Body Parts and Bodies Whole

Developments in body theory have had a strong impact on archaeology in recent years, but the concept of the body has tended to remain abstract. The term “body” is often used as a synonym for self or person, and the remains of bodies and body parts have often been approached theoretically as signs or symbols. While this has emphasized the importance of the body as a cultural construct and a social product, archaeologists have tended to overlook the equally important biological reality of the body. Bodies are more than metaphors. They are also biological realities. Maybe this becomes especially obvious at death, when the embodied social being is transformed into a cadaver, continuously in a state of transformation due to the processes of putrefaction and decomposition. In this transition, the unity of the mindful body and the embodied mind breaks down, and cultural and social control over the body can no longer be exercised from within, but instead has to be imposed from the outside. This article explores the friction between the culturally and socially produced body and the body as a biological entity at death. Through an approach that focuses both on the post mortem processes that affect the cadaver – and that can be seen as an ultimate materialization of death – and the practical handling of the dead body by the survivors, the author suggests a way toward an integrative and transdiciplinary approach to death and the dead body in archaeology.

This article summarises the main themes of: J. Robb and O. Harris (2013), The Body in History: Europe from the Paleolithic to the Future. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

One-day Interdisciplinary Conference funded by HRC (as winner of the HRC Doctoral Fellowship Competition, University of Warwick) Visit the website: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/body/ On Twitter: @Remains2021 Scope and main objectives The question of corporeality has provoked and challenged critical thinkers across the centuries, and remains the subject of sustained and varied examinations, to which the burgeoning lists of new titles devoted to the body testify. This event intends to tackle the current issue of how bodies are marked, organised and produced as cultural entities that leave traces in imagery after their total or partial material dissolution. The aim is to gather an interdisciplinary network of scholars to explore the ways in which the body, or part of it, is preserved and remembered over time through different aspects of representation, in order to evaluate its cultural impact. The conference's key concepts include: sacralisation/desacralization; the legacy of the body; the body as a relic of a past age; immortality or techniques for enduring posthumous fame/life; remembrance; memory; and commemoration. What is aimed to be explored is then, specifically, the relationship between the body, death and memory, thereby assessing the legacy of bodies. The conference welcomes papers from a broad chronological period and dealing with any geographical area without restrictions. The preservation of bodies/corpses, or parts of them, can be related to various and different cultural manifestations, such as religious beliefs, patriotism, and pledges of love. This event has thus been conceived as fully interdisciplinary, and intends to convene students, PhD candidates, early-career scholars and professors from both the humanities (literature, history of art, history, classical studies, film and media studies) and the social sciences (anthropology, philosophy, sociology, politics, popular culture/folklore studies, medical culture, and history of medicine), and would address various approaches (gender studies, fashion, Körperkultur, the making of the nation). This conference is also meant to reflect upon the importance of remembrance and commemoration; as a consequence, the remains of the body are pertinent to issues such as: the tombs of unknown soldiers, which scatter our cities; the relics of saints and martyrs shielded in our places of worship; and the myriad gendered depictions of dead bodies in visual culture. Perspectives The discussion emerging from the conference should pose a series of questions, such as: how did different cultures depict dead bodies at different times, and how were they understood as important and valuable? In which way is the body of a male hero represented? How does this representation differ from the body of a dead woman? How much is the body important in issues of national identity and popular folklore?

The attack on images in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was not random destruction. Particular parts of the body, namely, the head and the hands, were the focus of attack. These were the same foci against which capital and the severest forms of corporal punishment were aimed. Distinct from the theological reasons for iconoclasm, these persistent foci and forms of attack reveal something about attitudes to the body in this period and the privileging of the head and hands in a number of social and cultural discourses. Iconoclasm both informs and was informed by an understanding of bodies as they were constructed in the later medieval and early modern periods. The attack on statuary and images in sixteenth-and seventeenth century England was not random destruction. It was directed against particular parts of the body, the same parts to which capital and corporal punishment was administered. I will explain why both statues and criminals were treated in these specific ways and then place this in context and attempt to develop aspects of an anthropology of the body. I draw attention to continuities and changes between the late medieval and early modern periods that may have given a particular resonance to the anthromorphism of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm has taken different forms in different contexts, among them Christian destruction of pagan images, Byzan-tine, Islamic, or French Revolutionary iconoclasm, pre-Conquest Mesoamerican ritual mutilation of sculpted and painted heads, and political erasure, both ancient and modern, such as the shelling of the Bamiyan Buddha figures by the Taliban

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2008

Rebay-Salisbury, K., Sørensen, M. L. S. & Hughes, J. (eds.) Body parts and bodies whole. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010

This chapter offers a critical review of the main research approaches focusing on the body and the notion of the person in archaeology. Particular emphasis is placed upon research trends that have emerged in the last thirty years, as this period witnessed the increasing importance of such themes in archaeological analysis. Initially, I discuss three research agendas that have approached the human body from a positivist viewpoint, largely drawing on research methodologies developed in the ‘hard sciences’ (i.e. bioarchaeology, processualism, and Darwinian and evolutionary archaeology). Secondly, I discuss approaches that tend to explore the person as both a social and a biological entity, thereby focusing on the socio-cultural practices through which past people were ‘constructed’ differently in different cultural contexts (i.e. postprocessualism and interpretative archaeology). In the final sections of the chapter I critically assess two major strands that have largely developed from this second framework, namely gender and personhood.