Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Originally published in 1984, The Body and Society flew against prevailing trends which asked sociologists to understand society in terms of abstractions such as structure, class and function. Instead, in a series of dazzling chapters, Bryan S Turner argued that the body should be the axis of sociological analysis.

The Second Edition of this ground-breaking bookincludes a new introduction which analyzes the social changes which have given a special prominence to the body in contemporary social theory, and develops Turner′s own notion of a `somatic society′, a society within which major political and personal problems are both problematized in the body and expressed through it. Complementing the introdu

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface to the Second Edition
• Representing the Body as a Pictorial Metaphor
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• The Embodiment of Social Theory
• Introduction to the First Edition
• Body Paradoxes
• The Mode of Desire
• Sociology and the Body
• The Body and Religion
• Bodily Order
• Patriarchy
• Eve's Body
• From Patriarchy to Patrism
• The Disciplines
• Government of the Body
• Disease and Disorder
• Ontology of Difference