Discourses about “Diet for Alternative Lifestyle” and Body

Abstract

This article aims to examine the view of the body in alternative medicine, especially dietary practices based on an “alternative lifestyle,” which are often treated in researches of “spirituality” in Japan. The practitioners often insist that we must overcome the views and practices of medicine based on science to become healthy, because we cannot grasp our true self through them. Instead, they propose that we listen to the “voices of our bodies,” change our lifestyles, and choose daily practices in accordance with it. According to them, bodies are “natural” and not affected by anything including harmful discourses derived from modern industrial or consumer society, which is inhuman, so that we can know what we actually need for our health by listening to “our bodies' voices.”

However, recent scholars of anthropology and society have revealed that there are no bodies affected by any discourses, because our daily practices (including diet) are inevitably accompanied with moral discourses and carved by them. In addition, this article tries to show that such discourses of alternative medicine or lifestyle have the same structure as the ones of medical care or self-cultivating practices of modern consumer society.