BODY

Ever since the early twentieth century, when the Annales school of historical scholarship issued the call for a total human history, the body has figured prominently in the writing of the social history of Europe. The vision for a total history comprised two objectives. It aimed at extending the study of past lives beyond the traditional focus on monarchs, religious leaders, and social elites. And it sought to shift the examination of human activity away from events and toward the everyday experiences of ordinary people.

Attention to the body promised to realize this agenda in a number of ways. Historians recognized the body as a universal aspect of human experience, and so its examination would offer the possibility of a more inclusive consideration of human actors in the past. The body intersects with social organization in numerous and various ways, including birth, sex, reproduction, work, disease, and death, and so historians saw in it an ideal vantage point for expanding the scope of social life worth studying.

Historians also appreciated the special relationship between science and the body in the modern age. They recognized the limited relevance of traditional historical sources—political pamphlets, treatises, memoirs, works of art and literature—for the task of studying everyday life. By contrast, demography held the potential to transform individual births and deaths into meaningful series illuminating the influence of anonymous social and economic structures while medicine might cut through the arcane morbid classifications of the past, reveal the true nature of the diseases people suffered, and identify the conditions that produced them. But historians' interest in the relationship between scientific endeavor and the body was as much substantive as it was instrumental. The modern scientific disciplines of anatomy, physiology, and medicine defined the traits of the body, distinguished the body from its environment, and pursued an understanding of the relationship between them. In doing so they fostered a seamless identity between body and person, making it possible to appreciate the characteristics that human beings held in common as well as the conditions that accounted for their diversity. These accomplishments, at once material and ideological, fit well with the humanistic tenor of the social history enterprise.

The marriage of social history, science, and the body yielded impressive results. Demographic evidence of high birth and death rates (organized in series) revealed the prevalence of famine and nutrition-related diseases that characterized premodern subsistence economies. The efforts of women to combine childbirth with other forms of (agricultural) labor illuminated the multiple and difficult tasks associated with family life in premodern Europe. In the modern era, the study of epidemic diseases like cholera and typhoid fever contributed to a more nuanced portrait of the squalid living conditions and harsh work environment endured by an industrializing and urbanizing workforce. The bourgeois male's patronage of prostitution as an outlet for the expression of sexual desire, and the abusive syphilis examinations imposed on the prostitute in police-sponsored dispensaries, exposed the fragile and hypocritical foundations of the much-vaunted family in modern social life. The slow but inexorable introduction of water supplies and toilets in urban areas, and the growing popularity of practices such as bodily washing and the wearing of undergarments bore witness to the beginnings of an influential role for social reform in urban and industrial areas. Surprised by their discovery of the alarming incidence of "old-world" afflictions like malaria, typhus, and birth deformities in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European countryside, historians concluded that modern economic and social transformation was uneven at best.

These few examples only hint at the vast amount of information resulting from social history's focus on the body. They also suggest the problems that have been involved in using the body as a source of historical evidence. In a project that claimed to value the diverse and complex contours of a universal human experience and that approached the myriad manifestations of the body as a crucial aspect of that experience, the focus on the body instead resulted in normative judgments of past forms of social life. Evidence of the body—its diseases, deformities, and shape; the specific kinds of practices lavished upon it and the forms of knowledge employed to understand and give it meaning—ended up revealing and measuring the distance separating past societies from modernity. This normative tendency of social historical

interpretation betrayed a clear, if sometimes unarticulated, assumption about the body. Even if the past reveals bodies characterized by various shapes and functions, there exists a specific and identifiable body. Its realization, and the ability to perceive it, is the product of the interrelated modern accomplishments of industrial capitalism, urbanization, civil society, scientific understanding, and the affective family unit, and it has in turn fostered the possibility of individuality. This confidence in the stability of the body has served to legitimize the social historian's evaluation of the present in terms of the past and has made historical writing central to the recognition of modernity's unique stature among societies.

