ABSTRACT
Writing about humanist approaches to the body, the philosopher Russell
Keat argued that a good deal of time has been spent over the latter part
of the twentieth century discussing the ‘distinctiveness of human beings, at
the same time holding an assumption about the nondistinctiveness of the
human body’ (1986: 24). The body interior – the soma – has been will-
ingly ceded to the biological sciences as a terrain of little interest to either
humanists or social scientists. Commencing in the 1990s the work of several
feminist theorists and social scientists began to challenge this complacency. Haraway, as is well known, asserts that ‘bodies as objects of knowl-
edge are material-semiotic-generative nodes’. Body boundaries materialize
in social interactions so that bodies and body parts become constituted as
objects; as sites for manipulation (1991: 200). In a similar vein, Bruno
Latour rejects an understanding of ‘nature’ as either entirely socially
constructed or semiotically imagined. In seeking to create a symmetrical
account of the co-production of nature/culture he calls for recognition of
a hybrid ‘object-discourse-nature-society’ assembly, whose networks of entanglement demand analysis (1993: 78). The ethnographic research of
Franklin (1997; 2001), Lock (1993; 2002; 2005) and Strathern (1992a;
1992b), among others, has also sought to transcend an entrenched material/
meaning dualism.
