The body between intimacy and globalization

Abstract

All humans share the condition of being bodily beings. This fact does not entail that all humans are identical across the globe, but that we share a global human condition for shaping a local and individual life, based on different conceptions of bodily based local and individual identities. But our bodies do not specify identities or offer a fixed number of options to choose between or to combine like morphological patterns in a language. The meaning of any identity is constantly challenged and will have to be reconfirmed, modified, or reshaped through a reconsideration of the role of the body. Our individual bodily experiences form a crossroads between what is universal, cultural, and individual in our lives. Today the body is the site of the concrete, individual experience of the tension between a local cultural life and its global conditions. In an analysis of Athol Fugard's South African novel Tsotsi (1980), the literary articulation of this complex life condition is examined with theoretical and historical perspectives.

Keywords

• body images
• individualization
• control
• pain
• honor and shame
• habeas corpus
• Athol Fugard
• Paul Valéry