The Social Body and Its Transformations

In this chapter, I analyse the macro-framework in which the actor is positioned as a cultural agent engaged in the representation of personhood. Mary Douglas has made the strongest argument for the role of ritual as the process whereby the physical body is placed in a relationship with a social or symbolic body. In her account, the scope of the body as a medium of expression is limited by controls exerted by the social body, which in turn structures how the physical body is perceived by others and the self (Douglas, 2002, pp. 72–74). It is perceived, on the one hand, as a physical being existing in a social space bounded on one side by how the individual conceives of and fashions self-identity, and on the other, by the socially dominant norms of comportment that others attribute to her or him, the individual stands in a relationship with the relevant social body (La Fontaine, 1985, p. 124). The force of the social body as constraint, basically the recognition or legitimation of its moral authority over the individual, is a function of two dimensions of social existence. The first is the power of the social group as the enforcer of a particular body metaphor, and the second is the degree to which an individual is committed to, or feels compelled to identify with, the values, norms and beliefs enacted and entailed by such a metaphor.