culture and the body

Since the 1980s a new generation of historians, loosely organized around an enterprise referred to as cultural history, has developed new historical approaches for understanding of the body. These approaches differ in important ways. But for the most part they address the tension, evident in social history, between the assumption of an individual/body identity that informs the historian's interest in the past and the normative conclusions about social life that often characterize subsequent interpretations. One approach, especially popular among historians of distant epochs, has been to search out and affirm radically different conceptions and practices of the body as examples of the manifold variety of individual experience. For example, classical and medieval historians have considered the early Christian practices of sexual renunciation and somatic piety (such as fasting among women) outside of a modern framework. While a reliance on such a framework in the past had led more often than not to the fashioning of interpretations emphasizing religious repression or psychosomatic illness, these historians instead found practices expressive of deeply felt human impulses, even if they do not conform to modern notions of personhood. In the modern period historians have taken seriously the study of spinsters, single mothers, the varieties of sexual practices, and bizarre conceptions of the body (lascivious queens, women reproducing rabbits, and men giving birth to children) deployed in the heat of political argument and contention. While historians do not claim that such bodily concepts and practices are representative of modern social life, they accept them as expressions of the affective, psychological, social, and political life of individuals and thus as deserving of historical recognition. What all of these historical endeavors leave unanswered is the question of whether or how a body "really" exists apart from the individual's conception and experience of it, and how the historian should approach the relationship between individual experiences of the body and its normative formulations.

A very different approach has guided other historical investigations of the body in the modern age. In this second approach, cultural historians focus on the body's normative status as the basis for a critical revaluation of the modern notion of the individual. According to the lines of this interpretation, the body prescribes the social roles and social relations necessary for the exercise of individual liberty. Such a perspective affirms the body's normative status as a product of science. In contrast to social historians who insist on the independence of science from politics and affirm that independence as the source of a definitive understanding of the body, these cultural historians regard scientific knowledge of the body as discursive. It is the product of a specific historical context characterized by the interrelation of quasi-autonomous disciplines of inquiry and political events.

That context concerns the problematic relationship of the individual to society in the modern era. The problem manifested itself in numerous ways in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe: the violent expressions of the general will during the French Revolution, the debate over the correct interpretation of rights that animated labor conflict in early nineteenth-century industrial and urban centers, national rivalries pursued through war and imperial conquest. All of these crises brought into focus, in one way or another, tensions between liberty and sociability (or morality) and introduced the question of how (or whether) free individuals could realize meaningful and productive relations with others and with society (and societies) at large.

Even as these challenges to the foundations of European liberal social order unfolded, new ways of thinking about the possibilities of social organization involving the body appeared. A new appreciation of women's reproductive capacities emphasized their moral nature, fostering a role for the family as an antidote to the competitive and contentious relations of free individuals in the political and economic realms. Scientists and social reformers joined forces to rethink labor not as a question of rights but as a physical capacity requiring the analysis and management of the physiological processes that produced the energy for work. Public health officials visited working-class dwellings in urban neighborhoods where cholera spread and emphasized the importance of properly constituted family relations for the prevention of epidemic disease. Hygienic practices—the washing of the body and privatization of toilets, to name just two—became an important component of bourgeois identity and facilitated the sublimation of class conflict through new criteria for social distinctions based upon cleanliness.

Many of these examples figure prominently in social historical writing. Some social historians have viewed them as signs of progress while others have situated them in relation to class conflict and the ideological operations of hegemony. Whatever position they take, the principle guiding their interpretations is the (potential) identity between body and individual. For cultural historians employing a discursive analysis, however, these examples serve as evidence of the significant transformation in the possibilities of individualism wrought by modernity's focus on the social capacities of the body. If such a transformation is easily overlooked, it is due to the

ambiguous relationship of the body to the individual in scientific discourse. Even as scientists searched for human social capacities in the body and accepted them as characteristic of individuals, they carefully avoided any connection between them and subjective states such as will or reason. They presented these capacities as immanent in the body, a precondition of individuality rather than its expression. These bodily capacities were neither dependent upon nor signs of agency and autonomy but often necessitated government and experts for their realization. The prominent roles accorded to public health, psychiatry, and family assistance in the understanding and regulation of bodily capacities is telling in this regard.

