This article offers a symbolic analysis of the cultural construction and signification of three of the major "pandemics" of the late 20th century: AIDS, cancer, and heart disease. It is based on unstructured interviews conducted in Israel between 1993-94 with 75 nurses and 40 physicians and between 1993-95 with 60 university students. Two key symbols, "pollution" and "transformation," are shown to constitute AIDS and cancer within a symbolic space that I suggest is "beyond culture," where body boundaries are dissolved and cultural categories are dismantled. Heart disease, in contrast, is metaphorized as a defect in the "body machinery." The article concludes by arguing that heart attack is depicted as the pathology of the Fordist, modernist body, while AIDS/cancer are pathologies of the postmodern body in late capitalism.

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Israel is a country whose nationalism arguably hinges on a military conflict routine. In this paper I illustrate how national identity is inscribed in the Israeli body, and how "the body of the nation" arises following critical events such as terrorist bombings. Building on a discursive analysis of "bodyTalk" in the media representation of terrorist attacks, the article focuses on the non-discursive management of concrete bodies following such attacks. I focus on practices that can be subsumed under "body identification" and take place in the National Institute of Forensic Medicine. The data is based on interviews and observations conducted in the Institute during 1996-2000, and supplemented by narrative analysis of media texts. "Body Identification" and "bodyTalk" are thus presented as complementary aspects of the discourse of collective, national identity in contemporary Israel. It is argued that Israeli and Jewish identities, although sometimes discursively (politically) separated, are still closely tied in more fundamental, nonverbal practices of body identification [nationalism, terrorism, the body, forensic medicine, Israel].

Rituals provide public solutions to some types of life crises, or change. There are crises which beset the individual in modern society which are not easily addressed by public ritual. The present paper observes such a life crisis and identifies conscious rites performed by individuals. These rites are called, “personal definitional rites”, and take place in situations demanding identity changes. Newly acquired identity is performed ritually in an attempt to elicit recognition of a new social state. Thirty‐six patients clinically defined as obese underwent gastric reduction surgery. Patients were interviewed after having lost excess weight in order to understand the social results of the dramatic change in appearance. Patients described various “rites” they used to complete their conversion from fat to thin. These rites are compared to rites of transition and definition.

During the last 13 years I have collected university students'drawings of theirbodies. Between 1983 and 1993, I asked students to draw "the normal body" as well as "the body in disease." During the Gulf War, I discovered that a new type of body had emerged and replaced "the normal body." I call this type "the body in war." The powerful emergence of "the body in war" prompted me to analyze these drawings as concrete manifestations of the dialectics between the collective and the individual in Israeli society. Because I have examined "the body in disease" elsewhere {Weiss in press b and in press c), in this article I focus exclusively on the contrast between "the normal body" and "the body in war." I have divided the article into three parts. In the first section I introduce the historical axes of social analysis and the structural analogies between body imagery and images of the social order with comparisons to American society. In the second section I consider the Gulf War and examine its effect on the normal body. In the third section I conclude by offering a panoramic reading of how people narrate their socially informed bodies to suit changing cultural contexts and problematize the "individuality" presumed to be inherent in "normal bodies." the body as social mirror: the view from Israeli society Social paradigms are articulated through bodies. The existence and absence of bodily paraphernalia and practices such as clothing, makeup, bodybuilding, and diet reflect abstract social dispositions. These issues comprise some of the possible fields of research in the new sociology of the body-or, rather, the sociology of embodiment (see Turner 1991 b). Sociologists who study the body have made great strides in recent years, embracing such different theoretical concerns as feminist studies, post-Foucau/t sociology, semiology, ethology, and the more conventional social anthropology "of health and illness" (see Douglas and Calvez 1990; . I do not attempt to survey this fast growing corpus of literature here; rather, I focus on two outstanding contributions in order to compare these with my own discussion of the body: EmilyIn this paper I analyze images of the "normal body" in Israel between 1983 and. By correlating body imagery with images of the social order, I argue that this "normal body" reflects a social discourse of growing individualism. During the Gulf War (1991), images of the "normal body" changed to reflect a rising collectivism. I consider this abrupt change in the context of Israel's "interrupted system." I conclude by offering a panoramic reading of how people narrate their socially informed bodies to suit varying cultural contexts and thus problematize the "individuality"presumed inherent in "normal bodies." [body politic, embodiment, Israeli society, collectivism, individualism, social narratives] American Ethnologist 24(4):813-832.