Reading the body at von Hagen’s ‘body worlds’

Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 40, pp. 306–330, 20130160-7383/$ - see front matter � 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.08.008www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures

READING THE BODY AT VONHAGEN’S ‘BODY WORLDS’

Christina GouldingKeele University, United Kingdom

Michael SarenLeicester University, United Kingdom

Andrew LindridgeOpen University, United Kingdom

Abstract: Based on data collected through familiarization and netnography we explore thedifferent readings of the body at Von Hagen’s Body Worlds. We ground our data in a readingand interpretation that draws upon some of the debates from a cross disciplinary social sci-ence analysis. These include cultural anthropology, sociology and psychology. We present fiveexplanatory themes; the body as spectacle; the body as mortality salience; the body as com-modity; the body as machine and the dehumanized body. In doing so we also respond tothe call for greater attention to the consumer perspective within the field of thanatourism.Keywords: thanatourism, Body Worlds, netnography, commodification, dehumaniza-tion. � 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

ChUnivMarkconsdeveat LetouriMarkcultu

Morn after morn dispels the dark,Bearing our lives away,

Absorbed in cares we fail to markHow swift our years decay;

Some maddening draught hath drugged our souls,In love with vital breath,

Which still the same sad chart unrollsBirth, eld, disease and death.

Bhartrhari, Against the desire of worldly things.

ristina Goulding (Address: Keele Management School, Chancellors Building, Keeleersity, Staffordshire ST5 5BG. E-mail: <[email protected]>) is Professor ofeting at Keele University. Her research focuses largely on cultural and sub-cultural

umption, the ‘dark’ tourism experience, non conformist consumption and thelopment of qualitative research methodologies. Michael Saren is Professor of Marketingicester University. His research is concerned with critical issues in marketing, ‘dark’sm, services marketing and consumer identities. Andrew Lindridge is Senior Lecturer ineting at the Open University. He is particularly interested in issues of cultural tourism,re and acculturation and the impact on consumer identities.

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C. Goulding et al. / Annals of Tourism Research 40 (2013) 306–330 307

Death is inevitable. It is the one certainty that comes to us all andthroughout history humankind has battled to make sense of it, cele-brate it, deny it and fear it. Death, it would appear holds an under-standable fascination for us all and in turn we experience it in manydifferent forms. Death, dying and the dead body have also long beena source of entertainment and an integral part of the tourism sector.To quote Seaton (1996 p.234) ‘Death is the one heritage that everyoneshares and it has been an element of tourism longer than any otherform of heritage.’

There are many cases of death and dying as spectacle throughout his-tory. Early examples might include the public executions of Christiansin Roman amphitheatres, or the gladiatorial contests to the death, asacts of entertainment that attracted the masses. From the medieval per-iod to the last century the collective consumption of other spectaclessuch as attendance at public hangings, beheadings and disembowel-ments were common place, as were cemetery tours, and seances. AsStone (2006) points out, some notorious sites of execution such asTyburn prison in London, even built spectator platforms for betterviewing. Today our viewing habits may have changed slightly but deathstill remains a source of fascination. For example, as a celebrity you canbe forgiven any indiscretion, just so long as you die, and of course yourdeath or at least your post death can be captured and broadcast by themany forms of global communication that allow for instant reportingand endless repetition of the event (Stone & Sharpley, 2008). A nota-ble case in point would be the coverage of Princess Diana’s death andthe subsequent outpourings of grief and spontaneous makeshiftmemorial sites. Or, more recently the ‘Big Brother’ UK reality star,Jade Goody, who disgraced in life, managed to secure a deal with acable TV company to film her funeral after she discovered she had ter-minal cancer. Not to mention Michael Jackson’s untimely demisewhich resulted in a lottery for fans to attend his memorial performancewhere the coffin was placed ceremoniously in front of the stage whilefriends and fellow artists paid tributes in a show that was broadcastaround the globe.

Other forms of consuming death including slasher films, crime ser-ies that display slowed down, gratuitous scenes of killings and even reallife executions accessed via the internet are all vicarious forms of expe-riencing death; a form of death pornography (Stone & Sharpley, 2008;Tercier, 2005). In line with these is a growing sector of the tourismindustry labeled ‘dark tourism’ (Foley & Lennon, 1996) or thanatou-rism (Dann & Seaton, 2001; Seaton, 1996). Current day attractions in-clude holocaust museums and sites (Biran, Poria, & Oren, 2011;Lennon & Foley, 1999; Miles, 2002), battlefield sites (Dunkley,Morgan, & Westwood, 2011) prison camps (Strange & Kempa, 2003),sites of slavery (Dann & Seaton, 2001; Rasul, Mowatt and Chancellor,2011), the former homes of dead celebrities (Brom, 2000), ‘blackspots’, the sites where the deaths of celebrities occurred (Rojek,1993; Stone & Sharpley, 2008) and exhibits involving dead bodies(Leiberich, Loew, Tritt, Lahmann, & Nickel, 2006). Stone (2006)

308 C. Goulding et al. / Annals of Tourism Research 40 (2013) 306–330

categorizes dark tourism based on a spectrum of shades of darkness.He identifies seven key suppliers:

(1) Dark fun factories: These have entertainment as their core prod-uct and may include such places as the dungeons at Warwick Cas-tle where visitors can take part in their own execution.

(2) Dark exhibitions: Such exhibitions claim to have a more seriousor educational element and examples may include the Smithso-nian Museum’s exhibit of images and artifacts of the September11th attack.

(3) Dark dungeons: These may be penal institutions and sites ofjustice.

(4) Dark resting places: As the term suggests these are predominantlygraveyards or grave markers.

(5) Dark shrines: As in the case of Ground Zero in New York.(6) Dark conflict sites: These are largely sites associated with battles

and warfare and finally:(7) Dark camps of genocide.

In their sociological review of motivations to engage with death tour-ism, Stone and Sharpley (2008) provide a number of possibilitiesincluding ghoulish or tasteless motivations, the desacrelization of so-cial life, the privatization of death (Stone, 2012), the erosion of publicdeath rituals (see also Berridge, 2001 and Kellenhear, 2007 for elabo-ration on this point), the pervasiveness of the media in communicatingdeath and making death, which has largely become institutionalized,suddenly present and very real.

In this paper we make no attempt to cover the wide spectrum ofdeath attractions. Rather we focus on a specific exhibition, the Germanprofessor, Von Hagen’s Body Worlds, a travelling display of plastinatedcorpses which is in its twelfth year of touring and which continues toattract mixed reviews. For some the professor is vilified as a modernday Frankenstein, indulging in a spectacle of self-publicity (The Times21/11/02), his actions described as ‘a travesty of medical science, agrotesque pastiche of a dark, but necessary side of the healers art’(Blake, 2002). For others he is regarded as a champion of democracy,reclaiming the process of dissection and the workings of the body fromthe esoteric, elitist and exclusive medical profession. However, regard-less of the position adopted, Body Worlds is reputed to be the most suc-cessful exhibition ever, despite the fact that it has been the subject oflegal, ethical, religious and cultural controversy (Schulte-Sasse, 2006).

