Western science has obeyed certain principles of computers that define the fields of knowledge and legitimize certain forms of approach to the world around us. Such computer principles follow the Cartesian paradigm that separates the subject from the object, with one sphere of its own for each: philosophy and reflexive research on the one hand, science and objective research on the other.

The differentiation of the fields of knowledge from these principles computers has also been defined since an identification of one pole of the binomial with another. Thus, on the one hand nature corresponds to body, female and object; on the other, culture corresponds to reason, to masculine and to subject.

Although some disciplinary efforts have led the study of subjects and societies in more comprehensive directions, the body touches tangentially since the focus of its attention is the products of the mind and human work (anthropology, sociology and demographics, for example). In this way, we can consider that, despite the interest in studying the body as an object in itself, many of these studies have only reproduced the dichotomies already mentioned.

This volume, which brings together articles by leading scholars from Latin America, puts into play the understanding of the human body in its multidemensionality. It aspires to achieve a non-plotted, un divided, non-reductionist (or biology or culture) knowledge that, at the same time, shows the importance of knowing the body from its complexity and not as a whole or complete. The essays in this book propose a new heuristic of the body, a heuristic that destabilizes the dichotomy body-mind.