The Body in/of History

Abstract

The attention paid to the body as a topic of research during the last two decades raises the question whether this should be regarded as a mere shift of interest in historical research or if this indicates a more profound change in the approach to and the understanding of history. A hightened concern for the body as a topic of interest might indicate the abandoning of idealist and rationalist premises of traditional hermeneutics. But this shift of paradigm seems less motivated by explicit theoretical arguments than by a huge quantity of new historical sources which enable us to recognize the concrete body-relatedness of every day life processes. This new historical material does not only lead to a new perspective of historical subjects in general, but above that, new types or rather new strata of historical agents are called onto the stage of history, namely the common people as protagonists of a history of everyday life. This focussing on the body gives also rise to a new understanding of the mechanisms of power and social order. The historical tradition of the body as a metaphor of order and hierarchy on the symbolic level finds its equivalent, on the level of everyday life, in the exposedness of the bodies - of the people subjected to such rules of power - as the real place for discipline and regulation.