Based on qualitative data collected through familiarization with theexhibition and netnography, we explore the different readings of thebody by visitors to the exhibition. We recognize that the body has beenthe subject of intense scrutiny, theorizing and contestation within andacross disciplines such as philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology,medical science and psychology. We ground our data in an interpreta-tion that draws upon a number of key debates from a cross disciplinaryanalysis to present five key readings of the body. In doing so, we also


respond to the call for greater attention to the consumer view as averseto the production perspective so dominant in the thanatourism litera-ture (Biran et al., 2011; Stone & Sharpley 2008).

Von Hagen’s ‘Body Worlds’

Body Worlds, is an exhibition comprising numerous dead bodies, pre-served through a process of plastinisation, which replaces bodily fluidswith synthetic preservatives. The exhibition is promoted as an educa-tional experience with the aim of changing lifestyle choices and behav-ior through exposure to the inner workings of the body and organs. Thefocus of the exhibition is the process of aging and the effects of diseaseon the body from conception to the grave. As well as staging completehuman corpses posed to reveal the spatial relationship of internal or-gans, individual organs and bones are also featured in various stagesof development (Vom Lehn, 2006). The exhibition includes a skinnedman sitting astride a skinned horse, a chess player with his brain re-vealed, and the body of a young, pregnant woman with her swollen stom-ach open to reveal the fetus. Amongst the many exhibits are a series offetuses in various stages of development. Jones and Whitaker (2009) pro-pose that never before has the human body been exposed to the publicgaze in such an accessible manner. To date it has been visited by over 29million people at venues in cities across the world including Asia,Europe, the United States and Canada (Body Worlds site 2009).

Study Methods

Given the intense media interest, controversy and also acclaim, ourkey research question was relatively simple. It was to examine the nat-ure of visitors’ readings of the bodies displayed at Body Worlds. Thereare many different perspectives that Body Worlds could be analyzedfrom. For example, for those with a medical interest or backgroundthe anatomy and its functions and malfunctions could form the coreof the study. Religious controversy is another issue that has attractedcriticism and condemnation and would be a further area of analysis.Conversely, Body Worlds as art and the nature of art would make acompelling piece of research in itself. Our aim however was to exploreand analyze the readings of the exhibition from the perspective of the‘everyday’ lay visitor and not of those with a vested professional inter-est. Our objective was to develop an understanding of visitor readingsthat could provide insight into the nature of what people gain from vis-its to death or thana-attractions and particularly those attractions thathave the body as the main point of consumption.

Our guiding theoretical position was embedded in Consumer Cul-ture Theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). This is a sub-discipline ofconsumer research within marketing that emerged over the last decadeas a critique of the heavy emphasis on many aspects of traditional con-sumer research. For example the focus on buying over experiencing;


the machine metaphor of the consumer over emotions; the individualpsychological subject as averse to the social communal subject; and‘hard’ science embodied in positivist methodologies as averse to in-depth qualitative techniques. It also places the emphasis on less quan-titative aspects of behavior such as consumer identities and identityprojects, meaning making, historical influences and symbolic con-sumption. In keeping with this perspective we employed an inductiveinterpretivist approach to data collection that involved two stages.

Familiarization: The first stage of the research involved us familiariz-ing ourselves with the exhibition. The team consisted of three academ-ics who had conducted previous work into the body and itsrepresentation throughout history in art and the media. The contro-versy surrounding Von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibition led us to be-lieve that this would be a suitable context to pursue our enquiriesinto the nature of the body as a particular form of contemporary con-sumption. This was fuelled by the global nature of the exhibition andthe record breaking number of visitors. To begin with the three of usmet to discuss media reports, visual images, web sites and debates sur-rounding the exhibition. However, in order to conduct the research weneeded to familiarize ourselves with the context of the experience.This first step required us to visit Body Worlds for ourselves and gaina feel for all aspects of the exhibition. All three visited Body Worldsat the O2 in London during the summer of 2009 and spent the after-noon observing the content, layout and story line. This also gave us achance to observe visitor reactions to the displays. Given the ‘flayand display’ reputation of Von Hagens, our collective prior expecta-tions were of a somewhat grotesque portrayal of the human body. How-ever, the layout and staging of the exhibition owed more to a museumthan a freak show. The lighting was subdued and there was a clearroute around the display that was a mixture of plastinated bodies inspectacular poses and textual information about body organs, disease,birth, aging, death and even the diets of tribes who enjoyed extremelongevity. The environment had a clinical feel to it and there was littlesense that the bodies had once been living, social human beings. Thestripping of the skin, the exposure of veins, sinew, muscle, organs andthe clinical manner in which they were exposed, open and posed, dis-solved the distinction between mannequin and human.

Through the construction of memos noting body language, timespent at each exhibit and the type of conversations and questions gen-erated by each of the plastinates we also observed a range of behaviors,from fascination with the body as ‘art’, to involvement in exhibits thathad a particular resonance with the individual. For example smokerswould spend time analyzing a diseased lung, discuss their own smokinghabits and pledge a change of behavior. Others would express shock atthe effects of alcohol on the pancreas and liver. The result of confront-ing the stark reality of the damaging effects of smoking, drinking orovereating seemed to have an impact on the propensity to alter behav-ior as reported by Leiberich et al. (2006) whose research aimed to mea-sure emotional reactions to the displays at Body Worlds. Overall weobserved reactions which ranged from disgust at the one extreme,


although this was the minority, to clinical disassociation with the sub-jects, or the view that they were objects, routinely displayed in a mu-seum setting.

At this stage we employed a scaled down form of auto-ethnographyin order to begin constructing our analysis. Auto-ethnography is an ap-proach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematicallyanalyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understandcultural experience (ethno) (Holman-Jones, 2005). As a method,auto-ethnography combines characteristics of auto-biography and eth-nography. In writing the author may also interview others as well asconsult with texts, photographs, journals and readings to provide amore holistic interpretation (Ellis, Adams and Brochner, 2011).

At the end of the day these observations and reflections left us with avery different view of Body Worlds to the one we arrived with. We real-ized that analyzing our own experiences and observing the reactions ofvisitors on site provided us with an early set of insights. However, theydid not allow any analysis of meanings or an insider perspective of thevarious readings of the display. For this we employed netnographicanalysis of visitors post-visit discussions and shared experiences onblogging sites.

