Embodied Lives:: Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyptian Experience

by Rosemary A. Joyce

Examining a wide range of archaeological data, and using it to explore issues such as the sexual body, mind/body dualism, body modification, and magical practices, Lynn Meskell and Rosemary Joyce offer a new approach to the Ancient Egyptian and Mayan understanding of embodiment. Drawing on insights from feminist theory, art history, phenomenology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, the book takes bodily materiality as a crucial starting point to the understanding and formation of self in any society, and sheds new light on Ancient Egyptian and Maya cultures. The book shows how a comparative project can open up new lines of inquiry by raising questions about accepted assumptions as the authors draw attention to the long-term histories and specificities of embodiment, and make the case for the importance of ancient materials for contemporary theorization of the body. For students new to the subject, and scholars already familiar with it, this will offer fresh and exciting insights into these ancient cultures.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 2003

About the author

Rosemary Joyce is the Alice Davis Endowed Chair in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and received her PhD from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1985

Reviews

[Jayme Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting text. The comparison of the ancient Maya with ancient Egyptians is a premise that could have gone badly. However, Rosemary Joyce and Lynn Meskell perfectly find ways to keep this from being an "all ancient cultures are the same." I will say, though, the book is heavier on the Egyptian stuff than Maya. Not a bad thing, but something to note.

[Keegan Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

will be key for diss. while topics aren’t applicable, wider theory and treatment of evidence is. the introduction to mayan embodiment is particularly key. (in a book rating sense i agree that it was too egyptian heavy and some aspects of it could def have been shortened on that front)

[Alexus · Rating 3 out of 5]

More about Egypt than the Maya, and some very problematic premises concerning images, the body, and the connection of either to personhood, but overall a fairly interesting book. I feel like the authors would have been better served considering "personhood" more widely rather than simply the body, because this assumes some distinctions that certainly wouldn't have made sense in the Ancient Maya context, and I suspect also in the Ancient Egyptian case. The concept of the body as a physical entity is too limited to construct an account of personhood in either of these traditions, which seems to have been what the authors wanted to do. The material seems to resist this constraint throughout.