The Body Worlds
Throughout history the body and death have provided a source of spectacle, curiosity and entertainment. Examples include the Roman Gladiatorial games, public executions of criminals from the medieval period to the last century with notorious sites such as Tyburn prison incorporating special grandstands for enhanced viewing, guided tours of morgues during the Victorian period (Stone, 2006) to contemporary exhibitions of plastinated bodies such as Von Hagen’s ‘Body Worlds’ which forms the basis for our analysis. We focus on the commodified body and examine how, post death, it is interpreted and consumed. We suggest that there are multiple levels of meanings derived from the experience including spectacle, dehumanization, mortality salience, and repulsion and fascination.
Citation:
Michael Saren and Christina Goulding (2011) ,"The Body Worlds", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9, eds. Alan Bradshaw, Chris Hackley, and Pauline Maclaran, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 40-41.
Authors
Michael Saren, University of Leicester, UK
Christina Goulding , University of Wolverhampton, UK
Volume
E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9 | 2011
Share Proceeding
Featured papers
See MoreFeatured
Metaphorically Transgressing the Brand Relationship
Alberto Lopez, Tecnológico de Monterrey, MEXICO
Martin Reimann, University of Arizona, USA
Raquel Castaño, Tecnológico de Monterrey, MEXICO
Featured
Don’t Forget the Accountant: Role-Integration Increases the Fungibility of Mentally Accounted Resources
Iman Paul, Georgia Tech, USA
Jeffrey Parker, Georgia State University, USA
Sara Loughran Dommer, Georgia Tech, USA
Featured
A Computational Social Science Framework for Visualizing the Possibility Space of Consumer-Object Assemblages from IoT Interaction Data
Donna Hoffman, George Washington University, USA
Thomas Novak, George Washington University, USA