Netnography: For this part of data collection and analysis we employeda netnographic approach as pioneered by Kozinets (2002). Netnogra-phy is a technique designed as a means of investigating the behaviorof on-line communities. Its origins lie in ethnography, or the distinc-tive fieldwork used to understand meanings, practices and artifacts ofparticular social groups. Moreover as Kozinets suggests: ‘Ethnographicmethods have been continually refashioned to suit particular fields ofscholarship, research questions, research sites, times, researcher pref-erences and cultural groups (2002, p.62). Netnography is an adapta-tion of ethnography but with a focus on gathering data from avariety of on-line sources. In conducting this research we followedthe basic tenets as described by Kozinets; Namely:

Entree—This involved specifying the main research question(s) whichwere to identify the various readings of the body, and then identifyingparticular on-line forums that would provide us with answers. To thisend we conducted an extensive search of the net. A google search of‘Body Worlds’ provides 69,100,000 hits. Narrowed down to ‘BodyWorlds chat rooms’ and the number falls to a still very significant28,400,00, or 26,800,00 for ‘Body Worlds blogs’. We spent several weeksreviewing blogs that had high hit rates discarding those that werepurely publicity for the exhibition or consisted of simple one line com-ments. We also chose to ignore those that were exchanges betweenmedical students. Our aim was to capture the narratives of a range ofvisitors and not just special interest groups. We also wanted to includesites that had a ‘trail’ of conversations and exchange of views. Eventu-ally we chose seven blogging sites that had at their heart informationrelating to experiences of visiting Body Worlds from a cross sectionof lay visitors. In essence our sample was selected on the basis that par-ticipants had visited Body Worlds and had taken it upon themselves tointeract, share and compare their experiences with others. These sites


contained rich and detailed information and there was also evidence ofdeep reflection on a number of philosophical issues relating to thebody and its use as exhibit.

Data Collection and Analysis—This consisted of direct citation of indi-viduals’ narratives and we pursued an inductive approach, continuallyanalyzing stories until saturation was reached (Glaser and Srauss,1967). Netnography is primarily based on the analysis of textual dis-course and we employed the system of constant comparison to searchfor similarities and differences in readings of the body (Glaser andSrauss, 1967). We then looked for key concepts that offered a plausibleexplanation of the range and diversity of these readings (Goulding,2002).

Ethical Reporting—On-line forums dissolve traditional distinctions be-tween public and private space making conventions of anonymity, con-fidentiality and informed consent unclear (Kozinets, 2002). Accordingto Bruckman (2002, p.229) ‘The internet blurs traditional categorieslike ‘‘professional’’ versus ‘‘amateur’’, ‘‘published’’ versus ‘‘unpub-lished’’, ‘‘public’’ versus ‘‘private’’. Existing rules for the ethical con-duct of human subjects research that rely on these categories arethus difficult to extend to this new medium.’ Bruckman highlightssome of the ethical issues associated with on-line data collection.One of these is the fact that it is not possible for the researcher to travelto discuss participation in person with members of an on-line group,who, as in the case of this research, may live in different parts of theworld. Consideration, therefore has to be given as to the degree of riskto those involved. Bruckman (2002), referring to the ‘Protection ofHuman Subjects’ report (2001 p.102), defines low or minimal risk as‘the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated inthe research are not greater than those routinely encountered in dailylife or during the performance of routine or psychological examina-tion or tests.’

Given this definition we thought we could justifiably classify this workas low risk. We were not dealing with sensitive or personal aspects ofthe participant’s lives and the information we used was already publi-cally accessible to all. We did, however, take note of an important pointregarding site names and individual pseudonyms. Bruckman (2002)suggests that on-line pseudonyms are often used across different sitesand may, over time, come to serve the same means of identificationas real names. As such they should be treated in the same way as actualnames. To this end we have removed the names of the blog sites andalso the pseudonyms of the participants. The sites in this study are sim-ply referred to as 1-7.

A Short note on evaluating on-line data collection techniques: in line withthe rise in on-line forums for communicating comes increased oppor-tunity for researching and collecting data from many diverse on-linecommunities dedicated to sharing common interests and experiences.However, such forums and the data derived from them carries certainlimitations, particularly if the researcher is observer rather than activeparticipant. In particular:


(1) The selection of participants is largely outside of the control ofthe researcher. Therefore sampling cannot be pre-determined.

(2) The discussion agenda is also determined by participants and theresearcher has little control over the direction it takes.

(3) There is little opportunity to explore issues in further detail or torequest expansion and elaboration on points deemed central tothe research issue.

(4) There is seldom the chance to explore the histories and back-grounds of individual participants (unless it is part of the groupdiscussion) and how this impacts upon the experience.

Consequently, while netnographic techniques have much to offer interms of reaching a wide, sometimes global audience, they must betreated with caution depending on the nature, scale and objectivesof the work.

FINDINGS

Central to our findings is the fact that the meanings derived from vis-iting Body Worlds are multi-layered and reliant upon a number of fac-tors, not the least of which is the different readings of the displayedbodies and importantly, the degree to which the bodies can be objec-tified. In the following section we discuss five themes; the body as spec-tacle; the body as mortality salience; the body as commodity; the bodyas machine and finally the de-humanized body.

The Body as Spectacle

According to Debord (1970) spectacles present themselves to view;there is little hidden. They fill time and space with colourful, intricateand complicated surfaces and above all the spectacle is visual. WhilstBody Worlds is presented in a museum like setting with the ‘exhibits’interspersed with medical information about glass covered organs,there is no denying that the careful orchestration of the bodies, thelighting, the text and the subtexts are all designed to stimulate thegaze. Body Worlds is highly visual and may be described as a modernday spectacle. It relies on the gaze and there is nothing left to theimagination. It is extreme in its graphicness which acts as a parodyof real life. The scenes are all ‘unreal’, but at the same time real, asevidenced by the comment that ‘the bodies don’t look real, but itmakes a difference knowing that they are’ [from blog 3]. The sus-pended corpses, staged in extreme imitations of their key definingactivities, invite or compel the audience to leave aside normal defini-tions of the acceptable and step outside of the boundaries of the ta-ken for granted everyday practice. At the minimum philosophicaland reflexive level, the body as exhibit, and indeed death itself, wassimply viewed as a spectacle and described as such. For example, inone exchange of views:


Surreal . . . I have nothing against exhibiting the dead around theworld, but the spectacle seems to be a bigger deal than theinformation.Response . . .But when it comes to death, isn’t it always a spectacle?Reply . . .Not when it hits close to home. [From blog 1].

Accordingly, death can be viewed as a spectacle so long as it has nopersonal connections or significant meaning to the individual. Anothervisitor had some qualms about the posed and displayed nature of thebodies which appeared to cause some dissonance regarding the useof human bodies, but this was overshadowed by a fascination withthe display.

