A lot of body image issues seem to stem from whatever type of body is seen as “proper” by the society in which one is a member of. Lock and Scheper-Hughes (1987) puts forward the concept of “three bodies” as a means of how one can understand the human body as well as how certain entities would view illness and healing. As the authors of the article have pointed out, “the ‘three bodies’ represent, then, not only three separate and overlapping units of analysis, but also three different theoretical approaches and epistemologies”.
There is the individual body where personal experience is highlighted; the social body which concerns more about how a body or a body part relates to the whole of a culture or what it can symbolise and; the body politic, which questions who really controls the body and body image. In line with this, Lock and Scheper-Hughes stands to view certain illness/healing phenomenon with a more emic point of view, that is not to be too critical about the cases presented concerning the medical practises of other cultures by reading in the context of Western-oriented Social Sciences and Biomedicine (which should be noted is something common in the Philippines).
Before Lock and Scheper-Hughes actually discuss the individual body, they lay down how the dominance of Western Biomedicine have caused much of the discourse on the human body to be only a matter of biology. In status quo, most medical doctors still view the healthy human body as something more akin to “well-oiled machine”; when it breaks downs (gets sick), it needs repairs through medicalisation or through replacing some parts via surgery.
Nowadays, it is very easy to find people, who claim to love science, who would dismiss eastern medical practices (such as acupuncture, reflexology and whatnot) and other forms of alternative medicine as nothing more but mere quackery. The “no home birthing policy” of the current administration in the Philippines is another example where indigenous practises, in this case the hilots (traditional midwives), are brushed aside in favour of nurse-midwives trained in western methods. Folk medicine getting undermined for Biomedical practises is not something new as it had been practically ignored ever since, as Lock and Scheper-Hughes point out, the influence of Hippocrates has grown.
Rene Descartes has also contributed to that notion when he “sought to reconcile material body and divine soul by locating the soul in the pineal gland”, which dictates the actions of the body. Thus, this paved the way for religion to be seen as something which could not be explained by science and therefore, something which should be removed form scientific debates. As Cartesian dualism says, people are consisted of the mind and the matter, where the mind is not exactly the brain but rather more akin to a non-physical entity.
Decartes and Hippocrates were able to cement the dominant way of thinking in biophysical medicine where when it concerns finding the loci of the illness/disease/pain then treating it with medical specificity. This is proven by the anecdote of the authors concerning a medical students who were not interested with other factors that could have caused the headaches of the woman, for example her family life. Instead, the medical students were bent on finding a biological explanation of cephalalgia, such as which pain-sensitive structures are disrupted. The thoughts of those medical students are very much true to life as the training in most medical schools is skewed towards finding a medicalised diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.
Not that the biomedical method is being discounted but as long as clinical medicine is deemed as the only option, it is difficult to expect most medical schools to change how they view illness and disease, ergo it is likely that the medical doctors the same especially when their training and the environment that most of them were used to are taken into account. As the biomedical explanation of disease and illness is the core of western biomedicine, the exploration on cultural and social events concerning the aforementioned are reduced, if not overlooked.
In that context, “oppositions are natural (and presumed universal) categories of thinking insofar as they are a cognitive and symbolic manifestation of human biology”. Ornstein (as cited by Lock and Scheper-Hughes) talks about how the brain divides its functions through the left (logical) and right (creative) hemispheres. The dominance of one hemisphere over the other explains a lot about why there is a dominance of one entity over another; however, most contemporary social anthropologists would rather find a sense of balance in the idea of dualism (mind/matter, culture/nature, reason/passion, etc.
). Dualism is, however, one of the many concepts available to explain the interplay between the mind, body, nature, society, and culture. For holism and monism, principles of inclusion come more into play. Everything, can be viewed as one single unit, with no disconnect between dualities, and dualities are seen to be complementary with each other. The very concept of yin yang expresses how dualities are seen to be in harmony with each other and illnesses/body states are rather explained by how bodies would gravitate towards yin or yang. Speaking of which,
traditional Chinese medicine in the past also made analogies between the state, the society, and the individual body where the health of the whole body depends on the health of a part, much how stability of states as a whole depends on how well each unit of the state functions. Even for the part of treating the human body as a single unit connected to the cosmos, where the body is an “imitation of heaven and earth”, harmony is still being given emphasis: far from the exclusive Western biomedical model where dualities are represented by “or” instead of “and”.
The view that the individual self is unique, with a defined delineation between the mind and body, is indeed something which seemed to originate from the west. Lock and Scheper-Hughes cited how some culture believe in the idea of having multiple selves, being made from the parts of other previously living people, and the “social skin”, where a person is represented by two sides of the same coin. Of course, in Western contexts, those things might be interpreted as primitive and as distortions of a true individual self. Truth be told, in the modern era, one might even be diagnosed, without taking into account culture, with
dissociative identity disorder (DID) if they genuinely believed in the notion of multiple selves. The hegemony of the “one individual, one self” concept perpetuated by westerners has caused several indigenous beliefs to be pathologised by those who people would deem as credible enough. As religion is still a dominant system in contemporary society, another explanation for an altered regular personality/neurological state is seen as a result of possession- the soul losing control over the body against another being. This then gives rise to another observation: an explanation from the dominant religion for an unusual
phenomenon is accepted just like that but when an indigenous belief system tries to explain the same phenomenon, it would be called paganism and archaic. Body image, as stated in the opening lines of this essay, is something that is a very touchy issue for several people. Lock and Scheper-Hughes mentions that body image is close and maybe even central to the conceptions of one’s self. Body image, in this context, does not only refer to the physical appearance of an individual but rather, it refers to how the body is viewed and interpreted by different groups of people.
Blood as a universal symbol of life is one which illustrates this idea of having not just organs but also bodily liquids held above other parts of the body. Another example of where the blood plays an important role was during the Nazi era, there is the notion of a particular race, the Aryans, having superior blood which should be protected at all costs. This also gives a possible link as to why, in European and North American societies, having blonde hair and blue eyes, and being White is considered to be beautiful by a lot of people. As Lock and Scheper-Hughes have said, body image is