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Sociology
Copyright © 2005
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 39(4): 761–767
DOI: 10.1177/0038038505056034
SAGE Publications
London,Thousand Oaks,
New Delhi

The Rise of the Body and the Development

of Sociology
■ Chris Shilling
University of Portsmouth

Christopher A. Faircloth (ed.)

Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience
New York: Altamira Press, 2003, pbk (ISBN 0 7591 0236 8)

Helen Thomas and Jamilah Ahmed (eds)

Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, £19.99 pbk (ISBN 0 631 22585)

Alexandra Howson
The Body in Society: An Introduction
Cambridge: Polity, 2004, £15.00 pbk (ISBN 0 7456 2538 X)

Studies of embodiment have occupied an increasingly important role in sociology

and across the social sciences and humanities since the 1980s. This ‘rise of the body’
has led not only to the establishment of a vibrant interdisciplinary area of ‘body
studies’, but has also prompted an ongoing reconstruction of disciplinary and sub-
disciplinary areas seeking to account more adequately for the embodied nature and
consequences of their subject matter. It has also been responsible for a shift in main-
stream social theory. A growing number of works concerned with performativity,
structuration theory, nature, realism, feminism, and human creativity, for example,
are illustrative of an increasingly widespread recognition that the embodied subject
needs to be central to any comprehensive understanding of social life.
The theoretical and cross-disciplinary significance of this development is
remarkable, but dangers accompany the current fashionability of all things bodily.
In contrast to the most productive contributions to this area (which have excavated
‘hidden’ heritages of body thought while also contributing towards advances in

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theory and research), there has been a tendency within certain quarters to either
reify the body as a thing-in-itself or to treat it as an infinitely malleable phenomenon
which simply reflects social and cultural forces. In both these cases, we find evidence
of what Walter Schulz refers to as an ‘inverted Cartesianism’ in which human phys-
icality is reduced to an unthinking object the significance of which is found in its
capacity to be controlled or in its status as a bearer of social symbolism. Here, the
body becomes a way of reducing humanity to inactive flesh, and there is a collaps-
ing of the sociological horizon and an associated manifestation of what Peter Berger
refers to as ‘bad faith’ (involving a forgetting of people’s embodied capacity to cre-
ate social forms and to be responsible for their continuation).
Against this background, the three books under review do much to help illus-
trate the impact and scope of the rise of the body. Each is concerned to avoid reify-
ing the body. Taken as a whole, they also provide us with a variety of interesting
studies into how the body is our ‘vehicle of being in the world’, as Merleau-Ponty
put it, and also examine how the frailties and malleabilities of the human body can
constitute a location on which social control is exercised. While each is careful to
avoid endorsing an inverted Cartesianism, however, they also enable us to highlight
some of the remaining challenges facing those working in the area.
Christopher Faircloth’s introduction to Aging Bodies observes that: 1) aging is
a common phenomenological concern but has not had a commensurate academic
prominence, and 2) the study of older bodies is surprisingly uncommon, even in
gerontology. From this starting point, the chapters assembled by Faircloth seek to
help embody gerontology and to push social analysis towards the corporeality of
mundane experience and practice. Specifically, Aging Bodies is concerned with the
relationship between aging as image and aging as practice. Cultural images of aging
in the West have been overwhelmingly negative but, as Featherstone and
Hepworth’s earlier work on the ‘mask of aging’ argues, these have been accompa-
nied recently by a new visual vocabulary of aging (linked to the expansion of con-
sumer culture to all age groups) emphasizing the enabling possibilities associated
with growing old. In line with these concerns, Part One of Aging Bodies analyses
‘Images’ of aging, while Part Two concentrates on ‘Everyday Experience’.
In Part One, Bill Blythways asks what gerontologists can learn from visual rep-
resentations of late life. His comparative analysis argues that adverts in particular
suggest we are witnessing the partial incorporation of older people into consumer
society. However, he also highlights the disciplinary imperative in these images
which exhort the subject to act in order to avoid the ‘inevitable fate’ that awaits
those who respond passively to aging. Betina Freidin’s contribution focuses on one
part of this fate by analysing lay people’s understandings and representations of the
body in order to comprehend their willingness to donate organs after their death,
and identifies a dualistic view of the self and the dead body which informed most of
her subject’s views. Elizabeth Markson’s ‘The female aging body through film’
examines the history of sexual double-standards in film, traces how this media por-
trays older women as physically and mentally fragile, and concludes that such rep-
resentations have remained constant over six decades. Peter Oberg’s ‘Image versus
experience of the aging body’ is based on a large quantitative survey involving men