My only slight concern with the exhibit was the artistic displays of thehuman body, which seemed kind of unnecessary. It’s hard to remem-ber sometimes that these were actually human beings. Especiallywhen one sees displays like the drawer man, where chunks were cutand pulled out of the body like drawers and the spiral man, whosebody was cut out like spirals. And the ballerina, football and yoga posi-tions . . . I know it says it’s to show the muscles of the human body inaction, but it felt that they were placed like that for a better display.I’m aware that if they didn’t do things like these, I probably wouldn’thave found the exhibit quite as fascinating, but then the other part ofme remembers that these were real . . .[From blog 2]

It would appear the more ‘spectacular’ the poses and the more re-moved from normal corporeality, the easier it is for visitors to indulgein the spectacle, despite the fact that doubts about ethics do tend todisrupt the enjoyment of the display. According to Kayser (1963 p.2)such representations in art ‘‘can be defined as art whose form and sub-ject matter appear to be part of, while contradictory to, the natural, so-cial or personal worlds of which we are part. Its images most oftenembody distortions, exaggerations, a fusion of incompatible parts insuch a fashion that it confronts us as strange and disordered, as a worldturned upside down.’’ At the same time they can effect in the viewerfeelings of fascination, amusement and fear (Friedman, 2000; Wright,1968).

The bodies at Body Worlds are exposed and open. They are dis-played in poses that are an exaggeration of real life. They invite curios-ity, fascination and in some cases disgust. In its parody of the humanbody we can find overtones of Bakhtin’s treatment of Rabelais’ work.Bakhtin (1984) describes what he terms the carnival or grotesque bodywhich is the human incarnation of carnival, providing a corporeal sitefor renewal and invigoration through its orifices. This body is ‘open’and interactive with the outside world. Openness creates fecundityregenerating the world by creating life—in pregnancy and birth, andalso by surrendering it. The carnival body is in effect the expressionof both scatological and sexual activities. The orifices of the body arethe focus of attention and the bodily processes of eating, spittingand copulating are all exaggerated. Equally birth and death are treatedin an irreverent fashion. In the imaging of the body, body parts are jux-taposed and connected, defying easy recognition and leveling any


sense of one part as private or public, good or bad, repulsive or attrac-tive (Bakhtin, 1984).

The Bakhtinian ‘carnivalesque’ body, which is ‘open’ is probably atits extreme in Body Worlds which is a parody of real life where theunacceptable becomes acceptable. Corpses are suspended and frozenin time, continuing their game of chess, riding a horse, practicing yogaor playing basketball. They are flayed and stripped of their outer layersto reveal the human form in its most naked and exposed condition.Nothing is kept from the public gaze. Norms are challenged, conven-tions are flouted and the unexpected becomes the expected in a par-ody and reversal of human life. Through plastination thesemannequin corpses act as a juxtaposition of life and death but they alsomake us question our own motives regarding the status of the individ-uals whilst at the same time reminding us of our own mortality.

The Body and Mortality Salience

Whilst we are always consciously or subconsciously aware of our mor-tality, certain events may catapult the possibility of death into the fore-fronts of our mind (disasters, war) and in the West the threat ofterrorism that has increased since the US was attacked by terroristsfor the first time on its own soil in 2001. Amidst this increased mortalitysalience death related attractions appear to be flourishing. Von Hagen’sBody Worlds has been visited by over twenty nine million people glob-ally and similar copy cat attractions are also benefiting. Such numbersmight suggest that the constant portrayal of death on a daily basis andour increased awareness of our own vulnerability is a contributing fac-tor to the increase in visits to death related attractions. In the first ofthe following two narratives, the visitor reinforces the notion that itis distance or the lack of identification that makes death palatable, evenpleasurable, ‘by turning the familiar into the unfamiliar’. Death and thedead body in its unadulterated form forces a reaction that disconcertsus, it forces us to confront the reality of death, violence and war.

Under most circumstances, mutilated human bodies do not make forparticularly appealing visual stimuli because they force us to face thereality of death, violence, war and pain. But with a little alchemy ofthe mind—and of the body too, by turning the familiar into the unfa-miliar—we are seemingly able to bend our notions of what we find tol-erable, and distort and contort the dead to pleasure, turning the stuffof nightmares into the stuff of dreams. [From blog 1].

The second narrative also talks about the physical, reified nature ofdeath which has a much more profound effect and acts as a reminderof something which we would normally wish to suppress.

It may be arguable whether explicit pictures of the dead have signif-icant effect on the public’s opinion, but we may reason that comingface to face with lifeless and broken bodies does make death andwar more graspable and tangible. [From blog 1].This raises questions about how we deal with death in late capitalistsociety


Berridge (2001) provides an interesting analysis of how death is trea-ted in western secular society charting changes from the Victorians’ cel-ebration of the corpse, through to the devastation of two world warswhich swept away centuries of tradition, to the present day. Until the1950s most deaths occurred in the home accompanied by communaland family rituals. The corpse would remain in the home, usually inthe parlor and the event would be communicated through the closingof curtains. Today most deaths happen in hospital, out of sight. Insome countries the norm is that the body is then brought to the fun-eral parlor where it is revitalized through make-up, hair styling anddressing. In effect there has been a distancing from the act and a movefrom the private family to public institution where death is treated ascrisis management (see also Kellenhear, 2007).

According to one particular psychological view, despite the declinein public rituals and the secularization of society we still need to devel-op strategies to deal with death. Terror management Theory (Green-berg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997) suggests that events that makean individual’s mortality more salient lead to potentially overwhelmingexistential anxiety and results in behavior directed at alleviating thisanxiety (Ferraro and Bettman, 2005). The attacks of September 11th

2001 and subsequent attacks in Madrid, Bali, Mumbai and London sud-denly made death and its possibility a stark reality, a shocking reminderof our own vulnerability and mortality (Pyszcysnki and Solomon, 2003).The resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq further bring death intoour living rooms as the body count mounts on an almost daily basis.

Terror Management Theory (TTM) was developed as a lens forunderstanding behaviours that are influenced by the uniquely humanknowledge of our own mortality. The most salient reminder of this isthe body as the vehicle through which life passes into death (Goldenberg,Pyszcynski, & Greenberg, 2000). TMT is based on the work of thecultural theorist Ernest Becker (1973) who proposed that humans facea unique existential dilemma. First we are animals with an inherent in-stinct for self preservation, but second, we are intelligent, reflectivebeings which makes us aware not only of our own imminent deathbut also of the fact that it can occur at any time; through illness, vio-lence, accident or terrorism. Accordingly, without some strategies formanaging this awareness we would be in a constant state of terror.TMT suggests that in order to deal with this problem we developcertain death denying cultural belief systems. Such systems provide an-swers to basic questions as how should I live my life? What happensafter I die? Meanings may be found in certain practices such as reli-gion, tarot cards or horoscopes whereby individuals are rewarded witha form of symbolic immortality (Goldenberg et al., 2000).

