The body: From an immateriality to another

Jean Benoist and Pascal Cathebras

Social Science & Medicine, 1993, vol. 36, issue 7, 857-865

Abstract: A first level of immateriality of the human body is very classic for anthropologists: it concerns the different conceptions of soul, of a supernatural component of the human being. It refers also to different kinds of continuity and exchange between the human body and society. The other immateriality appears as an answer to the biological reductionism of the body. As we can see in biomedical conception of the body, as well as in different totalitarian utopias, biological reductionism tends to reduce the whole person to its biological body. Consciously or unconsciously, people cannot accept it. Contemporary ways of healing reflect this contradiction: people accept biological knowledge but they do not accept a purely biological conception of their own body. They conceive that there is an immaterial part in the human body; however it is not supernatural but a part of nature. In this way this 'not divine immateriality' can be conciliated with some kind of scientific approach. The refusal to enclose the person in the biological body appears as a constant through human societies. At the medical level, this refusal is always present in the ill person's image of his body and of his illness. At a more general level, this refusal is probably necessary in order to keep human freedom as well as human specificity.

Keywords: Body; soul; utopias; alternative; therapies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993
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