Jennifer A. Glancy
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195328158
- eISBN:
- 9780199777143
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195328158.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Church History, Early Christian Studies
In daily practice the embodied interactions and embodied self-understandings of Christians were subject to the status-conscious corporal pedagogy of the Roman Empire. Socially located experiences ...
More
In daily practice the embodied interactions and embodied self-understandings of Christians were subject to the status-conscious corporal pedagogy of the Roman Empire. Socially located experiences inform what a body knows. Nonetheless, corporal epistemology—what a body knows—exceeds inscription by social location. While social location is inevitably implicated in corporal knowing, what is known in the body is not exhausted by location in a social grid. In disturbing ways, the practice of torture relies on parallel logic, that is, on the conviction that truth can be beaten out of bodies and squeezed from flesh. In light of ongoing debates about torture, claims about corporal knowing are not anodyne claims. The epilogue nonetheless acknowledges the diverse phenomena of corporal knowing and the significance of those phenomena for a cultural history of Christian origins.Less
In daily practice the embodied interactions and embodied self-understandings of Christians were subject to the status-conscious corporal pedagogy of the Roman Empire. Socially located experiences inform what a body knows. Nonetheless, corporal epistemology—what a body knows—exceeds inscription by social location. While social location is inevitably implicated in corporal knowing, what is known in the body is not exhausted by location in a social grid. In disturbing ways, the practice of torture relies on parallel logic, that is, on the conviction that truth can be beaten out of bodies and squeezed from flesh. In light of ongoing debates about torture, claims about corporal knowing are not anodyne claims. The epilogue nonetheless acknowledges the diverse phenomena of corporal knowing and the significance of those phenomena for a cultural history of Christian origins.