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and women aged between 25 and 85 years. Oberg suggests that while contemporary
culture is dominated by positive images of youthful bodies, that people fear the
‘betrayals’ of old bodies, that few look forward to aging, and that aging is seen as
something to resist, ‘the majority of elders seem to be rather satisfied with their own
bodies’ (p. 129).
Part Two of Aging Bodies develops the issues raised in Oberg’s research by
focusing on varied experiences of aging. Julia Twigg’s interview-based research into
people needing home help with bathing explores the experiential and social presence
of bodies that have assumed a ‘new prominence’ because of their inability to do
things. Touching on the culture and history of bathing, care-recipient relations,
stigma, eroticism, and the management of embarrassment, Twigg’s contribution has
important policy implications. It also challenges constructionist ontologies of the
body which focus exclusively on how culture ages the body and neglect how ‘we are
also aged by our bodies’ (p. 165). Dana Rosenfeld explores contrasting experiences
of sexual identity. Based on interviews with subjects whose average age was just
over 72 years, Rosenfeld examines how gays and lesbians constructed their bodily
identities prior to and after the era of ‘gay liberation’ which began in the late 1960s,
and explores the capacities people had for forging distinctive identities in the same
historical period. Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein’s chapter on the visibility of
the aging body resonates with Drew Leder’s account of the experience of bodily
absence and presence in its analysis of ‘the practical interplay between the aging
body as an interpretive project and the aging body as an obdurate intrusion’. It
draws on life histories in order to show that the lived body is often far less intrans-
igent than suggested by popular images of aging (p. 209).
The final chapters in Part Two provide a fitting conclusion to Aging Bodies.
They challenge common conceptions of aging by looking at activities and profes-
sions that construct our bodies as ‘old’ long before that definition is usually
applied, while also demonstrating that the physical performance of embodied sub-
jects is inevitably affected by aging. Emmanuelle Tulle’s participant observation
and interview study concerns men and women aged between 48 and 86 who have
been involved in competitive athletics in their ‘later years’. Tracing how aging takes
place in heterogeneous ways between and within organisms, this is a sensitive study
of the phenomenology of aging athletes who resist medical and lay norms yet who
have to confront the deterioration of their performances. Finally, Steven
Wainwright and Bryan Turner’s study of aging, injury and professional ballet
dancers is a revealing analysis of a profession that defines its members bodies as old
before they are 30. Drawing on Foucault and Bourdieu, the authors examine how
a group of professionals for whom the performing body becomes the self have to
confront the rupture in bodily identity and the sense of loss associated with the
ending of their career.
Aging Bodies is a well-structured volume based around diverse empirically
driven investigations into a subject that has not had the significance it deserves. Its
parts are of varying quality, but the collection raises a host of questions about pre-
cisely what is meant by ‘aging’, and is possessed of a coherence thanks to its recur-
ring concern with the interplay between bodily images and experience, and the

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764 Sociology Volume 39 ■ Number 4 ■ October 2005

