Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Sudit Krishna Kumar and Suvobrata Sarkar -- Acknowledgementss / Sudit Krishna Kumar and Suvobrata Sarkar -- Introduction / Sudit Krishna Kumar and Suvobrata Sarkar -- Regulating the Feminine Body Glimpses from Manava Dharmashastra / Syed Tanveer Nasreen -- Female Body as the Site of the Mystical and the Erotic / Vijaya Ramaswamy -- Anatomy Knowledge at the 3rd Level Commodification of the Body Parts / Jayanta Bhattacharya -- Body Resistance and Atmospheric Threats / Ujjayan Bhattacharya -- Contextualizing the Body and the Nursing Profession in Colonial India / Aparajita Dhar -- The Image of Fallen Women in Nineteenth-century Bengali Literature / Amrita Biswas -- The ‘Bawdy’ Body / Sudit Krishna Kumar -- Living in the Shadow of Death / Arabinda Samanta -- ‘The East and the West’ / Bipasha Raha -- ‘Bodies Politics’ / Srilata Chatterjee -- Writing the History of the Relations between Technology, Medicine and the Body / Suvobrata Sarkar -- Muck on the Milky Way / Sudeshna Banerjee -- ‘Make Me a Man’ 1 / Amitava Chatterjee -- Imprisoned in the ‘Other Body’ / Rajashi Chakrabarty -- Contributors / Sudit Krishna Kumar and Suvobrata Sarkar -- Index / Sudit Krishna Kumar and Suvobrata Sarkar.

The new cultural history has rendered the historical epistemology of the human body a privileged site for scholarly intervention in social anthropology and other related disciplines. As a cultural metaphor, as manifestation of lived experience, as medium of existential encounter with the outer world and as a surface of social calligraphy, the human body spans varied categories of the extant strands of contemporary hermeneutic discourses. The essays in the present volume regard the human body more as a social subject than a social object. The volume accommodates variegated encounters of the biological body with the exterior world mostly from an Indian standpoint. The authors have explored the varied experiences of being embodied – the social subject's interactions with the surrounding context – as also its role as carrier of cultural, social and symbolical agents. While exploring the various contours of the 'corporeal self' the authors have captured fascinating glimpses of the 'representative' body. The present volume does not claim to represent a comprehensive account of body history. It is rather an incoherent bundle of scholarly conceptualizations of the human body discursively shaped to facilitate practices of knowledge production.

English

Description based on print version record.