This collection offers a comprehensive guide to the sociology of the body. With a strong historical scope and conceptual framework, it provides a useful reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and a source for scholars working in the area. The central focus is on understanding sociology through the body; what is often described as re-reading sociology in a more corporeal light. This is an interdisciplinary process, drawing on history, feminism, cultural history, art history, anthropology, social psychology, philosophy, medical sociology and media and communications, as well as...

Andrew Blaikie explores how different, but connected, ways of seeing infuse relationships between place and belonging. He argues that all memories, whether fleeting glimpses or elaborate narratives, invoke imagined pasts, be these of tenement life, island cultures, vanished moralities, even the origins of social science. But do these recollections share a common frame of reference? Are our perceptions conditioned by a collective social imaginary? We see the impact of modernity on Scottish culture in visions of nation and community from the late eighteenth century on, from Adam Ferguson's...