One of the progenitors of body studies with his Sociology as a Skin Trade (1972), O'Neill makes "a forthright statement on the body as an institution of anthropomorphosis," by which he seems to mean that cultural practices are embodied through a "becoming-human." He examines this process in five different spheres or bodies: "articulating a cosmology, a body politic, a commensal society, a productive/consumptive economy and a bio-technological frontier of human design and transplantation."