test
Search publications, data, projects and authors

Book

French

ID: <

10670/1.idfmrc

>

Where these data come from
Body in Mediterranean cultures

Abstract

After flavours, smells; the taste of the Mediterranean, and Rythmes and Enlightenments of the Mediterranean, the VECT-Mare Nostrum Reccueil Team of the University of Perpignan-Via Domitia continues to explore the five directions with the final part of this trilogy: The Corps in Mediterranean cultures. This research took the form of an international colloquium which took place at the University of Perpignan-Via Domitia on 30-31 March and 1 April 2006, chaired by Prof. Paul Veyne In a comparative perspective from antiquity to the present day, participants have set themselves the challenge of showing this so rich imaginary of the Mediterranean, in cultures that paradoxically combine great liberation with equally radical puritanism. From Sicilian widows to the organs of Pétrone, what about this Mediterranean body that is both hidden and unveiled, pushed, fantasmed and exhibited? At the heart of a time marked by identity using forms of self-affirmation on their body (clothes that are too short or long, piercing, discoloured hair, tattoos, ostensible religious signs), it is important that a theoretical and methodological reflection be put in place about the body. Moreover, in the Mediterranean tradition, body expenditure determines an even more urgent logic: CRIS, gestures, ephemeral or felt, say a culture of appearance, contact, physiology. By intersecting these two realities, researchers from different disciplinary and epistemological backgrounds (literature, anthropology, history of medicine, artistic creation) will compare their findings, not to propose fragmentary perspectives, but rather to grasp the social uses of the body: the body lives in loneliness, in the family and in the community. The starting point for such a reflection is in Greece and also in Rome. Indeed, within a city subject to the very strong hierarchies of the social condition, Roman man is first of all a body: his truth turns out in the burst of his body’s performance, built for immediate visibility. For this reason, Rome is an ideal subject of study for the status and culture of the body. We have chosen three insights: scientific eyes, body seen by poets, and anthropological body, seen through social decoding. After the ancient Mediterranean, we looked at a more contemporary Mediterranean, which is both the same and another one. Artists and creators give us the opportunity to see their idiosyncrasia, their own body representations, experienced through their imaginary prism, but at the same time they are part of the great mythical constellations we experience in the Greeco-Roman world. Finally, a final strand is devoted to a more comparative perspective, allowing a better understanding of certain trajectories and paths, in time and space. The challenge of this colloquium is therefore to produce a speech on the body in all its states: cleanliness, illness, consumption, savings, abstinence, desires and spirituality.

Your Feedback

Please give us your feedback and help us make GoTriple better.
Fill in our satisfaction questionnaire and tell us what you like about GoTriple!