Death related tourism may be one such practice that allows individ-uals to confront and contemplate mortality moments from a safe dis-tance and in a safe environment (Stone & Sharpley, 2008). Visits tosuch attractions offer a means of confronting death face to face butas can be gleaned from the narratives they are confronting bodies thatwere once alive, but have been given their own form of unique immor-tality. However, the price of this is that they have been stripped of their


identity, posed, manipulated and dehumanized. The disgust of decayhas been removed (Fessler & Navarrete, 2005) and they are reconcep-tualised as either objects, art or machines.

The Commodified Body

The study of the commodified body is not a new proposition giventhat the body in its entirety or its parts has long been an object of eco-nomic, social or symbolic use in a host of societies. Examples includeslavery, female reproduction, the sale of body organs, prostitution, tat-toos, modifications (Sharpe, 2000) and, as we noted in the introduc-tion, tourism. Commodification requires objectification in some form,transforming persons and their bodies from a human category intoobjects of economic exchange (Sharpe, 2000). The commodificationhypothesis proposes that culture becomes popular culture and inthe process a series of staged authenticity occurs (Cohen, 1988). In-deed it is this authenticity that according to Von Hagen distinguisheshis work from that of copy cat late comers. To quote from his BodyWorld site; Body Worlds resonates with the public ‘because it fillsthe longing for the authentic in a time of practically unlimited repro-ducibility’. But it is not only the bodies that are transformed, it is themanner in which they are perceived and read as commodified objectthat allows the viewers to engage without guilt. Through the technol-ogy of plastination the human body is transformed into a work of arttherefore blurring the boundary between the human subject andexhibited object. For a number of participants the exhibits wereviewed not so much as human corpses, but as works of art. Forexample:

I saw body world 11 when they were in Boston last year and loved it. Ithought the way that they displayed the bodies was so artistic. This wasdefinitely a lot more interesting than my anatomy class I took. All Ican say is that everyone should have the chance to see Body Worlds.It was just so beautiful. I guess it makes you look at your body a littledifferently and somehow I came out loving my body in a whole differ-ent way. [From blog 2]

However, while such stories were common many others who partici-pated in the blogs were far more critical of the images and messagespresented. There was a very real sense that what was on display wasmore to do with show business and profit than any real artistic or med-ical objectives. For example the first of the following narratives likensthe ‘benefits’ of Body Worlds to those of the home of advertising,Madison Avenue.

The plasticized real bodies are very unreal, and deny the reality ofdeath. Their public display is convenient for gawking but the pur-ported benefits to science and education originate from Madison Ave-nue. Most importantly, although the exhibits try to have it both waysand claim to be art as well as science, human beings are not works ofart. [From blog 3]


Others were even more adamant about the use of human bodies forprofit and the blatant commercial economic motives behind theexhibition:

I think the whole idea of this makes me sick. All of those people wereonce alive. It really makes me mad that they are not identified.Human bodies should NOT be used for profit. They say it’s to edu-cate people but they are making millions off of it. [From blog 2].

The third account actually uses the term commodity and is reflexiveabout the commodification of everyday life:

The exhibit literally solidifies the body’s place in consumer cultureassuring us that nothing can escape becoming a commodity. [Fromblog 5]

And the next uses the term objects and discusses the danger ofcheapening the value of life through the use of deceased bodies insuch a manner.

It is not always possible or necessary to come up with a reason whysomething is wrong, but if I was to single out one reason, it wouldbe that we show respect for the living by respecting the remains ofthe deceased. These exhibits cheapen the value of life. It is a shortstep to treating people as objects that in their turn are not valuable.[From blog 3].

At Body Worlds the ‘exhibits’ are stripped of their human identity.There is nothing to shed light on their actual lives and experiences.On the contrary, each one has a signature card attached which bearstheir title, Von Hagen’s signature and the date of creation, thus mark-ing the plastinates as artworks and Von Hagen’s as artist (Burns, 2007).In doing so each individual is denied their history and identity; they arereduced to the status of commodity. Appadurai (1986) proposes thatcommodities, like persons have social lives. They have histories andbiographies of their own and none more so than a former, living hu-man being whose whole previous existence is erased to be replacedwith a title which alters how the body is read. According to Foucault(1977), all bodies are historical, history recognizes no constraints, it re-veals and analyses a body which is totally imprinted by history. But atBody Worlds, history is eradicated and replaced by the ‘artist’s’ crea-tion and a new ‘date of birth’ marking the beginning of a new history.In effect, the process of plastination imbues the body with a host ofnew interpretations. For de Certeau (1984), there is agency in appro-priation and reinterpretation or the manipulation of the commodityby users who are not producers. This is related to the process/powerinvolved in creativity. Von Hagen’s is not the original creator of thesubject, but has adopted the role of creator of the appropriated andreinterpreted body and the meanings derived from it.

Mauss (1967) suggests that commodities are symbolically chargedwith meaning, as in the case of the gift. At Body Worlds, the gift isthe donation of the human body. Appadurai (1986) discusses the trans-formative process of human body parts which constitute a form offetishization. He gives the example of a dead woman’s transplantable


heart which may embody the essence of a loved one, while simulta-neously be transformed into a gift for a recipient and an object of de-sire for the surgeon. Von Hagen’s utilizes discourse that proselytizesthe gift of his work; education about the body; changes in lifestyle;the demystification of medicine and the mastery of science over nature.Advances in technology and the discourses used in effect legitimizeways to fragment and use the body. Objectifying the body enables sci-entists to extract, use and patent body parts and tissue without refer-ence to the person involved (Andrews and Nelkin, 1998). However,the implications of fragmenting the body, or altering it beyond recog-nition as at Body Worlds, whether for medical or economic reasonsraises questions regarding body boundaries, the integrity of the selfand the shifting social worth of human beings (Sharpe, 2000). In es-sence this exhibition problematises the boundary between life anddeath and the status of the exhibits. Are they dead people or plasticrepresentations? (Walter, 2004, p.472).

The Body as Machine

Lash (1992) talks about cultural objects as commodities and the pro-cess of diffusion from the elite to the broader sections of the popula-tion. With Body Worlds, the exhibits are not only consumed ascultural objects/art, but also as a revelation of what has been ‘hidden’to all but those involved in the medical professions, namely the intri-cate workings of the human body. Whilst many did point out theethical issues of treating the body as object, there was also a view thatwhat Von Hagen was doing was just an extension of medical practices.As Walter (2004) points out, for the last five hundred years westernmedicine has treated the body as a machine, divorced from the subjec-tive body of everyday experience. Accordingly the ‘defunct machinemay no longer function, but all its parts may be carefully dissected,examined and displayed for the benefit of clinicians, researchers andstudents’ (p.472). Indeed a number of visitors were able to disassociatethe notion of the exhibit as human and in doing so adopted a moreclinical perspective. For example in the following narrative the partic-ipant discusses a sense of fascination with the bodies but also a clearlack of identification with them as former human beings. Even the lan-guage used denigrates the individuals to the level of food:

Men, women and children of all ages, casually flirted with the corpseson display at the Body Worlds exhibit at the Ontario Science Centrein 2005, and even I was surprised at my own desinvolture before thiscadaveric carnival. I even found myself fascinated with the pregnantlady’s exposed fetus like a pried open apricot, and the fat man’s slicedepidermis like large slices of bacon. [From blog 1].

