Embodiment and risk: Another string to Eberhard Wenzel?s bow

Abstract

In 1992, the medical sociologist Bryan Turner and I established a research centre at Deakin University called the Centre for the Body and Society developing research projects which built on Bryan?s theoretical explorations in his book The Body and Society. We thought that we were on the cutting edge of thinking about how social theory might reclaim some of the monopoly that medicine had held over the human body since the Enlightenment and which had been consolidated virtually unopposed since Pasteur ?discovered? the germ in 1864. Little did we know that on the other side of the world another health social scientist had already cut the ice and was pulling the lived human body (leib) out of the hole that he had made in medical dominance of the scientific body (korper). The book that this researcher published in 1986 was called Die Okologie des Korpers (literally translated to The Ecology of the Body). It only appeared in German and was never translated into other languages so only German-speaking audiences were able to access the amazing insights that this author brought to a rethinking of the place of the human body in time and space.