Population Aging as the Social Body in Representation and Real Life

In a call for greater anthropological study of the body, Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) argue for examination of three, interrelated bodily forms: the body-self, the social body, and the body politic. Anthropologists of aging can most easily identify our work in the body-self when we study aging as a bodily and social experience that varies across cultural contexts (e.g. Sokolovsky 2009). The social body refers to how the physical body is used in many cultures as “good to think with” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 18) about the nature of society. For example, drawing from Janzen (1981), Scheper-Hughes and Lock explain, “every society possesses a utopian conception of health that can be applied metaphorically from society to the body and vice versa” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987,:20). The body-politic refers to how individual and social bodies (first as representations in discourse ARTICLES