Others saw the bodies as exposed machines that offered an insightinto the mechanics of human functioning:

Children, grandparents, scientists, engineers, and people from allwalks of life, gazed in wonder at the miraculous structures that hide


within. Body Worlds brings us back to our most primal origins as fleshand bone, conveying the immaculate beauty and design of the animalwithin each one of us. The exhibit highlights the artistry and capabil-ities of the human body as our most primitive, yet by far advancedmachine—from the delicate micro-capillaries that feed every inch oftissue, to the massive musculature that empowers us. [From blog 7]

Another visitor spoke of the impact that this exposure to the work-ings of this machine had on his intentions to change behavior:

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised, totally amazed, and only alittle grossed out. Yes you look at real dead bodies with their skinremoved. Yes they are sliced and diced in a way that mirrors art morethan science. But you will leave the exhibit with a greater understand-ing of the human body, and a desire to stop bad habits (like smoking)when you see what your organs look like. [From blog 4]AndIn addition to providing a window into the miracle of the humanbody, the exhibit also illustrates the damage we can inflict on this vitalmachinery throughout our lifetimes. Shock and dismay overtook view-ers of the fatty liver, bloated and failing from decades of drive-through burgers and fists full of potato chips . . . the smokers lung, lit-erally an ash tray of gray particulate matter from each and everyinhaled cigarette . . .and the nooks and crannies of the arthritic kneejoint, scarred from years upon years of wear and tear. This is wherethe message really hits home. Your body is a temple, and while youmay not notice externally, your daily decisions and behaviors slowlytake their toll, often with horrifying consequences. Judging by thehushed comments and somber nature of the crowd, the message isnot taken lightly. [From blog 7]

From the Renaissance onwards dissection offered new ways of seeing,understanding and fragmenting the body, generating new forms ofknowledge and socio-political power (Foucault, 1975). More recenttechnologies have rendered possible permanent transformation ofthe body (Sharpe, 2000). Body Worlds acts as a reinforcement of Carte-sian Dualism, the separation of body and mind, or a machine view ofthe body that allows it to be acted upon. In effect body = machine,mind = attribute of humans, with the implication that the death ofthe mind makes the body eligible for vivisection or other practices suchas plastination (Gerber, 1997). This view of the body has been ques-tioned by many. For example Merleau-Ponty (1962) uses the term‘body-subject’ which denies the separation of conscious mind and phys-ical body suggesting that meaning is not produced by transcendentalconsciousness, but by an engaged body subject. Crossley (1996) inhis comparison of the work of Foucault and Mereau-Ponty suggests thatboth view the body as simultaneously active and acted upon; a locus ofaction and a target for power. The exhibition also resonates withHaraway’s (1985) vision of the cyborg or posthuman where the inter-face of human/technology sees the erosion of boundaries betweenthe human and technological creation. Haraway challenges modernistdualisms such as nature/culture, employing the metaphor of thecyborg to explore the rejection of the organic body in the larger socialcontext of machine desire (Hamilton, 1997). Medical practice now


routinely relies on technologically generated images of the inner bodyby x-ray, body scan, MRI, etc (Waldby, 2000). As Morgan (1991 p.30)suggests ‘‘we have arrived at the stage of regarding ourselves as bothtechnological subject and object, transformable and literally creatablethrough biological engineering’’.

Dehumanizing the Human Body

Through a process of commodification and objectification thecorpses at Body Worlds undergo a process of dehumanization. Haslam(2006) points to two forms of dehumanization; the first involves deny-ing the individual a sense of humanness by removing any characteris-tics that are uniquely human. The second involves the denial ofcharacteristics that constitute human nature. Denying human charac-teristics represents them as animal like while denying human naturerepresents them as objects or automata. One thing that emerged fromour analysis was that the greater the distance of identification the morethe bodies could be viewed as objects with very little empathy. Forexample in the following extract the visitor recounts a form of gradualimmunization and diminished emotional connection the longer andmore prolonged the exposure to the exhibits:

In the descriptions accompanying each piece the bodies were alwaysreferred to as ‘plastinates’ which removed the identity of the personwho donated their body to the exhibit. However, the identity wasoften given back to them through the use of the persons eyes and/or hair. This I thought was the most haunting part of the whole exhi-bit but at the same time it was strangely calming. It was a weird con-tradiction that as the exhibit went on I became null and immune to it.My friend noted this by pointing out that the plastinates became lessof a novelty as we saw more of them. With each additional plastinatethe emotional firepower each one held diminished noticeably. [Fromblog 6]

However, the more visitors could relate to or identify with the exhibitthe greater the empathy, emotional attachment (Rasul et al., 2011) andrecognition of humanness. For instance, in the following extract thevisitor compares the images of dead soldiers returning after war which‘hits home’, while the ‘dancing cadavers’ fail to evoke any real emo-tional reaction.

It seems that our levels of involvement in matters of pain-inflictionand death have everything to do with how and who we identify with.The amount of empathy we choose to mobilize appears to depend onthe degree of connection we feel and what the context of this connec-tion is . . .And when it comes to the dead, it seems we are most both-ered when we can relate to them by a temporal or familiarityrelationship . . .or if the circumstances of their death somehow hithome . . .Pictures of coffins of dead soldiers? That hits home. Anony-mous dancing cadavers? Not so much . . .and for this reason I willcarry on flirting with the contorted dead but cringing at the flag cov-ered coffins. [From blog 1]


On the other hand, those that could relate through personal experi-ence to the exhibit tended to imbue the body with a sense of humanityand loss.

As a mother, I was drawn to the exhibit on pregnancy. I could seewhat an embryo and then fetus looked like from conception to birth.I caution you, it was mildly disturbing. Seeing the work brought backsome painful memories for me. My little son was fascinated; I thinktoo young to understand that some mother had to lose each one ofthese babies in order for us to see them on display. [From blog 4]

This exhibit in itself raises questions over body boundaries anduniqueness and autonomy. Is the fetus part of the female body or anentity in its own right, and if so does the mother have the right to do-nate it? These are ethical questions that are beyond the scope of thispaper, but our final narrative does present a clear warning of the dan-gers of dehumanization:

Out of respect for the living, the bodies of the deceased should betreated with respect. By treating our bodies as mere objects like thisexhibition does, we cheapen the value of life. As we reduce ourselvesto objects we open ourselves to the attitude that who cares if a few, ora few million of these objects are damaged or killed. Hitler and Stalinboth dehumanized their victims to make their destruction more pal-atable. [From blog 3].

