Global Journal of Human Social Science, G: Linguistics and Education, Volume 22 Issue 9

person, the authors detect an association, in the popular classes, between illness and the incapacity for work. Especially for this population, work is a central category, concretely and symbolically speaking, once it allows for the legitimate access to social space by means of the construction of a working person’s identity, chiefly among men, according to an ideal imaginary within such families, Sarti (1996); Adam and Herzlich (2001) highlight in different studies centred on such populations. It is thus that, on this work (biological and social) body, medical and biomedical practices are operated. Medical attention on the body, the biological organism, is grounded on the separation between body and spirit; on the divide between Man and his body. The Cartesian dualism that founds this distinction answers for the conception of the body in modernity, which is continued up to contemporaneity, ponders Breton (2006), in a sociological study about the issue. This separation is supported by the notion of a split person, separated from her own body, which is conceived only in its biological dimension. In this perspective, Morin (2000) states that the fragmented conception of the world tries to reduce complex phenomena down to simplifying explanations, instead of conceiving them as multidimensional. Differently from such conceptions, in the human sciences, the body is constituted as a human reality by the meaning that collectivity attributes to it, not having a character that is objective or prior to the meaning itself, Sarti (2001) highlights in a study about pain and suffering. In face of it, the human sciences develop a critique of biomedicine’s naturalised body, especially gender studies, which have problematised the social construction of women’s and men’s bodies. Within this scope, Thomas Laqueur (2001) retraces the historical process of the invention by medicine of the two sexes, with implications to the consolidation of a model and of a moral for women and the family, by means of the disciplinary control of the female body and its sexuality. The split body and the individual are notions that go together in modern western culture. As developed by Durkheim ([1912] 1989), in the text “Elementary Forms of Religious Life”, the body is an individuation factor. The notion of a “self” in the relation of the individual with society is recent in the history of the Western world. This is a historically built social category (the notion of the individual) in the context of the search for freedom and autonomy, which is counterposed to submission to the collectivity. As Dumont (1983) develops, the individual is constituted by a value, the triumph of individualism. In this conception separating body and person in contemporary Western societies, the corresponding model of health and illness is ontological. As Laplantine (2001) clarifies, this model takes illness as an autonomous entity. For Sarti (2010), in a text discussing the traffic of knowledge in the health field, this implies another diverse conception of that which had already split human beings between body and person, autonomising the body into the biological body, in a matter unveiled by experimentation. And all this together with the increasingly more advanced technological resources that end up instrumentalising the body even further, in a process of maximum medicalisation, Breton (2003) writes in “Farewell to the Body”. The critique to this intended objectivism of the biological sciences’ has been elaborated by Canguilhem (2006) and Foucault, focussing on the historical process of this knowledge construction and of medical practice. This critique, under different perspectives, is well-established in the social sciences. In this field of knowledge, human beings are deemed social beings, who are born, grow up, fall ill and die, Sarti (2001) stresses, in relations that are established by society, by culture and by the times in which individuals find themselves. Birth, pain, suffering, illness, are manifested in the biological body and are lived grounded on the way in which society, culture, defines such experiences. This meaning is socially elaborated. The biological body is thus socially translated, from the instant the individual is born. As Sarti (2001) develops, every human fact is a social language. The apparent naturalness yields from the fact that we assimilate it through habit, unthinkingly, as Mauss (1973) clarifies in a text related to bodily techniques. The social sciences, in particular, seek the deconstruction, in social studies, of the “naturality” of the relations there established by individuals. In such relations, the social is defined by constantly made and remade rules, which implement the dynamics of power relations. The social analysis of the health field operates the apprehension of power relations. In such relations, some practices, defined as medical-scientific, are legitimated to the detriment of other that are demoted, as Laplantine (2001) and Breton (2006) elaborate. In anyway, these are discourses and practices that coexist, even though, in this clash, the medical discourse is hegemonic and dominant in Western societies. They are, as Laplantine (2001) develops, models for illness and health, valid for the practices articulated to them, according to a specific rationality. But the ill person holds his or her own interpretation models of the health-illness process, rooted in the sociocultural contexts one is inscribed in. In this sense, all knowledge is relative and liable to mutation, such as scientific knowledge, highlighted by Foucault in “The Birth of the Clinic”. © 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue IX Version I 2 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 G Body, Health and Society: Socioanthropological Considerations