Research Catalog

Title

Regulating bodies : essays in medical sociology / Bryan S. Turner.

Author

Turner, Bryan S.

Publication

London, England ; New York, N.Y. : Routledge, 1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 280 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

• Bryan Turner's book provides a framework for the development of a sub-field: namely the development of the body. Through the examination of various philosophical traditions--phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, structuralism, and postmodernism--Regulating Bodies shows how the human body has been ignored or neglected by mainstream social theory.
• Turner integrates these different traditions, demonstrating how this absence has not only impoverished the sociology of health and illness, but the very foundations of sociology itself. There are three major aspects to this argument. Firstly, it is impossible to develop an adequate theory of social action without a conception of the embodied social agent. Secondly, the idea of embodiment offers a fundamental critique of the positivistic side of the medical model of illness, thus offering a new theoretical basis for medical sociology. Thirdly, following the work of Michel Foucault, Turner demonstrates that medicalpractice functions as a moral discourse which produces a regulation of the body. In providing a general account of the problem of the body in modern society, this book builds on Turner's previous studies of The Body and Society (1984) and Medical Power and Social Knowledge (1987), attempting to solve many of the existing epistemological and theoretical difficulties in social theories of the body.
• Turner has provided a major synthesis of his earlier work on the sociology of the body, establishing the idea of embodiment as fundamental to the sociology of health and illness, and guiding the way to new areas of cultural analysis. This volume is a major university text for sociology, philosophy, and feminist theory.

Subject

• Human body > Social aspects
• Social medicine
• Human Body
• Sociology, Medical
• Social Medicine
• Human body > Social aspects
• Social medicine
• Körper
• Medizinsoziologie
• Philosophische Anthropologie
• Aufsatzsammlung
• Menselijk lichaam
• Medische sociologie
• Mind and body
• Body image
• Knowledge, Sociology of
• Knowledge, Theory of
• Medicine, Psychosomatic
• Sociologie du corps
• Anthropologie médicale

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Author's preface: towards the somatic society -- pt. I. Discovering bodies. 1. The body question: recent developments in social theory. 2. The absent body in structuration theory. 3. Reflections on the epistemology of the hand -- pt. II. Medical sociology. 4. The interdisciplinary curriculum: from social medicine to postmodernism. 5. The body and medical sociology -- pt. III. Regimes of regulation. 6. The government of the body: medical regimens and the rationalization of diet. 7. The anatomy lesson: a note on the Merton thesis. 8. The talking disease: Hilda Bruch and anorexia nervosa -- Conclusion: Theory and epistemology of the body: an interview with Richard Fardon -- Appendix: Bryan S. Turner's publications on the sociology of the body and medical sociology.

ISBN

• 0415069637
• 9780415069632
• 0415082641
• 9780415082648
• 0203214188 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

92004229

OCLC

• ocm26095957
• 26095957
• SCSB-8790646

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library