515F BODY, PERSON AND CULTURAL THEORY (2 or 4 hrs)

Professor Brenda Farnell Office: 209E Davenport Hall; PH: 244-9226

bfarnell@uiuc.edu

During the past twenty-five years there has been a virtual explosion of interdisciplinary literature on ‘the body’. The immediate theoretical background to this interest lies in a tension between Freudian theory and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. Foucault, Bourdieu and Giddens are three social theorists who have attempted to respond to this tension. Growing out of this, in anthropology, Jackson, Csordas and Desjarlais draw upon Merleau-Ponty’s experiential body, whereas Williams, Farnell and Varela offer an integrative approach that unites experience and agency. In contrast, contributions from literary/cultural studies by Lacan, Kristeva and Butler draw inspiration from the Freudian tradition. In this course, we will examine anthropological contributions to, and critiques of, these approaches to the problem of ‘embodiment.’ Why has attention to ‘the body’ emerged so recently? Why is ‘the body’ a theoretical problem for anthropology and ethnographic research? We will develop a critical, historically and theoretically informed understanding of these various contributions, identifying approaches to “the body” and “personhood” which meet the requirements of anthropological theorizing for cross-cultural and comparative adequacy. Students will be encouraged to apply theoretical resources explored in the course to their own research interests.