Managing Stress and Work-Life Balance

Sullivan needed to devise a way to demonstrate the universality of the body-as-social-expression while simultaneously informing the reader about the culturally specific ways in which this universal tendency found expression . The consequence would seem to be , not a concise (and therefore more immediately persuasive ) article . but a sprawling , massive inquiry into comparative cultural studies . Therefore , Sullivan 's use of culturally specific , but anecdotal evidence , in combination with theoretical demanding ideas is a good match . The result is that , due to the far-ranging citation of culturally specific information and customs which are

not bogged down by lengthy statistics or dry background information , the reader feels the sense of universality because Sullivan has presented the reader with a wide-ranging set of cultural practices and cultures all of which support the central assertion that the human body functions as an instrument of social cohesion and social while simultaneously being acted upon by the social in which it exists

Interestingly , Sullivan 's ability to build tension in the essay stems from this same contrast of theoretical postulation (and definition ) with culturally specific information and anecdotal evidence . Without such a balance , it is entirely possible that Sullivan would "lose " many readers in the complex theoretical ideas which are compressed in the essay and -- correspondingly -- without the technical and theoretical ideas , the anecdotal information of comparative cultural practices would devolve into a series of unrelated but quite interesting passages about cultural practices in various parts of the world which were associated with the human body . Instead , by framing the thesis with both theory and relevant "asides " Sullivan manages to create an absorbing and very comprehensible article out of what might otherwise prove to be very dry and therefore inordinately challenging set of theoretical assertions The approach used by Sullivan in the article is both...