ABSTRACT
The human body has been an almost infinitely flexible symbolic resource; historians and anthropologists analyse the multitude of ways in which the body has been construed in terms of politics, religion, sexuality and social structure. The body is at once both intensely individual and a collective representation, an image of the social world shared by its inhabitants. 1 However, these representations are not fixed or stable; they are made and remade in response to specific circumstances and are often contested across multiple realms. The act of imagining one's body is a kind of drawing together of these kinds of representations, negotiating amongst images and meanings particular to one's historical circumstance. By asking questions about the processes by which people came to understand and interpret their bodies, about the cultural materials from which bodies were constructed, we can begin to develop a history of the body which accounts for multiple meanings, which illuminates the ways in which the body is always being remade.
