La dimensione corporea nella sociologia eliasiana

Abstract

This paper focuses on why and how the human body and corporeality change in the long-term civilization process. Through the Eliasian’s sociological prism, it explores the relation sociogenesis/psychogenesis and the interweaving between biological and social processes. In a processual perspective, that goes beyond dichotomies, the corresponding formation of social and psychic structures leads to make emerge the construction of personality, behaviour, emotions, identity, habitus, in the Eliasian’s concept of individuals and society as a whole. The figurational dynamics of changing societies create pressures, tensions and conflicts that are experienced by the human body, in the ineludible interweaving between evolutionary, development, social and psychic processes. The framework of the evolutionary biology and the great evolution is integrated in the Elias’s sociological perspective, in his overall vision of interdisciplinary research. The paper outlines how drives control become automatic, enlightened by the recent studies in neurosciences and evolutionary psychology; research is still open.