This investigation of power and the body is a brilliantly original account of the nature of force as it functions in religious rituals, sorcery, political relations, and other social domains. Laying the foundation for an "anthropology of forces", it is crucial reading for anyone interested in how bodies and power circulate in a range of human contexts and cultures.

For Jose Gil the body, with its capacity to translate forces into signs, is the source of power. Analyzing the language of mime and gestures, comparing magical cures to psychiatric ones, contrasting the flayed body of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" with the anatomical body in Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, he develops a typology of metamorphoses of the body as they correspond to systems of signs.

A major intervention that marks the first appearance of Gil's work in English, Metamorphoses of the Body gives us an entirely new way of looking at relationships between bodies, forces, politics, and people.