Moving the sociological and anthropological lens on the body: a brief reflection

Abstract

The article reflects on the body and on the health and illness process as non-natural facts. Starting from a bibliographic review, it uses some ideas of the history of Western Medicine to contextualize body conceptions, sexual differences, and the health and illness process. In addition, it discusses other medical rationalities and religious cosmologies, in which the conceptions of body, health and illness differ from those of the Western Medicine. It employs some anthropological approaches to show the cultural modeling of the body and its uses; the symbolic dimension and its inclusion in the network of social relations and norms and also its links with the environment and the representations of the person, through ethnographic examples extracted from the literature.