' instrumental. The idea of field research has been questioned for many years as a separate method. As a result, too far-reaching conclusions have been drawn - 'literature' started to replace the privileged 'field'. The fact that the object of ethnologists' interest and interpretation is a document ('fiction') for them, created by anthropologists themselves on the basis of available data, is obvious. However, it is not so obvious that the mode of representation saves ethnology of its problems. The author does not share the opinion that literature could replace ethnology and does not understand why we should believe that there is a 'naked' or a better truth of a literary text when we have just gotten rid of the illusion that there is a naked truth of facts. The fulfilment of the project of the anthropology of culture in Poland gave rise to one important feature of present-day works: Polish ethnology does not suffer from the 'provincionalism', taking a distance approach to the ideologized form of scientific knowledge. Making no attempt at the depreciation of its other merits, it is precisely the provincionalism that gives us hope that the 'next generation' will make its own original contribution to this history of our field of research.
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