Social practices and the arts: towards new communicative paradigms of health and illness

My paper is aimed at evaluating that the body is a culturally and socially negotiated project as much as its health and diseases and that each culture has its own social and artistic representation of the healthy and sick body. So the perception of sickness (as much social as natural) is related both to the historical sequences of the corporeal schema and to the health practices. This appears a very prominent issue when we consider the difficulties and questions we must cope with in the medical practices, all dealing with the body and no more conceivable as something separate from the social ones. Starting from this new point of view, social practices become the core part of many medical theories, that we instead were and are still used to interpret as mere scientific and incontrovertible data. According to Kantorowicz, we can distinguish two patterns of body: the real body (Körper), the body of flesh, and the social, political and symbolic body (Leib), suggesting the old dual relation between soul and body. The symbolic body can make the individual body eternal by means of art. It is just beginning from here, that we can try to approach the complex reasons that have guided the figurative art of twenty centuries towards so different roads in the figurative and social representations of the body.