Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and ModernityIn this incisive and truly impressive book, Ian Burkitt critically addresses the dualism between mind and body, thought and emotion, rationality and irrationality, and the mental and the material, which haunt the post-Cartesian world. Drawing on the work of contemporary social theorists and feminist writers, he argues that thought and the sense of being a person is inseparable from bodily practices within social relations, even though such active experience may be abstracted and expanded upon through the use of symbols. Overcoming classic dualisms in social thought, Burkitt argues that bodies are not purely the constructs of discourses of power: they are also productive, communicative, and invested with powerful capacities for chang |
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action activity artifacts aspects Bakhtin become behaviour bio-history biological bodily experience Bourdieu Butler capacities carnival Cartesian Cartesian dualism Chapter claims cognitive cognitivism concept constituted construction constructionism contexts created culture Descartes dimensions discourse dispositions domination dualism ecological niche Elias embodied persons emergence emotions epistemology ethical everyday existence expression feeling rules feelings forms Foucault gender Gergen Giddens grotesque body habitus Harré Heidegger historical human body idea identity ideologies Ilyenkov individuals interactions knowledge language linguistic lived located material means mediated Merleau-Ponty metaphor mind minnesang modern multi-dimensional nature Nietzsche non-human norms notion objects ontological physical political postmodern power relations processes production rational reality realm regulation relations of communication relations of power relations that transform relationship Romanticism sensation sense separate sexual simulacrum social constructionism social relations society Sociobiology space speech genres structures symbolic technologies things thinking body thought transform the real understanding various Western world women