BODY, EDUCATION AND HOMINIZATION: POSSIBILITIES OF ANALYSIS FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show the mutual relevance between body studies
and Marxists approaches of society. For that we searched in some Marxist scholars, when
they study the process which leads to the arising of homo sapiens, signals which depict how
body and its history are discussed. The analysis is divided in three parts: first, we see how
historians of education put value to the split between manual and intellectual labor as basis
in their historical studies. Then we go through some Marxists authors with vary approaches,
explaining how they end up putting the body and traditional dichotomies at issue, while
considering the relevance of labor. In third part, we put in evidence the role played by
Engels essays, which gave to the human hand great value for the history of homo sapiens.
As results, we could see that for both body cultural analysts or Marxists scholars, their
problems can be useful for each other, what could fill analytical gaps between them.