Body, Economy, and Medicine

Harvard FAS

How do economic, social, and political systems enter, shape, and use up bodies? And what in bodies resists them? This seminar reads the anthropology of the body and medicine alongside the critique of political economy.We begin with Marx and Engels, who described capitalism as a system that consumes the bodies and vital energies of workers. We then trace how anthropologists and social theorists have approached embodiment, from Mauss’s techniques of the body and Bourdieu’s habitus to Foucault’s…