Thomas W. Laqueur est un historien et sexologue américain dont le travail explore les histoires culturelles de la sexualité humaine. Son écriture examine comment notre compréhension du corps et du genre a évolué au fil des siècles, dévoilant les constructions sociales complexes qui façonnent nos vies intimes. Grâce à une recherche méticuleuse, Laqueur offre des aperçus profonds sur la façon dont nos perceptions de la sexualité et du corps se sont transformées de l'Antiquité à l'ère moderne, remettant en question les notions de nature intrinsèque. Son approche invite les lecteurs à reconsidérer les hypothèses profondément ancrées sur ce que signifie être humain et comment cette identité est forgée par des forces à la fois biologiques et culturelles.
The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be
tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone
else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed
cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally
rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal
remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body
still matters- for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably
ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly
detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from
antiquity to the twentieth century.
Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Thomas Laqueur posits that destiny is
anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice and Making Sex tells the story of
sex in the west from the ancients to the moderns. It looks at how our
predecessors thought about anatomy and analyzes our ideas on gender. číst celé
"The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters--for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources--from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed--and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history."-- Provided by publisher
