The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of the Body

Adeline Masquelier is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. A specialist on gender, religion, and health in Niger, she has authored and edited several books, including Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger (2019), Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body's Surface (2005), and Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger (2001). Andrew McDowell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. A medical anthropologist of South Asia, tuberculosis, pharmaceuticals, care, and global health, he has written about bodies as simultaneous sites of local (micro)biology and global health. His book, Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India (2024) won the 2023 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences.

• Introduction: elusive bodies, stubborn bodies, ethnographic bodies Andrew McDowell and Adeline Masquelier; Part I. Flesh: 1. Substance: blood and a theory of excorporation Dionisios Kavadias and Rose Wellman; 2. The fetus: conceptual puzzles and corporeal boundaries Fiona C. Ross; 3. Aging: the lure, the peril, the possibilities Felicity Aulino; 4. Corpses: social, political, and other lives of dead bodies and their parts Caroline Bennett and Sally Raudon; Part II. Bodies in Motion: 5. Performing bodies: cross-species performance in acupoint biophoton emission diagnostics Sally Ann Ness; 6. The dis/appearing body of labor in modern capitalist society Jean Comaroff; 7. Disabled bodies: beyond the body proper redux Tyler Zoanni; 8. The migratory body, or how bodies come to matter during the migration journey Synnøve Bendixsen; Part III. Embodied Formations: 9. Gender: anthropology of the body through an Andean lens Florence E. Babb; 10. Race: embodied joy as black resistance Sabia McCoy-Torres; 11. Queer/ing bodies: corpus sexualis and the ethnographic imagination George Paul Meiu; 12. Trans bodies: transgressing gender and theory Elijah Edelman; 13. The national body: gender, genetics, and the geobody Tâm Ngô; Part IV. Bodies of Knowledge: 14. The biometric body: moving beyond the embodiment paradigm Ursula Rao; 15. To see is to become blind: images and the history of the body Shigehisa Kuriyama; 16. The medium's body: permeability, knowledge, and practice Manduhai Buyandelger; 17. The sensory body: troubling the bounds of sense David Howes; Part V. Bodily Management: 18. Disciplined bodies: setting the terms by which life is lived Rebecca Lester; 19. Addiction: permeable bodies and therapeutic possibilities Erica Prussing; 20. Weighty bodies: nourishment in the ethnography of fat Jessica Hardin, Tausala Aiavao, Ramona Boodoosingh, Saunima'a Ma Fulu Aiolupotea, Uila Laifa Lima, Falelua Maua and Tauaitala Lees; 21. Aesthetics: on beauty, layered histories and surfaces that matter Claudia Liebelt; 22. Wearing the body: dress, embodiment, and performance Adeline Masquelier; Part VI. Bodily Entanglements: 23. Bodies with minds with bodies Sarah Pinto; 24. Permeable bodies: analyzing paradigms of porosity in a toxic world Janelle Lamoreaux; 25. Breath and breathing bodies Andy McDowell; 26. Interspecies hybridity: the hidden sociomoral challenges of xenotransplantation Lesley A. Sharp; 27. Contagion: configuration, communication, infection Jens Seeberg; 28. Carbonic entanglements: bodies after anthropocentrism Nils Bubandt.