This comment reflects the concerns of many people regarding theproper disposal of bodies after death; which highlights conflictingviews of what the body is, the extent to which the body can be consid-ered a constituent of selfhood and how its boundaries should be de-fined (Seale, Cavers, and Dixon-Woods, 2006). A focus onembodiment ultimately foregrounds the dualistic separation of bodyand self. ‘‘This dualism so rampant in medical practice facilitates thedepersonalization—and thus the dehumanization—of persons asbodies, a process that ultimately allows for the commodification ofthe body and its parts’’ (Sharpe, 2000 p.209).

DISCUSSION

‘Plato believed that the body was a ‘tomb’, Paul said that it was the‘temple’ of the Holy Spirit, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taughtthat it was a corpse, Christians believed and believe that the body isnot only physical but also spiritual and mystical and many believedthat it was an allegory of church, state and family. Some said it was cos-mic; one with the planets and the constellations. Descarte wrote thatthe body is a ‘machine’ and this definition has underpinned bio-med-icine till this day; but Satre said that the body is the ‘self’(Synnott, 1992, p.79)

This eloquent summary by Synnott illustrates the highly complex,multifaceted and contradictory nature of the body and the various dis-courses surrounding its meaning and consequently its treatment. We


have taken a highly controversial exhibition that has the human bodyat the core of its experience. For more than a decade Body Worlds hasattracted criticism and praise in equal measure, but certainly no short-age of visitors who every year come in greater numbers driven by a vari-ety of expectations. We have focused on how visitors read the body andhave identified five themes that start to illuminate the complex rela-tionship between exhibit and audience which range from spectacle,mortality salience, commodification, viewing the body as a machineto the dehumanization of the body. These various readings also involvea degree of identification or conversely detachment and disassociationand in this final section we briefly review each of the themes.

The first of the themes is spectacle and the bodies at Body Worldscertainly constitute ‘spectacle’ in their staged and posed parodies oftheir former lives. The rich tapestry of human life, from birth, throughaging, to death is laid out at the exhibition in its most open exposedand exaggerated form. Howard (1964) suggests that the human eyeand man’s imagination have always been fascinated by the bizarreand the unusual. The bodies displayed at Body Worlds engender bothcuriosity and perplexity and attraction and repulsion. They incorporateincompatible elements where the monstrous and human abound inthe imagery (Haphram, 1982). To draw on the work of Skrade(1974), such representations can engage us in such a way that baffle-ment, mystery and possibility are all experienced. The fusion of organ-ic and inorganic parts, the distortion of natural forms, and theexaggeration of fundamental aspects of life such as birth, sex, death,scatological processes, aging, size and gender, not only surprise andbaffle us, they call forth a mixture of feelings, often contradictory, offear, dread and repulsion, of fascination, amusement and derision.But they are also seen as objects of complex beauty removed fromthe realm of death and decay into a staged aesthetic spectacle thatfuses the incompatible in such a way as to fascinate the viewing public.However, whilst this exhibition has resonance with Bakhtin (1984) car-nivalesque or grotesque body in its inversion and reversal of the every-day body, this is no medieval carnival. It is a controlled and managedspectacle and owes as much to clever staging and design as any care-fully planned stage setting or store layout.

The theoretical background of the Body Worlds presentation ofexhibits is similar to that applied in retailing where an aesthetic,embodied experience is created to shopping consumption atmo-spheres in order to produce a seductive aesthetic manipulation of cus-tomers (Korczynski, 2005). Here such aesthetics are employed as anactive social power (Murray & Ozanne, 1991). It is suggested thatspaces create atmospheres, subtle forms of power, which are indetermi-nate, spatial bearers of moods, and affective powers of feeling thatinfluence people’s corporeal perception and state of mind. Researchhas acknowledged that consumers’ experiences involve further aes-thetic encounters and responses, many of which are stimulated by as-pects of the environment such as design, events and entertainment(Fiore & Kim, 2007; Miller, Jackson, Thrift, Holbrook, & Rowlands,1998). In a similar vein, Von Hagen has employed aesthetic techniques


of lighting, staging and decorating in order to create a sophisticatedatmosphere within a site of various embodied experiences (Underhill,1999) which is not out of line with many museum interpretations oreven medical science itself. As Laqueuer (1992, p.72) reminds us, itis the desire of modern science to ‘confront, master and representthe tuths of the body in a self consciously theatrical and publicfashion’.

Nonetheless, while spectacle cannot be denied, reading of the bodymay hold deeper meaning that enables the viewer to reflect, questionand connect with notions of death and mortality; a modern day strat-egy for dealing with and understanding death (Greenberg et al.,1997). Stone (2012) reinforces the idea that in most secular societiesdeath has become sequested behind medical and professional facades.At the same time extraordinary death is recreated for popular con-sumption and in doing so bridges the gap, or acts as a social filter be-tween life and death. Exhibitions such as Body Worlds provide both aphysical and cognitive space to reflect on mortality. The posed and arti-ficial staging of the bodies may make us question their former human-ity, but they also serve to remind us of our own inevitable death. Thisbecomes even more salient in late modern society where illness, deathand decay are problematic given the celebration of the healthy, thebeautiful and above all the living body (Walter, 2004).

Interestingly, the Body Worlds creator, Von Hagens’ latest work andpossibly his most controversial to date is a life size crucifix with thebody of Christ reconstructed from human bone and veins which havebeen injected with plastinate. In a documentary entitled ‘Crucifixion’screened on Channel 4 on April 8th 2012, Von Hagen, a professedatheist, spoke of this work which he planned to take to Rome to pres-ent to the Pope, as his finest to date. In the late stages of ParkinsonsDecease and unable to work on the body himself, he revealed hisown desire to live on after death in the words, ‘this Jesus will last longafter my death and will say created by Von Hagen’’. Whether Von Ha-gen has found religion with the realization of his own impending deathis not for us to speculate, but the need to reify and make physical sometangible reminder of our existence is a fairly common human need.

