The body is currently being redefined and explored in the architecture of its forms and in the depth of its structures and processes. Karl-Heinrich Bette's work, which has meanwhile become the standard work in the sociology of the body, shows how more and more people are resorting to their physical-organic environment in the context of sport, leisure, fashion, health orientation or protest culture in order to intercept or critically comment on the overburdening consequences of the process of social modernization. The central perspective of the work turns away from the nostalgic and too simply conceived doctrine of the pure loss of the body in modernity and instead emphasizes the paradoxical simultaneity of body distance and body enhancement in the course of socio-cultural evolution. The work thus not only addresses the issues that society sets on the body, but also follows the traces that the body leaves behind in society in the form of body-oriented social systems and semantics. 'Traces of the Body' is presented here in a revised and considerably supplemented second edition.
