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Individual Body (individual + body)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Law and Criminology	50%

Selected Abstracts

D(en)ying narratives: death, identity and the body politic

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2000
Patrick Hanafin
One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with particular symbolic capital and casts a traumatic shadow over discourses on death in Irish society. The nation is always already in the shadow of death, of the deathly apparition of the new nation, made hauntingly manifest in the photos of the dead body of the nationalist hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, as his corpse lay in state in 1920. This body being dead also signals the hope that, in the sacrifice of the individual for the national cause, liberation will one day come. This theme of the primacy of community over individual prefigured the manner in which in postcolonial Irish society the individual body of the citizen was relegated to a secondary position. The attempt to deny or repress death may be analogised with the similar attempt on the part of political elites to create a notion of political identity which is rigid and attempts to keep all those others associated with death and degeneration outside the body politic. [source]

Persons, Places, and Times: The Meanings of Repetition in an STD Clinic

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2007
Lori Leonard
In this article we work the tensions between the way clinical medicine and public health necessarily construct the problem of "repetition" in the context of a sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinic and the ways patients narrate their illness experiences. This tension,between clinical and epidemiological exigencies and the messiness of lived experience,is a recurring theme of work conducted at the intersections of epidemiology, anthropology, and clinical medicine. Clinically, repeated infections are a threat to the individual body and to "normal" biological processes like reproduction. From a public health perspective, "repeaters" are imagined to be part of a "core group" that keeps infections in circulation, endangering the social body. Yet patients' accounts are anchored in particular social histories, and their experiences rely on different time scales than those implicated in either of these types of readings. Extended analyses are provided of two such accounts: one in which repetition can be "read" as part of a performance of recovery, and one in which repetition is bound up in the effort to avoid becoming the involuntary subject of institutionally administered intervention. We argue the need to open up the category of repeaters to include the social and draw on work by Cheryl Mattingly to suggest that one way to do this in the context of the STD clinic might be to adopt forms of therapeutic practice that make use of interpretive, in addition to technical, skills. [source]

The social mind-body: Anthropological contributions to the study of the self

NURSING & HEALTH SCIENCES, Issue 1 2005
Denize Saint Arnault phd
Self is formed because of the interaction between the body and the society. Culture defines the range of options for being a human within a certain time, place and group. The self is developed within the sociocultural context, which tells us what we should be, how we should interact with society, what we should feel and what those feelings mean, as well as how our body should look, be used and be cared for. This multidimensional model of culture allows us to define the dimensions of the self, and explain how the culturally derived self understands, reacts to and acts upon the individual body within a social context. The view of the self posited here allows us to research the experiential connection between the mind, the body and the society. [source]

The Anonymous Matrix: Human Rights Violations by ,Private' Transnational Actors

THE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 3 2006
Article first published online: 27 APR 200, Gunther Teubner
Do fundamental rights obligate not only States, but also private transnational actors? Since violations of fundamental rights stem from the totalising tendencies of partial rationalities, there is no longer any point in seeing the horizontal effect as if rights of private actors have to be weighed up against each other. On one side of the human rights relation is no longer a private actor as the fundamental-rights violator, but the anonymous matrix of an autonomised communicative medium. On the other side, the fundamental rights are divided into three dimensions: first, institutional rights protecting the autonomy of social discourses , art, science, religion - against their subjugation by the totalising tendencies of the communicative matrix; secondly, personal rights protecting the autonomy of communication, attributed not to institutions, but to the social artefacts called ,persons'; and thirdly, human rights as negative bounds on societal communication, where the integrity of individuals' body and mind is endangered. [source]