agentic and constraining properties of the body. If the sociology of the body has suf-
fered from a dearth of empirical studies, this volume helps readdress that balance.
The concern with embodied experience is also key to Helen Thomas and
Jamilah Ahmed’s edited collection Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory. This
volume seeks to utilize developments in epistemology and ethnography in order to
address the lived materiality of the body. The book is divided into three parts:
‘ethnography’, ‘theory’, and ‘theory and ethnography’. Contributors from sociol-
ogy, anthropology, gender, dance and cultural studies impart a strong interdisci-
plinary feel to the volume.
In Part One, Les Back’s analysis of tattoos illustrates how this body symbolism
‘incarnates a sense of place, community and history on the skin of the individual’
(p. 38). Back analyses various forms of tattoo, and argues that writing the names of
family members and lovers on the skin constitutes ‘illocutionary love’. Back’s ‘essen-
tial point’, that ‘the expression and communication of love needs to be understood
through the range of verbal and non-verbal modalities’ is well made, but if this point
really still needs to be made it shows just how insidious the academic taste for the-
ories based on the overvaluation of language has become. Joanne Entwistle’s chap-
ter on male models grounds and embodies recent concerns with ‘performativity’.
Based on interviews with fashion models and bookers, Entwistle explores how these
mainly straight male models are sexualized at work, subject to the homoerotic gaze
that has influenced codes of masculinity since the 1980s, and reveals how they exer-
cise agency by switching from ‘queer’ performances to ‘hyper performing masculin-
ity’. Suki Ali’s chapter uses data from an ethnography of how children aged from
eight to 11 years negotiate their own and others’ racialization through readings of
bodies in popular culture, and shows that conventional phenotypical ideas of race
are not fixed. The children studied experimented with ‘the logics of visibility in
order to make sense of their everyday world’, yet Ali suggests these interventions are
likely to be temporary as ‘the recuperative effects of the discursive frameworks of
“race” are ultimately constraining’ (p. 93). Finally, Stephen Wainwright and Bryan
Turner provide us with a partly revised version of their contribution to Aging Bodies
which fleshes out some of the themes evident in that chapter.
In Part Two, Sally Ann Allen Ness uses dance to compare ‘embodied method-
ologies’ with traditional accounts of social action. This provocative piece charts the
different accounts that can emerge from participatory and non-participatory
research. Paradoxically, descriptions based on bodily immersion in the researched
activity seem to be more focused on (non-present) cultural rules and symbolism than
accounts based on simple observation. At the same time, their appreciation of the
particularity of an individual performance (and how it can deviate from cultural
norms) provides grounds for phenomenological reflection. The issue of methodol-
ogy is an under-explored aspect of academic work on the body and this chapter is
an important contribution to debate. Nigel Thrift’s chapter discloses the processes
by which ‘very small spaces and times’ become intelligible, especially insofar as they
affect ‘bare life’, the ‘simple living body’ revealed in that gap between action and
consciousness. Thrift’s creative analysis grounds and develops some of Foucault’s
concerns with biopolitics, and examines how tourism, branding, the ‘experience

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economy’, and the conduct of business, operate in this embodied arena of pre-
consciousness. Simon Shepard’s chapter focuses on contrasting examples of bodily
performance – Suzuki Tadashi’s strenuous training regimes based on a search for a
universal physical language, and Stelarc’s performances of the ‘post human body’ –
and identifies a ‘new kinaesthetic’ emerging within contemporary culture. Emily
Martin’s ‘Talking back to neuro-reductionism’ engages critically with modes of
thought such as biological psychiatry and cognitive science which interpret psycho-
logical and social processes in exclusively neuronal terms. Martin addresses the lim-
itations of these influential paradigms, which obfuscate the realm of culture, and
does so by drawing on her research into social meanings associated with ‘hyper
mental’ conditions.
In Part Three, Elspeth Probyn reports on her research on the role of food writ-
ing in mediating taste. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, as well as on her own
experience of working in restaurants and bars, Probyn provides us with an interest-
ing exploration of the connections and marks made and left by eating. Thomas
Csordas’s analysis of health and the holy in the Afro-Brazilian possession cult
Candomble demonstrates how the relations that exist between the medical and the
religious get played out in the contested site of the body. His chapter can profitably
be read alongside Parsons’s analysis of the relation between medical and Christian
ethics in the West. Simon Carter and Mike Michael’s contribution is designed as a
first step towards a ‘sociology of the sun’. It is concerned with how symbolizations
and representations of the sun are tied to body techniques, and focuses on the dis-
courses and practices associated with sun exposure and on the affordances and
gazes facilitated by sunglasses. Finally, Jamilah Ahmed concludes Cultural Bodies by
mapping out future directions in research, and conceptualizes the ‘nomadic self’ as
an idea and practice that can manifest the ‘many selves’ that people ethnographic
encounters involved in researching the body.
Cultural Bodies is characterized by an impressive range of issues and is inter-
esting both for the wealth of empirical material it covers and for the attempts its
contributors make to advance their own (inter)disciplinary concerns by embodying
them. This concern helps to physically ground and begin to make more sociologi-
cally viable and interesting some of the abstract and self-indulgent directions taken
by recent theorists of postmodernism and performativity. Many of the chapters are
peppered with interesting insights – although these often stem from studies that have
a strong feel of being ‘work in progress’ – and this book should be a useful source
of reference for anyone interested in the development of body studies.
Despite its popularity, there have until recently been few undergraduate texts in
the area of body studies. The contents of Alexandra Howson’s The Body in Society:
An Introduction, however, appear to be directed at first-year undergraduates and
based closely on lecture notes. The book aims to examine ‘taken for granted aspects
of the human body and what they reveal about the social organisation of everyday
life’. Its objectives are to: 1) describe key issues concerning the body and its signifi-
cance; 2) outline sociological perspectives and conceptual frameworks which
address these issues; and 3) compare sociological and other social science
approaches to the body. An introduction is followed by chapters on ‘The body in