Stone and Sharpley (2008) suggest that dark tourism allows death tobe brought back into the public realm and aid the social neutralizationof death for the individual. One explanation of dark tourists’ motiva-tions is that they are in search for the ‘other’, which is most closelylinked to a search for authenticity (Uriely, 2005). Wang (1999) arguesthat what tourists are actually seeking is ‘‘their own authentic selvesand inter-subjective authenticity, and the issue of whether the touredobjects are authentic is irrelevant or less relevant’’ (Wang (1999: 365-66). Body Worlds offers the opportunity to interact with dead bodiesnot only without personal connection but also without the smellsand undeniable reality of death. ‘A body must appear foreign, like adeclasse actor or a detourne implant, so that humanity may feel athome in its own skin (Cotton, 2006, p.145). At Body Worlds visitorsexperience a world of bodies as the ‘other’, yet many reflect on thenature of their own body, the self. Encounters with these cadavers


ultimately demands the reconfiguration of self/other relations at everyturn. The plastinated body of a woman, in her fifth month of preg-nancy, with the fetus openly displayed in her womb is the exhibit thathas attracted the most attention (Moore and Brown, 2008) due to itsemotive nature that for many is too close to home. Paralleling Shake-speare’s (1994) objectification of disabled people in the mass media,this exhibit is one where ‘‘the gaze focuses on the body . . .particularaspects of the body are exaggerated . . . the viewer is manipulated intoan emotional response’’ (p.73). The chess player on the other hand,with his brain exposed, will never again claim check mate, nor willthe basket ball player ever succeed in dropping the ball in the net.There is something about their staging that suggests the end of the ma-chine. The blood, bone and sinew dissolve the ‘human’ from the body.They are dead bodies in commodified form, reified objects, and assuch part of a broader market system. The pregnant woman however,is read with empathy and identification. It would appear that bodiescan be read as objects or as machines up until the point when theypresent the viewer with a moral dilemma, identification or emotionalconnection. However, this raises questions regarding transforming hu-man subjects into objects or pure biological machines.

Of course Von Hagen is by no means the first to treat the body as amachine. The history of medical involvement with bodies is repletewith instances of commercialization, as in the demand for corpsesfor dissection (Seale et al., 2006). However our acceptance of this is of-ten predicated on the power of dominant discourse. Foucault (1972)contends that the language of bio-medicine is produced through dis-course which creates its own objects of analysis. In the process thesemantically produced body is reduced to the status of a sign whichin turn renders it passive (Lock, 1993b) or malleable. Today we are wit-nessing a transition in body perceptions and practices which sees theend of one kind of body and the beginning of another. One whichis open, flexible unbounded (Martin, 1992; Sharpe, 2000) materialand negotiable.

The recent so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social science emphasizes andproblematizes the materiality of thinking, represented most notablyby the ubiquitous—and much criticized—‘actor-network-theory’ (La-tour, 2005; Law & Urry, 2004). The broader spatial and material theoryhowever provides a philosophical and ontological underpinning forthe contested materiality of the ‘real’ world (Lefebvre, 1974/1991).Thrift (2006) notes that this ‘‘has proved to be a move of extraordinaryconsequence because it questions categories like ‘material’, ‘life’ and‘intelligence’ through an emphasis on the unremitting materiality ofa world where there are no pre-existing objects. Rather, all kinds of hy-brids are being continually recast by processes of circulation within andbetween particular spaces’’ (2006 p.139). The transformation of bodiesat Body Worlds into commodities ‘reorders’ the normative social per-ceptions of life, objects, body and mind where the very sense of selfas body is obscured (Sharpe, 2000, p.290).

Ultimately, the medicalization of life, the fragmentation of the body,and the subjectification of embodied subjects all potentially dehuman-


ize individuals and categories of persons in the name of profit (Sharpe,2000, p.293). As in the case at Body Worlds, the medicalized body isoften ‘reified, isolated, decontextualised and abstracted from real time,actual location and social space (Lock, 1993a, p.370–71). According toLackoff (1987, p.9) The world is understood not only in terms of indi-vidual things but also in terms of categories of things to which we tendto attribute a ‘real existence’. At Body Worlds this can be seen throughthe categorization and labeling of organs and bodies giving them newfunctions and narratives. They have been stripped of their personaland social identities, reconstructed, reconfigured, resignified and as-signed a new category of being and use.

The Cartesian dualism of mind and body ultimately renders the‘mindless’ body as passive—to be worked on. The body as machine,mind as soul/ reason is a metaphor that underpins much medical sci-ence. Von Hagen, a modern day anatomist follows in the tradition ofdissection for advancing knowledge. However at Body Worlds he takesdissection much further—into the realms of preservation and technol-ogy. His creations are open, hybrid fusions of skeletons, blood, bones,tissue and plastinate which resonate with Haraway’s (1985) post humancyborg where boundaries between human and machine are blurred.

The de-humanized or post-human body does not necessarily meancoming after the ‘human’ rather it is a set of bodily and discursive fig-urations that destabilize the ideas of human, humanism and thehumanities (Halberstam & Livingston, 1995). Among other agendas,the post-human is an area of study which critically examines the statusof the human when it is intimately bound with technology. As Haraway(1985) suggests, the posthuman is an ontology that questions catego-ries of existence such as nature and culture, the real and the virtual,human and machine and the male and the female. As such, post-hu-man theory draws attention to liminal zones, or inter-spaces betweenthese seemingly immutable categories, and one of these zones is thespace of the mechanical and the visceral which the Body Worlds exhi-bition creates.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, Moore and Brown (2008) suggest that the range of expe-riences encountered at Body Worlds; cultural, philosophical, religious,disgust, fear and education act as a microcosm of society at large. Whatwe have discussed in the main body of this paper centres around fivedifferent readings of the body at Body Worlds. We contend that VonHagen’s exhibition can be read on a number of different levels andthese in turn will be influenced by the individual’s ethical positionand also the ability to disassociate the bodies with prior, living socialentities—the ability to adopt a view of the body as machine, which ulti-mately leads to its dehumanization (Taussig, 1993), or alternatively aliberatory fusion of human/technology (Haraway, 1992). For someVon Hagen is an emancipator and visionary while others see him asa Frankenstein, although we could ask who is the monster, the cre-


ations or their maker? And, for those who see it as cheating mortalityand a means to extend the physical shell, there are body donationforms available at the exhibition which visitors can complete; for asmall fee!

Further Research

This paper probably raises more questions than it answers. There areissues of ethics, questions regarding the body itself and of course its‘meaning’ and use after death in what is primarily a tourism attraction.We have concentrated on a particular form of visitor attraction, theplastinated body in a museum/gallery setting. This largely allows forthe commodification of the body and its parts. However, it would beinteresting to explore experiences at other sites that have death andthe body as the main attraction such as the Palermo Catacombs in Italywhich date back to the sixteenth century. Here, unlike Body Worldsthe bodies remain in their various natural state of decay. The centralpiece is a two year old girl who remains as an exhibit under glassand whose body has never decomposed. Unlike Body Worlds wherethe corpses are posed, stripped of skin and dehumanized, the bodiesat Palermo are a stark corporeal reification of what follows death. Acomparison of experiences would help to build up a fuller picture ofbody centered thanatourism.

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Submitted 17 August 2010. Resubmitted 31 January 2012. Final version 11 July 2012.Accepted 27 August 2012. Refereed anonymously. Coordinating Editor: John Tribe.

Reading the body at von Hagen’s ‘body worlds’

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