The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of the Body

Bringing together a diversity of conversations and concepts, this Handbook is a state-of-the-field survey of the anthropology of the body. It helps readers understand the body as an intersection of cultural anthropology and medical anthropology's concerns, making it ideal for students and scholars of a range of subdisciplines in anthropology.

Attention to the body is an exciting emerging dimension of anthropological research. A collection of diverse conversations contributed by a global team of scholars, this Handbook is a state-of-the-field survey of the anthropology of the body, revealing dialogues between anthropological traditions that inform the study of the body. A focus on the body has animated subfields such as the anthropology of religion, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of performance, and rekindled interest in kinship and materiality. Chapters are organized around six central themes – flesh, motion, formation, knowledge, management, and entanglement – giving readers a holistic sense of the diverse analytical possibilities within the anthropology of the body. Showing the unique combinations that material and metaphorical aspects of the body take across different ethnographic and epistemic contexts, this Handbook is essential reading for students and scholars of social, cultural, and medical anthropology.