Panel 153: Damaged Bodies: Anthropological Perspectives on the Inscription of Experiences

The social sciences have a long history of looking at the body as both a precondition and a way of perceiving the world and engaging with it, and thus a fundamental condition of all social experience. From Mauss to Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, sociologists have tried to put this relation into words and theories, but the difficulties of interpreting and writing about bodily experiences in relation to the social remain as poignant as ever. Since the 1980s, anthropologists have increasingly looked at bodily knowledge and at the inscription of experiences in the body, and tried to incorporate non-predicative experiences into a discipline often still mostly interested in conscious interpretation.

The panel wants to take up these discussions by looking at the damaged body and its relation to social experience. In it, researchers interested in the bodily dimension of experiences of violence and trauma come together with anthropologists interested in disabilities and their social interpretation. We are interested in contributions that use empirical data to reflect on the principal theoretical question of what it means to be (in) a body, and how the social sciences can find meaningful ways to engage with bodily experiences. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: experiencing disabilities; integration of war victims; the body as evidence of injustice; definition of injuries.