1.Introduction35Corporeal real

The first key element of corporeal realism, then, is the idea that in dealing with the body–society relationship we are dealing with emergent,
causally consequential phenomenon. Structures and embodied subjects are
not identical: the former are often crystallized within social roles, legal codes
and material artefacts, for example, and these possess very different properties than the people upon whose actions their future depends (Bhaskar,
1989: 35; Archer, 1998: 200). Theories of the body–society relationship
should not seek to account for the body exclusively in terms of its social
construction, or for society in terms of its corporeal construction. As structures contain emergent properties, it is just as unacceptable to analyse and
explain them purely with reference to the actions of living individuals (as in
rational choice theory) as it is to account for the beliefs and actions of individuals exclusively with reference to structures (as in structuralism).