Table of Contents

Introduction to the Third Edition
Virtue and the Body: The Debate over Nature and Nurture
Chapter 1: The Mode of Desire
Vulnerability and Values
Needs and Desires
Wisdom and Friendship
The Mode of Desire
Asceticism
Desire and Reason
Homo Duplex
Play and Pleasure
Capitalist Bodies
Chapter 2: Sociology and the Body
Absent Bodies
The Self
Michel Foucault
Spirit and Flesh
Sociology of the Body
Locations for a Theory
Critical Theory
Structuralism
Foucault and the Origins of Sociology
Phenomenology
The Person
Chapter 3: The Body and Religion
Capitalism, Desire, Rationality
Sickness, Salvation and Medicine
Medical Ethics and the Medical Fee
Medicine as a Secular Practice
Capitalism and the Body
Chapter 4: Bodily Order
Hobbesian Materialism
Neo-Hobbesian Problem of Order
Reproduction
Restraint
Regulation
Representation
Chapter 5: Eve′s Body
Nature/Culture Argument
The Property Argument
Patriarchal Relations
The Feudal System
Individualism
Witchcraft
An Argument for Divorce
Chapter 6: The End of Patriarchy?
The Dominant Ideology Thesis
Patriarchalism
Weber on Patriarchy
Engels on Patriarchy
Feminist Theory
The Household in Capitalism
Patrism
Chapter 7: The Disciplines
Foucault, Language, Desire
The Accumulation of Men
Asceticism
Dietary Management
Table Practices
The Critique of Foucault
Chapter 8: Government of the Body
A Mode of Living
The Orgy and the Fast
On Disease
Man is What He Eats
Sensualism
Body Practices
Contradictions
Corsets
Women′s Complaints
Calculating Hedonism
Chapter 9: Disease and Disorder
Disease versus Illness
On the Specialization of Sin, Disease and Deviance
Secularization
Medical Morality
Doctors, Women and Sexuality
Culture and Disease
Chapter 10: Ontology of Difference
Marx′s Ontology
The Body in Nature and the Nature in the Body
Nietzsche versus Marx
The Body and Difference
Body Paradoxes
Chapter 11: Bodies in Motion - Towards an Aesthetic of Dance
The Experience of Aura
Defining Dance
Dance and Modernism
Conclusion: The Stuff of Dance
Chapter 12: The Body and Boredom - The New Longevity
The Body and Metaphysics
Technology and Living Forever
Body and Soul
The Elixir of Life
Sociology of Ageing
Boredom and the Theology of Prolongevity
Chapter 13: Epilogue - Vulnerability and Values
Embodiment, Vulnerability and Frailty
Human Rights: Frailty, Precariousness and Interconectedness
The Metaphors of Sociability
Evil and the Theological Turn
Forgiveness or Revenge?

About the Author

Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Asian Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. Previously he was Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge from 1998-2005. His research interests include globalization and religion, concentrating on such issues as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronic information, religious, consumerism and youth cultures, human rights and religion, the human body, medical change, and religious cosmologies. He is Joint Chief Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals.

Reviews

The Body And Society is now better than ever. … Turner bridges the organic and cultural with his philosophical and theological aspirations: the result is a penetrating analysis of society′s blend of bodies - from erotic to famished bodies, labouring to desiring bodies
Anthony Elliott
Flinders University Bryan Turner has revolutionized the way in which we think about ourselves and our bodies. This edition … demonstrates further intellectual growth and development; innovative ideas inform an already classic understanding. The human body is the very material of our lives; this book allows us to deepen our knowledge of the meanings of the body in the twenty-first century and offers a definitive and emancipatory account of the possibilities (both negative and positive) with which we are presented and which we construct for ourselves
Mary Evans
London School of Economics