ANTHRO 136K Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Ideal Standard, Subcutaneous Tissue, Luxurious
28 Jun 2018
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ANTHRO 139K - Lecture 6 - Beauty, Size, Body-Image and the Politics of Representation
The Body
●The human body is both a physical and a symbolic object, shaped in ways that are
culturally, historically, and environmentally specific to a society, and that are ever
changing.
●Social institutions, cultural meanings, ideologies, values, beliefs, technologies, etc.,
transform a physical body into a sociocultural body that – in turn – articulates
sociocultural structural processes.
●Bodies and their representations provide important information for an overall
understanding of sociocultural constructs and relations of power.
Body Customs and Practices
●Dressing, adorning, altering, etc., the body has significance and meaning within
sociocultural, environmental, and historical contexts.
●The body can be:
○A site for the expression of power.
○A site for communicating group membership:
■Class
■Caste
■Ethnicity
■Race
■Gender and Sexuality
■Age
■Other forms of sociocultural identity and associated beliefs and values.
●These practices -- whether temporary, like makeup and hair coloring, or more
permanent, like tattoos and cosmetic surgery -- are forms of self-creation that establish
a connection with, and resistances to reference groups.
●For Example:
○Identities and rites of passage between life stages in many cultures are marked
by ritualized patterns of scarification, piercing, tattooing, and body modification
Body Image
●Body-image is how individuals perceive their physical appearance and how they think
others perceive them.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
●People shape their body-image in articulation with:
●Messages from their parents.
●Messages from their peers.
●Socialization
●Cultural standards
●Mass-media representations
●Hegemonic ideals of body size and shape
●Studies show that greater numbers of girls and women throughout the globe are having
varying degrees of body-image problems.
Rites of Passage and Media Representations
●Rites of passage for girls throughout the world as they grow into puberty increasingly
involve experimenting with clothes, hair styles, and make-up to emulate media
representations of young women who correspond with idealized standards of facial and
bodily beauty.
●Global media saturation makes these representations accessible to peoples
everywhere, including remote locales.
●For example, when tourists visit areas of Central Eastern Africa populated by Maasai
peoples, tour organizers suggest that they bring gifts of cosmetics and trendy costume
jewelry for the girls and women.
The Idealization of Beauty
●Beauty is socially constructed:
○Standards change over time and differ among cultures.
●Beauty reflects social power and relations of privilege and inequality:
○In modernity, corporate interests and the mass media have come to define
beauty in many areas of the globe
●The beauty ideal is enforced through disciplinary practices, such as those theorized by
Michel Foucault:
○They are complex and irregularly enforced based on the individual’s position in
society:
■Gender
■Class
■Ethnicity
■Race
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Anthro 139k - lecture 6 - beauty, size, body-image and the politics of representation. The human body is both a physical and a symbolic object, shaped in ways that are culturally, historically, and environmentally specific to a society, and that are ever changing. Social institutions, cultural meanings, ideologies, values, beliefs, technologies, etc. , transform a physical body into a sociocultural body that in turn articulates sociocultural structural processes. Bodies and their representations provide important information for an overall understanding of sociocultural constructs and relations of power. Dressing, adorning, altering, etc. , the body has significance and meaning within sociocultural, environmental, and historical contexts. A site for the expression of power. Other forms of sociocultural identity and associated beliefs and values. These practices -- whether temporary, like makeup and hair coloring, or more permanent, like tattoos and cosmetic surgery -- are forms of self-creation that establish a connection with, and resistances to reference groups.
