Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5825713
AutoresDagmar Wujastyk (0000-0003-0216-6381, University of Vienna, autor correspondente), Dominik Wujastyk
Ano2009
Volume13
Fascículo2
Páginas189-228
Data de publicação2009-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoInternational Journal of Hindu Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1022-4556 • E-ISSN: 1574-9282
EditoraSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s11407-009-9077-0
OpenAlexW2024711828
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas16
Referências citadas31

Postmodernism, now fading partly into orthodoxy, partly into irrelevance, brought two new academic metaphors into common usage, especially in the fields of cultural studies and anthropology. The first is the metaphor of writing, derived mainly from work by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Using this metaphor, we can talk of discourses, textualities, inscriptions, readings, and deciphering. All experience and explanation is modeled on the act of reading and textual reception. For example, bodies may be described as "cultural artifacts, fabricated both in the writing and reading of 'body texts.'...As soon as one 'knows' one's own or another's body, it has been written discursively;...Anatomy, epidemiology, psychology, medical sociology and other body-texts frame bodies...which exercise power over its reading" (Fox 1997: 45). The second decisive metaphor, associated in particular with Michel Foucault's work on the history of madness and the evolution of clinics, is that of the human being as a body. For Foucault, the medical encounter is

Human body · Indian History and Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Studies and Conflicts