Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural
History of the Human Form – Michael Sims (2003)
While I
am a huge fanatic of reference books, and of highly detailed and deep dives
into very specific topics, there is another type of book I find very
entertaining. Those would be the books
that aggregate data from widely ranging fields, but which all serve to shed
light on a specific subject. This book,
Adam’s Navel, is a great example. It
explores the visible human form from head to toe, and draws from the obvious
sciences, biology, anthropology, anatomy, as well as the humanities. This helps to paint a much greater picture of
the history of how humans have seen their body and how they have used the parts
of that body to develop their view of the Universe at large.
I found
out about this book while perusing the bibliography of a different book I
recently read. Luckily the amazing M.D.
Anderson Library at the University of Houston always hooks me up. The author, Michael Sims, developed the core
of this book while he was incapacitated due to a serious medical
procedure. His inability to move left
him alone with his thoughts, and he began to write about the various things he
associated with the currently not working parts of his body. Those original thoughts informed this work.
Starting
at the top of the head, Michael Sims describes not only the biological nature
of hair, the various types, and the hair of our closest primate relatives, but
he discusses several of the rules, myths and legends humanity has created in
regards to hair. From Samson in the
bible, whose power came from his uncut locks, to the attitudes of certain
christian fundamentalists who believe that they must collect their life’s hair
to be “complete” upon the resurrection, to the hairlessness of certain ascetic
monk groups worldwide, humans have assigned so much meaning to hair, a
substance made from keratin, the same material our fingernails, and certain
animal horns are made of. Every single
visible part of the body is explored in this manner.
This was
a very fun book to read, and helped me better understand the way in which our
corporeal form is used as a prism by which we analyze the entire Universe
around us. Our ten fingers inspired our
decimal system of mathematics. The size
of past ruler’s body parts determined measurements. The eyes, by virtue of
their power to see the world around us, have always been treated as gateways to
see the inner self. Even something as
simple as the shape of the ear has been conflated by desperate, or deluded,
people into providing intimate details about that ear-owner’s personality
traits. We live our lives in these ever changing
bodies. It is understandable that our
bodies helped shape our ideas about the world around us. For anyone who is interested, this is a great
resource and a really fun read.
(This book can be purchased here: ADAM'S NAVEL )
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