Body boundary work : praxeological thoughts on personal corporality

Abstract

In everyday life, we usually go by the one-body-one-person rule: one person has one body (and vice versa). This social belief builds on two assumptions: bodies are individual units and they (and ‘their’ person) are the same in different situations. This is also the conceptual resource for social theories that build on the notion of individuals. In this article, we turn it into a sociological topic. We develop a vocabulary for reconstructing bodily one-ness and bodily sameness as practically achieved social order, as body boundary work: what belongs to a body is a matter of local practices that define its situational contours, limits and margins. Practices of identification and personification draw on social memories and enact bodies as trans-situational entities. Persons and bodies, we argue, evolve in co-individuation. Personal corporality, then, can be conceptualized as a body of work that encompasses these practical efforts of boundary-making.