INDS 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 37: Theocracy

• School: McGill University
• Department: Interndisciplinary Studies
• Course: INDS 111
• Professor: Anne Andermann

Document Summary

Anthropologist: how categories that organize our thinking, and our ways of knowing, change over time, or differ across space, to think about thinking. Challenge of explaining the body: consider the body as a category of thought. Although the body has been the same for hundreds of thousands of years, our conception of it has changed. Body: an organism, composed of various organs w/ vital functions, a whole. The structure and function of the body are the same worldwide (universal reality). But, people might not always have thought like this. Chinese doctors lacked a specific word for muscle. Muscularity was a specifically western anatomical vision of reality. You end up with different vocabularies, ideas as a physician, some patients might not report their symptoms properly" because of these differences. Most of the languages that we know of do not have a conception of the body. Homer used different words for body depending on what he wanted to say about it.