Dychotomie i dwuznaczności. Kultura wobec ciała i jego problemów

Joanna Hańderek’s chapter Dichotomies and Ambiguities: Culture Perceptions of the Body and its Cultural Stigmas illustrates the history of corporality from the philosophical perspective and makes an attempt to create a comprehensive account of the cultural perception of the human body across the decades. Human beings are eccentrically positioned—they possess body and are bodies at the same time, as Helmuth Plessner has stated. As entities, human beings are forced to rework their corporality, considering not only its natural, but also the symbolic side, perceiving in the scope of human body not only its intimate and private expression, but also the public one. Consuming food is a necessity, although culturally, it has not been adapted to the needs of body (of surviving, sating hunger), but adapted instead to modes of social interaction, rituals and manifestations of status. Body and corporality are therefore entwined in the specific network of meanings, in which the biological and cultural aspects form an inseparable whole. Various forms of re-presentation of corporality indicate different modes of its interpretation—often encumbered with the context of historical meanings and institutions, cultural specifics, gender differences, debasing and negating corporality or, on the contrary, accepting and even favouring it.