Corpo e incorporazione nella teoria antropologica

The article explores the concepts of body and embodiment in anthropological theory, addressing their historical evolution and contemporary relevance. Classical anthropology initially treated the body as a natural counterpart to a culture perceived as “incorporeal” and rooted in the mind. However, figures like Boas and Mauss highlighted the cultural shaping of the body, placing the study of bodily techniques at the core of ethnographic research. Mary Douglas later introduced the concept of a “social body”, examining how different cultures use the body as a repertoire of “natural symbols” central to logical-classificatory systems and the construction of purity and danger categories, themselves tied to social structures. Authors such as Bourdieu (through the notion of habitus) and Csordas (via a phenomenological approach) more explicitly theorized the concept of “embodiment”: a theoretical paradigm that treats the body as the very origin of social agency, rejecting its reduction to an object guided merely by psychic subjectivity. The effort to transcend the “Cartesian dualism” of mind and body, which these approaches advocate, has become a central agenda in recent decades. However, this program has sometimes developed in unclear directions, occasionally resulting in generic holistic visions that are more religious or ideological than strictly scientific. A notable example is a seminal contribution by Scheper-Hughes and Lock, which introduces the notion of the “political body” and ambiguously situates medical anthropology within a framework of radical critique of modernity and the “materialism” of biomedicine. The development of reflections on embodiment and the body-mind relationship, now more central than ever to anthropology, must move beyond such irrationalist tendencies and vague holistic philosophies, to reclaim the epistemological rigor from which the discipline’s classics initially departed.