Body, History of

Abstract

The history of the body continues to be a sensitive subject. Although the body was considered to be a 'stable experience' (and as such, not part of cultural evolution and historical change), bodily experiences of humans were never absent from historiography. Nonetheless, a continuous, conscious, explicit reflection on the role of the body only began four decades ago across the social sciences and humanities. It was only when the static, biological, and naturalistic idea of the body started being criticized that body-related questions were addressed among historians and constituted a new field of research. As such, it is sometimes seen as an interdisciplinary meeting point of several different approaches (discourse analysis, semiotics, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, etc.); others consider it an independent subdiscipline of history. From a historico-scientific perspective, there exist a number of arguments in favor of highlighting the shift of paradigms that took place in the 1970s, and asking how a new, theoretically based examination of the body has influenced older fields of research like demography and social history. This article addresses the problem of corporeality and the two dominant approaches to the history of the body, the continuities and the shift of paradigms, current fields of research, and current controversies and prospects.