The body and culture Sample Clauses

The body and culture. One analogy by which to express the person’s ability to objectify her own body is that of reading a text. Each person’s body is the fundamental text of encounter. The manner of this encounter differs in kind from any other, as, in Xxxxx Xxxxxxxx’ words, ‘the body is never simply an object in my field of perception.’90 Drawing upon the philosophy of Xxxxxxx-Xxxxx, Xxxxxxxx helpfully reflects that this difference means that our perception of occupying space is the unconscious backdrop of our engagement with the world, while also shaping that world in which we live and move. Being oriented in space; having to face a direction, means that we are constantly navigating obstacles. This facing-toward is already a form of relationship with what we see or move towards (or away from). Our bodies are therefore constantly bound up with ‘attitudes, projects, and relationships.’91 The body is in this sense, inherently intelligent as a site from which negotiations with the world are conducted. The implication of this, for Xxxxxxxx, is that the natural body is never a neutral organism; it is always already engaged with culture. Persons organize and symbolize their 89 Xxxxx, 176. 90 Xxxxxxxx, "On Being a Human Body," 404. 91 Ibid., 405. engagements with the world, not excluding their bodily needs and desires, as, for example, in eating’s symbolization as social bonding. While I concur that the body from (before?) its birth is entangled with culture, I am cautious about over-articulating the role of culture, the extreme expression of which would claim culture to be determinative of the body. The body is the manifestation of an acting person who can resist, or choose, at least in part, to selectively disengage from its cultural entanglements. A discriminatory cultural appropriation could be seen as a moral imperative for each life and as informing the primary task given to the church: the evangelical commission to reach (therefore, change) all cultures. The form of cultural resistance that Christianity advocates is to turn to, and embrace, the a priori culture of faith that constituted ‘the beginning.’ The need for cultural metanoia is the starting point from which Xxxx Xxxx begins his theological-anthropological task; that contemporary culture has a distorted and erroneous conception of the body, as manifest in its misrepresentation of sexual relations. To say, as does Xxxxx Xxxxxxxx, that the body is involved with culture from the outset is to say that the body and its func...