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everyday life’ (centred around Goffman); ‘The body, gender and sex’ (viewed from
an historical perspective); ‘The civilized body’ (providing a partial introduction to
Elias); ‘The body in consumer culture’; ‘Regulating the body’ (concerned with
medicine); and ‘Images and experiences of childhood, ageing and death’. At the end
of each chapter are suggestions for extra reading and addresses of relevant websites,
and the book contains a glossary.
The Body in Society provides some accessible discussions of issues important to
the field of body studies and includes student-friendly references to body issues and
images in popular culture. Like Aging bodies and Cultural Bodies, it displays a wel-
come concern with the body as a target of political control, and the basis of social
experience and action. Given its basic, entry level market, however, the somewhat
confusing manner in which a range of issues is rapidly passed over in the introduc-
tion is unlikely to help students. The assertion that the body was historically
excluded from sociology as ‘relevant to the production of sociological knowledge’,
for example, is followed sentences later with comments on the body’s presence in
classical sociological texts in relation to such issues as social classification (p. 4). The
book is also characterized by some unfortunate errors and misleading simplifica-
tions of theorists’s positions. The statement that Elias’s work is predicated on the
idea that civilizing processes began in the 11th century (p. 68), for example, is
wrong and would not help students appreciate his processual treatment of embodi-
ment. Finally, I thought that strengthening the narratives of some of the chapters
may have helped student understanding, as would a concluding chapter that drew
together the major themes of the book and reflected on the general significance of
embodiment for understanding social life.
Each of these books provides evidence of the continued influence of ‘the rise of
the body’ for the development of sociology and related disciplines. Aging Bodies
illustrates the wide-ranging ramifications that serious consideration of the body can
have for a field of studies (in this case gerontology). Cultural Bodies gives us a
strong taste of the interdisciplinary scope of body studies (and reminds us that
anthropology has long dealt with the experiential and symbolic import of the body
within traditional societies and ritual structures). The Body in Society illustrates the
significance of the body to many contemporary topics dealt with in the sociology
undergraduate curriculum. None suffers from the problem that has afflicted some
recent writings of endorsing an inverted Cartesianism. Despite their welcome focus
on empirical research, however, the gaps and silences that mark many of the dis-
cussions contained within these volumes suggest we need to explore in more detail
the question ‘what is the body?’. In Cultural Bodies, for example, the body is fre-
quently approached in terms of its ‘multiplicities’ and its ‘networks’, but some of the
contributors display an associated tendency to overlook how it is the specific mater-
ial properties of the body (subject as they are to evolutionary and social change) that
facilitate certain linkages and multiplicities and mitigate against others. More
broadly, while each of the books under review develops a welcome recognition that
the body is implicated in the creative exercise of human agency, the studies included
within them are frequently informed by unexplicated, yet fundamentally different,
views of what the body is and of what the body is capable. Against this background,

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it is no wonder that ‘the body’ continues to be a highly contested concept associated

with a range of incommensurate theoretical paradigms and tied to competing polit-
ical agendas. If the ‘rise of the body’ is to retain its power to influence the discipline
positively and productively – and if we are to develop our understanding of how
embodiment is generative of particular types of performativity and of social forms,
as well as constituting a location for their effects – it may be necessary to temper the
plurality and diversity that has characterized body studies with some agreement as
to what it is we are referring to when we talk of the body and embodiment.

Reference

Featherstone, M. and M. Hepworth (1991) ‘The Mask of Ageing and the

Postmodern Life Course’, in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth and B.S. Turner
(eds) The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage.

Chris Shilling

Is Professor of Sociology at the University of Portsmouth. His publications include The

Body in Culture, Technology and Society (Sage, 2005), The Body & Social Theory. Second
Edition (Sage, 2003), The Sociological Ambition: Elementary Forms of Social & Moral Life
(co-authored with P.A. Mellor, Sage, 2001), and Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community
and Modernity (co-authored with P.A. Mellor, Sage, 1997).
Address: School of Social, Historical & Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth,
Milldam, Burnaby Road, Portsmouth P01 3AS, UK.
E-mail: chris.shilling@port.ac.uk

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