Forum for Culture

The human body: its contemporary readings

By ci ⋅ July 30, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

Ranjith Perera (editor of Pravada, Social Scientists’ Association) undertook a cultural reading of the human body in the fifth of the series of talks organized by the Forum for Culture.

He presented the following ideas: the human body, in the past, was mostly the subject of medicine, painting or sculpture. Today it is a cultural body, read in multiple ways. Pleasure, consumption, popularity, sexuality, gender and ethnicity are experienced through their embodiment. Today, the human body is a cultured body; a discursive body; moreover, it is a form of physical capital. It has reached its highest planes in contemporary times: that of the technical body that we call the cyborg.