The Unarticulated Existential Body: Embracing Embodiment and Representation in the Ethnographic Model of Objectivity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Embodimentas a Paradigm for Anthropology
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Something other than its own mass: Embodiment as corporeality, animality, and materiality
Anthropological Theory, 2024
Anthropological concern with embodiment began in part with consideration of Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception, and this essay continues in that vein by considering his theory of nature. Embodiment from this standpoint is our general existential condition and an indeterminate methodological field for a cultural phenomenology attuned to the immediacy of lived experience. Without claiming to define nature or human nature, the essay offers an outline of embodiment as a framework for integrating corporeality, animality, and materiality. These three domains have generated lively bodies of literature that do not always speak to one another, and that invite phenomenological critique in a world where the existential and ethical position of humanity is increasingly in question and precarious.
Properties of cultural embodiment: Lessons from the anthropology of the body
At present for a genuinely cultural theory of embodiment the first step should be to bring together cognitive linguistic and anthropological discourses on embodiment. The specific strength of cognitive linguistics is its analytic tool of embodied image schemas. However, a cultural approach requires moving towards a more contextadaptive analysis, as expressed in my notion of situated image schemas. The specific strength of the anthropology of the body, in particular cultural phenomenology, is a contextually situated, qualitative and performative approach that views embodiment as being-in-the-world. Based on both theoretical strands, I will argue that cognitive theory should widen its purview (a) by looking at the integral relation between embodied intentionality, agency and human selves, as well as the cultural nature of the preconceptual; (b) by exploring “shared” or “distributed embodiment” between agents; and (c) by modeling the body-discourse relation bi-directionally, including how discursive imagery is implanted into body awareness.
The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field, 2020
The word embodiment represents how values, dispositions, and preferences from the world (re)make the body through practice and performance. The problem that presents itself when attempting to embody the past arises because one’s habitus is particular to a time, place, and social system. Embodied practices and an embodied engagement with objects help enliven the semiotics of the mise-en-scene: enhancing the what, where, and why, with how. The normative practices of any body are developed within a particular place and time. The body’s shape and actions are transfigured by what a culture considers to be natural, proper, and authentic in the world. To claim the body as archive and tool for research is to offer reenactment as a form of performance as research. Performance is meant in its widest sense, anything on a continuum from framed actions with witnesses, to staged fictions with audiences.
Bodies and Worlds Alive: An Outline of Phenomenology in Anthropology
2013
The article begins with a short introduction to phenomenology with an emphasis on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose ideas have had a great impact on cultural anthropology since the 1980s, especially through notions like 'embodiment' and 'radical empiricism'. The article will proceed to outline main trends in phenomenological anthropology as well as its precursors. It then dedicates itself to some of the most prominent issues in anthropology in which phenomenology is particularly involved such as: 'bracketing', 'betweenness', 'mindbody dualism' and 'embodiment'. Alongside a summary of phenomenology's contribution to anthropology, the conclusions will address some of the critiques that are often directed at phenomenology.
Lived Body and Intentional Embodiment. New Perspectives on Phenomenological Anthropology
Dialogue&Universalism, 2018
The body, the bodily condition of the human being, or embodiment as an essential aspect of the human situation in the lived world are important topics of phe-nomenological research and phenomenologically oriented anthropology. On the other hand, today also cognitive research and neurosciences are dealing with the topic of embodiment, mainly focusing on so-called embodied cognition. Modern neurosci-ence claims that both, thought and action can only be interpreted in the light of interac-tions between brain, body and environment. New trends in phenomenology stress their familiarity with this position and focus on naturalizing phenomenology. In my view, this development disregards fundamental Husserlian claims concerning the naturalization of human subjectivity. In order to avoid such naturalizing effects, I focus on the transcendental-phenomenological interpretation of the lived body, and underline the intentional-genetic potential of Husserlian analyses. On this path, instead of relying on naturalizing embodiment, I develop a genetic understanding of the intentional embodiment of subjectivity and describe a peculiar form of intentionality as transbodily intentionality, thereby stressing its anthropological and socio-theoretical signifi-cance.
Hydra: Interdisciplinary Journal of the Social Sciences , 2013
This article questions the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy followed by most Western academia. It compares and contrasts two ethnographies of the body that entail different theoretical conceptions of the body, casting doubt on the ‘Cogito ergo sum’ which reduces the body to this ‘common thing’ on which the authority of a superior private mind is exerted. The first ethnography - ‘The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the Indian State, and Utopian Somatics’ by Alter (1993) - seems to follow, at first, this tradition, defending the Foucauldian image of an inanimate and politically benign body inhabited by a multiplicity of external force relations called ‘power’. However, in his conclusion Alter (1993) questions the Foucauldian framework stating that the Indian wrestler does not express his protest rationally, but fundamentally embodies his opposition to state domination. The second ethnography - ‘Words from the Holy People: a case study in cultural phenomenology’ by Thomas Csordas (1994) - introduces his concept of ‘embodiment’ as the way bodies are inhabited in the world prior to all abstract objectifications of it. I conclude with Lambek’s original argument (1998) that the discussed mind/body problem arises from the human capacity of self-reflection and needs to be understood in its specific Western socio-historical context.
Embodiment theories and alternative perspectives on the body
«Studi di estetica», XLV, serie IV (8/2)(Sensibilia 10-2016-Embodiment), pp., 2017
Embodiment theories have overcome the doctrine of intellectus archetypus without ever discussing the notion of body on which that particular kind of intellect was based. Indeed, the model of the body underlying embodiment theories remains an a priori: anthropomorphic, independent and " self-contained ". This paper sheds light on the problematic points of this vision and explores the anthropology of the " ontological turn " , looking for alternative modes of body knowledge – seeing it as the result of " affects " , " affections " and habitus – more effective in justifying the corporeal dimension of cognition.