| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Shigehisa Kuriyama. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books; distributed by MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1999. Pp. 340. $29.50.

Shigehisa Kuriyama's wonderful reflection on the varieties of bodily experience begins with two drawings. One is very familiar: a plate from Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica(1543), showing a man with no skin, his muscles bulging, striding through a classical landscape. The other comes from a work on acupuncture tracts by Hua Shou, published in 1341. The tract is inscribed on the body of a middle-aged scholar. A generous belly swells over his loincloth; not a single muscle ripples his skin. In over two thousand years of elaboration, Chinese medicine failed to produce a word for muscles; and to Western medicine acupuncture is still an enigma. How did such different perceptions and practices of the body arise, and what might they tell us about ideals of the self? 1

To appreciate the nature of Kuriyama's enterprise, we must return for a moment to his title. Why does he call the body expressive? Why does he speak of divergence and not of difference? Kuriyama writes sparely and poetically. The book contains no jargon and no pompous disquisitions on current theory. It is instantly clear, however, that the author challenges many prevailing orthodoxies of cultural studies. Kuriyama does not treat language as primary. The body is not inscribed with discourse; it secretes it—but how? . . .

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