The body is both the substratum of the person and its anchor point within a social group. It is through their body that individuals recognize themselves, identify themselves, and are affiliated with a cultural group, a population, an age, a sex or an ethnic group. The body is not only the external envelope of the individuals. It is at the same time a "clean body" in other words a flesh which is felt through feelings and affects. The body has a front and a back, an intimate side and an external side. We have a body which is seen and a body which is lived. The attacks on the perceived body have an impact on the intimate experience of the lived body. Thus, senescence is an objective and measurable physiological phenomenon, whereas old age is a complex notion which integrates - in addition to senescence - the body's own experience, the gaze of others and social representations.
The research of team 2 "Body, norms, health" has in common that it approaches the body from two sides: on the one hand, as a "body-object" and on the other hand, as a "body-subject". The vulnerable, painful, aged, handicapped, epidemic body is admitted in a space of care, taken in charge by health personnel within institutions on which it becomes dependent.
The body itself can become an element of treatment, be perceived as a biomaterial, through the practices of blood, tissue, hematopoietic cells or organs collection. The suffering body is treated with the resources of another's body. This is the case of organ transplants, cell transplants or blood transfusions. In this case, the body is not only the receptacle of treatments; it becomes itself a means of treatment available to failing bodies. The growing development of "biomedicine" modifies the representations of the body and calls for an anthropological and philosophical reflection that also includes the body-subject.
In health care institutions as well as in nursing homes, intervention practices on the human body are subject to legal, professional and ethical standards. These norms set limits to the invasion of the body's intimacy and integrity. In case of death, other norms are deployed, in other spaces, to protect the deceased, it being understood that respect for the body does not disappear with death. Thus, a duty of decency is imposed when the person has donated his body to science.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has also revealed cultural invariants in the attachment of relatives to the respect due to the body of the deceased. Here again, the approach to the body-object is inseparable from the consideration of the body-subject. The medical or odontological approach of the body must be completed by an approach in anthropology and in human and social sciences.