Taken together, these examples testify to the elaboration of a moral and social framework outside the contentious play of individual subjectivity. That framework was both strategic and effective; it is also paradoxical. The crux of the paradox can be understood by (again) considering the body's ambiguous relationship to the individual. In their attempts to identify individual social capacities in bodily characteristics without any recourse to reason, will, or desire, scientists rejected the unity of subjectivity, sociability, and morality that informed the Enlightenment's vision of the individual. In doing so, the modern scientific conception of the body at once confirmed and undermined the value of the individual and the expression of individuality. In this sense the body did not provide a horizon for the individual but a barrier to it. The manifestations of this paradox of the body in the social life of modern Europe are (again) important and varied. The reproductive organs that rendered women the source of morality in a free social world also prevented them from the exercise of reason and participation in the spheres of politics and economics. In other contexts the body figured negatively, as a destructive social force to be reckoned with. Such was the case in the preoccupation with degeneration after 1850. Discussions about degeneration that focused on the interconnected phenomena of criminality, vice, and racial predisposition merely illuminated the limitations of individualism in the task of producing a progressive, productive, and harmonious social framework. Whether considered as the source of social prescription or as the symptom of a crisis in the terms of liberal social representation, the body often failed to provide an adequate or coherent understanding of the relationship of the individual to social order. In the analysis of social phenomena, the influence of physical (bodily) predispositions became confused with environmental influences, and pathological states (like specific diseases) become mixed up with social ones (such as criminality). In the final analysis, the social characteristics and implications of individuality defied analysis. What remained was the shocking, provocative, but ultimately inexplicable evidence of the incestuous relations of the urban poor, the hungry and hollowed-out faces of Irish peasants, and the sexual perversions of the prostitute.

For those Europeans whose bodies have excluded them from the privilege of individuality, the paradox of the body has not simply been experienced as an inescapable limitation. They have embraced it as a productive source of change. Women dressing "en homme" have sought to expose and overturn the biological determinants of their supposedly social destiny. In his poignant yet humorous and upbeat memoirs, the French writer Hervé Guibert approached the social ostracism encountered by him and other gay men "living with AIDS" as an opportunity to fashion an alternative subjectivity to the heterosexist norms informing modern conceptions of individuality. None of these attempts produced a definitive solution to the normative functioning of the body in modern European society, nor were they intended as such. Rather, they posed the indeterminacy of bodies and individuality and insisted on the importance of specific social contexts in fashioning the meaning of their relationship. In doing so they have restored the utopian potential to the modern vision of personhood.

See alsoDegeneration; Demography; Disease; Gender; Phrenology; Public Health; Sexuality.

bibliography

Aisenberg, Andrew. Contagion: Disease, Government, and the Social Question in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford, Calif., 1999.

Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York, 1988.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, Calif., 1987.

——. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336. New York, 1995.

Caron, David. AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures. Madison, Wis., 2001.

Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture. Minneapolis, Minn., 1995.

Cody, Lisa Forman. Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons. Oxford, U.K., 2005.

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Translated by Miriam L. Kochan, with Dr. Roy Porter and Christopher Prendergast. Cambridge, Mass., 1986.

——. Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.

Duden, Barbara. The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

Engelstein, Laura. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia. Ithaca, N.Y., 1992.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York, 1979.

——. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, 1980.

Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley, Calif., 1992.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.

——. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York, 2003.

Mandrou, Robert. Introduction to Modern France, 1550–1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology. Translated by R. E. Hallmark. London, 1975.

Nye, Robert A. Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline. Princeton, N.J., 1984.

Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918. Cambridge, U.K., 1989.

Porter, Roy. "History of the Body." In New Perspectives on Historical Writing, edited by Peter Burke. University Park, Pa., 1991.

Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York, 1990.

Revel, Jacques, and Jean-Pierre Peter. "Le corps: l'homme malade et son histoire." In Faire de l'histoire, vol. 3: Nouveaux objets, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora. Paris, 1983.

Shorter, Edward. The Making of the Modern Family. New York, 1977.

Vigarello, Georges. Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.

Vila, Anne C. Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore, Md., 1998.

Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, Calif., 1976.

Andrew Aisenberg