The human body has become in recent years the subject of renewed interest across a spectrum of disciplines, from sociology to literary theory. Approaches to its study vary, of course, with each discipline. Since the groundbreaking study “Techniques of the Body” by Marcel Mauss (1935), however, an underlying assumption in the human sciences has been that the human body is not merely a physical and biological reality confronting human consciousness as an external and independent entity, but primarily a cultural construct carrying social and cultural meanings and messages. Attention has also been drawn by many sociologists and social-anthropologists to a central dimension of the cultural construction of the body: the human body stands as the primary symbol of the social body, or the body politic (Turner 1984). Mary Douglas posits the interrelationship between the two types of bodies in clear terms:

Berger and Luckman (1967), furthermore, have drawn our attention to a central dimension of culture: all cultural creations, including the human body, have a dialectic nature.