SURFACING THE BODY INTERIOR

Abstract

In the wake of critiques that have rendered problematic such familiar objects of study as culture and social structure, anthropologists seeking ways to engage ethnographically with the complexities of the contemporary world have fashioned new kinds of objects of study. These generally continue, however, to be framed as just that—as objects. Rather than pursue the “anthropology of” any particular object that preexists ethnography, anthropologists should find ways of bringing the openness and creativity of ethnographic work more boldly into the theoretical framing of what it is that they study. I propose here the notion of surfacing the body interior as one framing device that may help facilitate such ethnographic explorations into bodies, their interiors, and their surfaces as contingent configurations made and unmade through practices that are at once social, material, and representational.