 The body and society.
Author: Turner, Bryan Published: 1996 Few recent books can claim to be path-breaking. The body and society is one of them. Originally published in 1984, it flew against prevailing trends which asked sociologists to understand society in terms of abstractions such as structure, class, and function. Instead, in a series of dazzling chapters, Turner argued that the body should be the axis of sociological analysis. In this second edition, Turner updates the argument. A wide-ranging new introduction analyses the social changes which have given prominence to the body in contemporary theory, and develops Turner's own notion of a somatic society, a society in which major political and personal problems are both problematised in the body and expressed through it. |
