Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.

250 images from inside the human body, produced using the very latest photographic technology, with captions explaining how the images have been taken and what they represent.

In 1739 China’s emperor authorized the publication of a medical text that included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe, where they were interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chinese. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua collaborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker in the creation of portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies, rendered both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of Western medical prowess. Within China, the visual idiom that the paintings established influenced the development of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images, Ari Larissa Heinrich investigates the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity beginning in the eighteenth century. Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as “sick” or “diseased.” He also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, through the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese, and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time “scientific” Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings, taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders.

Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.

Examines the marketing of body images, discussing how to sort fact from fiction in modern media.

In overwhelming trauma, when words fail, it is the body that begins to speak. How can clinicians listen to the body and understand its messages? This book is both a detailed review of the body symptoms and body image distortions found after trauma and a textbook of psychotherapy techniques to repair broken metaphors about the body so that the body-self and its functioning can be restored. Multiple theoretical perspectives—Freudian psychoanalytic theory, attachment theory, trauma theory—are synthesized to shape an interlocking framework within which the therapist can listen and stay with the messages from the patient's body. The reader is guided by detailed clinical examples drawn from an international group of trauma therapists that includes Barry Cohen, Richard Kluft, Bruce Perry, Valerie Sinason and Onno van der Hart.

This intriguing book engages with the concept of the body in its cultural context by acknowledging and demonstrating that the human body is understood differently in Western and Indian cultures. The contributors go on to show that any attempt to put forward a single concept of the body within Indian culture would be misleading. Divided into three parts, the book examines the considerable and often conflicting variations in body images and body concepts. In Part One the contributors focus on the representation of the body in religious and philosophical texts; representations that emerged from reading, translating and interpreting classical writings from diverse historical and anthropological approaches. Through predominantly ethnographic studies, Part Two explores the role of the body in narratives and ritual performance, from dance to ritualistic ceremonies. Visualisation processes of the body are examined in Part Three, focusing on developments in modern and contemporary periods: from visual practices at the Mughal court, to the multiple bodies of the bride, and the influence of new media. This volume is a fascinating collection of articles for those in the fields of sociology and anthropology, history, religion, cultural studies and South Asian studies.