Nature - autonomous learning

96 the ‘nature’ of geographydocumentaries – like the BBC’s The Human Body series, hosted by eminentmedic Sir Robert Winston. As with the issue of identity and subjectiveoutlook, all this may seem a far cry from human geographers’ core researchand teaching interests. But from the mid-1990s several of these geographersshowed how different individuals’ and groups’ bodily comportment wasnot a function merely of physiology but also of those same social relationsand discourses shaping peoples’ subjectivities. These relations anddiscourses, it was shown, were expressed in and through a variety of siteswhere people learned how to comport themselves over the life-course (see,for example, Nast and Pile 1998). At a general level, this research oncorporeality resonated with some of the humanistic geography researchtwo decades earlier. However, where this early research operated with therather universal notion of a human body interacting with local environmentsthrough smell, touch and taste, the more recent cultural-left research‘de-essentialises’ the body and exposes how power relations within societyreach into people’s biological being not simply their mental selfunderstanding.In terms of subdisciplinary fields, this kind of research hasbeen primarily conducted by social and cultural geographers, as well asmedical geographers (Box 2.6).Box 2.6 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY AND THE STUDY OF THE BODYThe body, as Elizabeth Grosz (1992: 243) observes, is ‘the concrete,material, animate organization of the flesh, organs, nerves, musclesand skeletal structure’. It may seem odd that many humangeographers have taken an interest in the human body thispast decade or so. After all, one normally thinks that bodies arestudied by medics, human biologists and physiotherapists ratherthan social scientists. But human geographers are not so muchinterested in the physiology of bodies – for instance, how joints andmuscles work or why some people get multiple sclerosis. Rather, theyare interested in two other things that directly affect people’s bodies.First, one of the main ways in which different societies differentiatepeople is through selective representations of their bodies. Forinstance, it is no accident that in predominantly white, Westerncountries black men are often stereotyped as being muscular and