The Consuming Body
- Pasi Falk - University of Helsinki, Finland
Pasi Falk offers a major synthesis and critical assessment of the debates surrounding the body, the self and contemporary consumer culture. He explores two fundamental issues for modern social theory - the delineation of modern consumption and the body's historically changing position in various cultural orders. In the course of his argument he examines both metaphors of consumption and investigates the issues of representation in advertising and pornography.
`I consider this book a remarkable achievement. Sophisticated in its use of sociological, anthropological and critical theory, The Consuming Body also successfully conveys the direct tangible experience of corporality and the senses. Its key metaphor of orality unites body history and consumer history, speech and sustenance, with rare penetration and clarity. Pasi Falk's original and insightful book sets the study of the body onto a new plane'- Roy Porter, The Wellcome Institute, London
`Although the sociology of the body is a major issue in contemporary social science, we do not as yet possess a comprehensive theory. Pasi Falk's remarkable analysis of consumption and the body goes a long way to providing such a comprehensive and synoptic overview of the problems of the body as a topic of research. Through a sustained analysis of the mouth and consumption he provides an extraordinarily provocative and compelling analysis of corporality and culture. This is not a text to be easily consumed, but it will play a formative role in restructuring contemporary debate about the body, culture and society. In particular it will be no longer possible to ignore the nature of human embodiment in debates about need and consumption. A profound tour de force of contemporary sociological theory, it will undoubtedly become a central text in the analysis of the sensory body' - Bryan S Turner
