The rebel body : the subversive meanings of illness

Abstract

Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s and Margaret Lock’s (1987) article on the “the mindful body,” in which they introduce their framework of three interconnected bodies (individual, social, and the body politic), has shaped debates in medical anthropology over the last three decades and, as Yates-Doerr (2017: 142) puts it, represented “a zeitgeist for the field” (italics in original). Scheper-Hughes’s related, but more politicized idea of the “rebel body,” however—which she sketches in the following reprint—has not yet entered mainstream debates.

Originally published only in print in the Traditional Acupuncture Society Journal (Scheper-Hughes, 1991), the article conceptualizes the rebel body as one that “refuse[s] the demand to suffer quietly” and thereby reveals and challenges political etiologies of illness. We discovered the article in our preparation of the special issue (see Führer and Vorhölter, 2025) and found it to be extremely valuable for our reflections on liberation medicine—and surprisingly timely. The article offers a compelling analysis of the political causes and potentials of illness, of pain and its demand for recognition, and of the power of refusal. While some of these themes have since been prominently discussed in more recent scholarship (see e.g., Buchbinder, 2015; Hamdy, 2008; Rose Hunt, 2016; McGranahan, 2016; Simpson, 2014), the conceptualization of the rebel body remains provocative and relevant to contemporary debates in and on medicine. By republishing this article here, we hope to make it accessible to a new generation of scholars, practitioners, patients, and activists and hereby further their aspirations toward an understanding of medicine as a form of everyday resistance.

The article begins with a survey of anthropological understandings of and debates on the body, embodiment, and somatization. Based on her own fieldwork in North-Western Brazil, and using the framework of the “three bodies,” Scheper-Hughes reflects on the interrelations between the individual body, the social body, and the body politic. Through a reworking of established notions of illness, suffering, and healing, she proposes to understand illness as a form of bodily praxis that can be read as an expression of protest and rebellion to unequal and unjust social and political orders. Thus read, the moment of illness carries the potential for radical reflection and subsequent action, which medicine as well as society can either mute through biomedical cooptation or respond to with engagement in political therapy.

We are republishing the article with the kind permission of the British Acupuncture Council. The text has been lightly edited and this introductory note/abstract has been added by Amand-Gabriel Führer and Julia Vorhölter. We have added references that were missing in the original article and have removed those that were not mentioned in the text. Furthermore, we have included the works that we cite in this introductory note/abstract in the reference section. The article in the present form is reprinted with the permission of the author.