ABSTRACT
The universal salience of bodily reform in processes of social transformation is strong evidence that the human frame mediates between self and society. In their concern to show that bodies and persons are culturally constructed, however, many scholars have treated the human form as a tabula rasa. There is plenty of ethnographic evidence that certain contrasts and combinative sequences recur in diverse cultural systems, appearing to be rooted in physical constraints on human perception. Some structuralists and postmodernists, for example, see unified selfhood as a bourgeois illusion, a myth abetted by the workings of power on the receptive surfaces of the human frame. Yet power in human society is often perceived as an innate physical capacity: a form of efficacy, virtue, or magnetism that resides, at least to some degree, as a material substance within the person. There is a widespread human tendency to signify such tensions in terms of that archetypal sign of conflict, illness.
