Roy Porter’s History of the Body puts the body (i.e., human being) back in history. He examines three key areas of knowledge regarding the body which help to lend a broader interpretation to social change. He argues that traditional Classical and Judaeo-Christian interpretations of the body have relegated the body to a minimal aspect of significance. These modes of thinking have each “advanced a fundamentally dualistic vision of man, understood as an often uneasy alliance of mind and body, psyche and soma; and both traditions, in their different ways and for different reasons, have elevated the mind or soul and disparaged the body” (Porter 206). In other words, the significance of the body has been minimalized over time because of ideologies which for reasons of power and politics have ignored its significance in the search for an understanding of human meaning.
Porter argues that these views which were reinforced in a ruler-ruled manner, are being demystified as we come to a fuller understanding that distrust of the body is an ideological formation that ignores the contribution to history and human meaning afforded by the history of the body. Further, these kinds of imposed ideologies that dominated history, societies and writing, have served to quell the voices of many, particularly women who were often suppressed or neglected in matters of the body in favor of male dominated ideologies. Like work, power, politics, reading and other aspects of society, it is naïve to think that the body, another aspect of society, existed in a vacuum and is a mere matter of size or ability. This is because even photographic depictions of the body are inaccurate or enhanced due to the social or cultural context in which they were produced. The history of the body is an attempt to understand the relationship between statistics on the body as well as the different representations of the body through v
...