Flexible BodiesEmily Martin traces Americans' changing ideas about health and immunity since the 1940s. She explores the implications of our emphasis on 'flexibility' in contexts from medicine to the corporate world, warning that we may be approaching a new form of social Darwinism. |
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FLEXIBLE BODIES: Tracking Immunity in American Culture--from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS
User Review - KirkusAn anthropologist's erudite report on how our ideas about the body (and society) are undergoing a dramatic shift. Martin (Anthropology/Johns Hopkins; The Woman in the Body, 1987) and her research ... Read full review
Contents
The Body at War Media Views of the Immune System | 49 |
Immunology on the Street How Nonscientists See the Immune System | 64 |
Fix My Head How Alternative Practitioners See the Immune System | 82 |
Immunophilosophy How Scientists See the Immune System | 91 |
CONFIGURATIONS OF HEALTHY BODIES | 113 |
Complex Systems | 115 |
System Breakdown Dying from Within | 127 |
Flexible Systems | 143 |
Educating and Training the Body Vaccines and Tests | 193 |
Educating and Training at Work | 207 |
POSTDARWINISM | 227 |
The Neighborhoods | 251 |
The People We Interviewed | 255 |
Questions for Neighborhood Interviews | 263 |
NOTES | 267 |
| 285 | |
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Common terms and phrases
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Popular passages
Page 7 - Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
Page xvii - ... therapeutic purposes), toward projecting risk factors that deconstruct and reconstruct the individual or group subject. This new mode anticipates possible loci of dangerous irruptions, through the identification of sites statistically locatable in relation to norms and means. Through the use of computers, individuals sharing certain traits or sets of traits can be grouped together in a way that not only decontextualizes them from their social environment but also is nonsubjective in a double...
Page 40 - Improved systems of communication and information flow, coupled with rationalizations in techniques of distribution (packaging, inventory control, containerization, market feedback, etc.), make it possible to circulate commodities through the market system with greater speed
References to this book
Bibliographic information
| Title | Flexible Bodies Cultural studies Cultural studies: Anthropology |
| Author | Emily Martin |
| Edition | illustrated, revised |
| Publisher | Beacon Press, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0807046272, 9780807046272 |
| Length | 352 pages |
| Subjects | › › Health & Fitness / Diseases / Immune & Autoimmune Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social Social Science / Disease & Health Issues |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |