Material Bodies and the Transformation of the Social

In 1992, Emily Martin pronounced ‘the end of the body’ as we know it. In considering why and how ‘the body’ has come to resume center stage as a site of theoretical analysis in social scientific and humanistic inquiry, Martin suggested that we are undergoing fundamental changes in how our bodies are organized and experienced. As a result, the ‘problem’ of the body has been thrown into relief. Ian Burkitt’s Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernityand John Hassard, Ruth Holliday and Hugh Willmott’s collection Body and Organizationare two notable additions to the growing literature on embodiment, which grapples with how to make sense of what Martin characterizes as the end of one kind of body and the beginning of another. This review essay considers these two texts within the context of larger contemporary theoretical debates about modernity, embodiment and the generation of social and personal meaning.