The Culture of the Body

The TRANSCENDENT body in American Culture

• Bodies have been commodified throughout history in American and European culture
• Christianity reversed ideas about the polluting body and transcended death
• Ressurrection of Lazurus
• Jesus
• body of christ as communion
• relics of saints
• dead bodies of righteous as positive spiritual attainment
• survival beyond death is a continuity (nothing changes)
• dead bodies are considered fertile (worries about premature burial)

• Physical body with its dogma of rebirth did not putrefy but defied this process

Japan: in Buddhism, death is a process

• purification occurs as a process of like as the soul needs to be FREED from the body as an aspect of death. Not "dead" unitl the body is gone
• shy burial
• cremation
• etc

• body is a THING only following death
• organ donation from living donors is NOT frowned upon,  but in the death process it is adefilement

THE BODY AND MODERN MEDICINE

• allopathy and the corpse/ayurveda, nature informs
• why the practice of dissection/autopsy-the truth about life and death can be found in the body 
• body snatching/grave robbing
• criminals bodies as commodities
• anatomy theaters
• transcend crimes as a dissection
• women's bodies as a valued commodity
• specimens (mutter museum) of abnormalities/preservation
• paupers were owned (bodies) by the state

---led to a profound distrust of doctors and dissection/disruption of the body
---many do not see the person located in the brain

NHBCDs