“Le Dictionnaire du Corps” Supervised by Bernard Andrieu Professeur
February 9th sees the publication of Le Dictionnaire du Corps, a work steered by Bernard Andrieu, professor in Nancy 2. Thanks for his help in the realization of this article, essentially made with translated parts of his texts.
The body is our every day life. From birth to death, our body is the companion of our existence. Our children, our deaths, our sexualities, our kitchens, our movements, our communications so many physical cultures realizing symbolic and imaginary meanings in the shares and the representations. All the objects used every day are physical so much by their ergonomics and their design. Our environment and the state of the planet, express our physical customs. Our practices and our techniques engage gestures, postures and movements in interactions with the other bodies, the objects and the persons. Never being able to get out of our body otherwise than by the word, sexuality and action, each belongs to a material culture which educates him since the childhood by habit, by control and by ritualization.
The body is today in France the focus of diverse publications in biology, ethology, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literature, but no work, even Le Dictionnaire du Corps, can inventory and synthetize the researches and the definitions.
Le Dictionnaire du Corps (450 articles) solicited those, belonging to human and social sciences, who put forward in the jobs a definition of an ownership, a state, a practice, a technology or a model of such an individual body, social or collective. These physical cultures, observed and described by the sociologists and the psychologists, must be situated in their conditions of emergence both to the plan of history and the plan of the evolution of the concepts. The liberation of the body, the youth, the ageing, the expansion of sports and physical practices, the emergence of the complementary medicines and the physical therapies, the aesthetic forms, the arts of the body, the techniques of the body, the practices of maintenance, the varied sexualities… so many subjects studied in Le Dictionnaire du corps as the visible part of the physical iceberg are.
What does this dictionary talk about? Androgynous, bisexual, crucifixion, dance, empathy, feminisms, godes, haptonomia, impotence, youth, lesbian, menopause, narcissism, organicism, psychiatry, robot, soldier, tattoos, utopia, speed, yoga, X, … for example.
Le dictionnaire du corps prefigures an encyclopedia of the body in the social and human sciences. It creates the network of the researches on the body in France by grouping together for the first time the specialists in the service of the general public. It opens a new community of researchers and researchers belonging so much to the University, to the bodies of researches (NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, INSERM, INED) and in laboratories and research seminaries (School of France, International School of philosophy, EHESS)