The Body and Social Constructionism (excerpt)

I refer you again to the story of Frankenstein, which has the subtitle “The Modern Prometheus”. According to Wikipedia:

"Modern Prometheus"
The Modern Prometheus is the novel's subtitle (though some modern publishings of the work now drop the subtitle, mentioning it only in an introduction). Prometheus, in some versions of Greek mythology, was the Titan who created mankind, and Victor's work by creating man by new means obviously reflects that creative work. Prometheus was also the bringer of fire who took fire from heaven and gave it to man. Zeus then punished Prometheus by fixing him to a rock where each day a predatory bird came to devour his liver.
Prometheus was also a myth told in Latin but was a very different story. In this version Prometheus makes man from clay and water, again a very relevant theme to Frankenstein as Victor rebels against the laws of nature and as a result is punished by his creation.
Prometheus' relation to the novel can be interpreted in a number of ways. For Mary Shelley on a personal level, Prometheus was not a hero but a devil, whom she blamed for bringing fire to man and thereby seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat (fire brought cooking which brought hunting and killing)[8] For Romance era artists in general, Prometheus' gift to man compared with the two great utopian promises of the 18th century: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, containing both great promise and potentially unknown horrors.
Byron was particularly attached to the play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and Percy Shelley would soon write Prometheus Unbound.

The myth of Prometheus can be related back to technology, metaphorically represented as the fire that he gave as a gift to humanity, and for which he paid the price of punishment by Zeus. The cautionary tale of the monster that is created through the work of a scientist who dares to meddle with Nature’s laws is the warning against wanting to equal oneself to God through use of technology to imitate creation. In this sense, we can begin to see the importance of questioning, like Csordas’ suggests, the dualities between subject and object. Technologies that affect fundamental biological functions, for example, confuse these categories by crossing the boundary between the creator and his creation, and by breaking the cultural taboo of human self-determination of our own nature, materiality and biology. This taboo helps us to understand why there is so much resistance to human cloning, harvesting stem-cells from embryos, germ-line engineering, transgenic plants and animals and other such existing technological hybrids. These same technologies break the boundary between nature and culture, by allowing science to alter, through technology, basic biological entities such as genes and their expression.
Many analyses of issues related to the body coming from the Social Sciences and Anthropology also make use of the term “culturally constructed”. Again, this would entail a biological base that is re-signified through specific cultures. While this idea has been productive in allowing for the understanding of many issues, it has not shown to be adequate in understanding instances where the body itself is being modified through culture and science. So called “social-constructionism” still understands the body as a fixed biological entity that can only be re-signified by thought and culture. It does not allow for a broader understanding of how biology itself is intertwined with culture and history.
Social construction can also mean that the body is completely fluid and changing, and such ideas have been associated with “postmodern” thinking in general. Without debating the pertinence of calling this approach post modern, it becomes clear that erasing biology in favor of a total predominance of culture is also to miss the target, and fail to explain how the body exists in society. Biological and material realities cannot be simply explained away culturally, and the infinite examples of body alterations and even genetic manipulation cannot be reduced to mere culture. Reifying culture, thus, is as unproductive as giving nature the sole heuristic ability to give answers to questions such as gender, sexuality, race, body modification, plastic surgery, reproduction, family, medicine, and the numerous other spheres of society where we see an interplay between bodies and cultures.
Again, ideas such as embodiment help us to avoid the pitfalls of reifying either end of the nature/culture duality, effectively suggesting alternatives to this debate. Whether it is the best alternative or not, this has to be tested out and debated, preferably as you research your specific topics. Again, the exercise here is to try to think beyond usual dualities and categories, and not to convert or offer a ready-made solution to the problem of the body in Anthropology.