453 p., Offers an anthropological interpretation of cultural discourses about the body found in literature, visual narratives and archival sources throughout 19th century in Spanish colonial Havana. These discourses show a pressing concern with the "manners" of bodies, the ways they moved, how they occupied space, and how they managed sensations and emotions to negotiate power and prestige in the highly stratified Havana's society. Concerns for the manners of the body became the discursive domain of the rising planter and intellectual elite of Cuban creoles. They often expressed these concerns in normalizing terms such as "good manners," "good taste," and "tone." Argues that these and other highly embodied, interlocking moral, sensory, affective and aesthetic categories such as nobility, respect or " sabor " became focal indexes of the social status of individuals in colonial society.
