At minimum, sociological interpretation engages processes of analytical (cognitive and perceptual) selection and deselection and representational techniques. Whereas processes of analytical selection mark certain subjects as worthy or unworthy of study and certain data as more salient than others, representational techniques offer methods for explaining, visualizing, reconstructing, and comprehending subjects of study (narratives, network topologies, and statistical models are all stylized representations of selected underlying data). In this regard it can be said that the discipline of sociology has always been an interpretive human science, just not one foundationally concerned with interpreting the human body. Preoccupied with understanding the drivers and characteristics of capitalist societies and the atomizing effects of “modernity,” classical sociologists sought to understand the collective actions, systems, and events that held humans together in the face of these disparate social forces (Durkheim, 1893; Weber, 1930; Parsons, 1948). Although not explicitly theorized, the body was nevertheless implicated in early sociology: it operated in the background as the taken-for-granted medium of action external to the decision-making social actor, and it served as an expedient natural symbol representing “society as an organism” and/or “the body politic” (Douglas, 1970; Turner, 1991; Shilling, 2012).

The relative absence of the body from early sociological thought is ascribable to the historical sensibility of the nineteenth century that inflected sociology's interpretive lens. The discipline of sociology emerged against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, a period that ushered in widespread rural-to-urban migration and ostensibly one of the most dramatic transformations of human social organization since the Middle Ages. The expansion of industrial capitalism across Europe and the United States coincided with technological innovations and the rise of modern science (Wallerstein, 1989; Taylor et al, 2008). During this time, bureaucracy, individualism, realism, and rationality were not only the hallmarks of the positivist “hard” sciences, which sought to objectively measure and quantify the observable world and discover its regularities and causal connections, they also were the perceived attributes of modernity itself (Weber, 1930; Giddens, 1991; Taylor, 1995). Shaped by this historical milieu, early sociology drew from economics, law, and even positivism to formulate its disciplinary methods (Durkheim, 1895; Comte, 1975) as well as its concepts of social “action, choice, and goals” (Turner, 1991, p 7).