Page 39 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

his later work Foucault concentrates on ‘techniques of the self’ that re-introduce
agency and ‘self-fashioning’. In particular, in his studies of ancient Greek and
Roman practices he points to an ethics of ‘self-stylization’ centred on the body that
16 forms a process of ‘self-mastery’.
The manner in which the body has been understood by medical science
illustrates our changing cultural understanding of the body as well as
highlighting the issues of agency and determination. For biologically based
medicine (biomedicine) the body is constituted by unchanging necessities that exist
prior to culture. Here the causes of disease are internal to the body so that illness
is an outcome of the objective facts of biology. It follows from this that doctors
know best how to treat illness since they have has gained the appropriate scientific
knowledge. Thus did medicine describe and compare bodies in ways that produced
normality, pathology and disciplinary practices. Patients became cases rather than
unique persons.
However it has become apparent that ill health is not simply a consequence of
the hermetically sealed workings of individual bodies. It is a product of what we eat,
where we work (for example, stress or chemical poisoning), levels and types of
exercise, the patterns of our thinking (generated in our childhood experiences) and
so forth. Thus a more holistic understanding of health practice has begun to emerge
called the biopsychosocial model of medicine. The shift from biomedicine to
biopsychosocial is marked by relative shifts from a focus on the isolated body to
bodies in environmental contexts and from the curative to the preventative.
The new holistic model of medicine would appear to weaken the dominance of
medical authority in favour of the active participation of lay persons.
Nevertheless, health promotion can itself be grasped as a new disciplinary process
involving the medicalization of lifestyles and identity management. Thus, we are
exhorted, urged and disciplined into adopting the ‘right’ healthy attitude towards
our bodies. Having the right kind of body is now not only a matter of tasteful and
pleasing appearance, or even of longevity, but of moral virtue. Nevertheless, the
management of health as an aspect of lifestyle can also be understood as a
manifestation of reflexivity and agency as we make self-fashioning choices.
Links Agency, consumption, culture, emotion, identity, reflexivity, self-identity

Bourdieu,Pierre (1930–2002) Bourdieu was the leading French sociologist of culture
and Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France and Director of the Centre for
European Sociology. His work was unusual in its combination of empirical methods,
including statistics, with more philosophical theory. Bourdieu attempted to resolve
the puzzle of structure and agency in terms of what he called a generic
structuralism. He argued that practice carries the mark of agency but needs to be
grasped in the context of the ‘objective’ structures of culture and society. In
particular, Bourdieu was concerned with the determining power of class as a
structural constraint so that some critics regard his work as reductionist. He is
perhaps best known for his argument that cultural tastes are social constructs
located in the context of a class-oriented habitus.