Embodiment and Cultural Differences focuses on the body as the equilibrium limit between the memory of time already passed and the dynamic where of unexpected happenings. The body’s ecology is fulfilled in the surrounding environment within this variable limit. Each embodiment operation is, in fact, an experimental setting that consists of the unrepeatable executive instants through which, like a musical score, the body synchronises human consciousness with the context of action. What distinguishes the architecture of this book is that, collectively, it constitutes a challenge to the digital media paradigm, in which the body is treated simply as a two dimensional icon of space and time; a relatively “free form” with all kinds of narratives generated by the multimedia. The volume demonstrates how fundamentally different ways of experiencing time are also determined by the differing cultural use of bodily rhythms. Central to the understanding of this interdependence is the study of synchronisation – increasing knowledge through the investigation of how rhythm, music, chants, dance, prayer and other harmonising practices support social integration. The book also touches upon the anxieties, fears, and ambivalences affecting contemporary European societies, particularly those that have followed in the wake of terrorist attacks and the influx of refugee populations. The participating authors are all members of the International Sociological Association, and part of the Research Committee 54 “The Body in the Social Sciences”. This is, in short, a book that will attract wide interest, especially from social scientists, researchers and academics in the social sciences, sociology, and digital studies, in addition to further afield, for example, in health, philosophy, education, and anthropology.

This volume shows that the notions of embodied or situated cognition, which have transformed the scientific study of intelligence have the potential to reorient cultural studies as well. The essays adapt and amplify embodied cognition in such different fields as art history, literature, history of science, religious studies, philosophy, biology, and cognitive science. The topics include the biological genesis of teleology, the dependence of meaning in signs upon biological embodiment, the notion of image schema and the concept of force in cognitive semantics, pictorial self-portraiture as a means to study self-perception, the difference between reading aloud and silent reading as a way to make sense of literary texts, intermodal (kinesthetic) understanding of art, psychosomatic medicine, laughter as a medical and ethical phenomenon, the valuation of laughter and the body in religion, and how embodied cognition revives and extends earlier attempts to develop a philosophical anthropology. (Series A)

The first interdisciplinary investigation of the cultural context of enactive embodiment, offering perspectives that range from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological. Recent accounts of cognition attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving cognition as enactive and the cognizer as an embodied being who is embedded in biological, psychological, and cultural contexts. Cultural forms of sense-making constitute the shared world, which in turn is the origin and place of cognition. This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection on the cultural context of embodiment, offering perspectives that range from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological. The book brings together new contributions by some of the most renowned scholars in the field and the latest results from up-and-coming researchers. The contributors explore conceptual foundations, drawing on work by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, and respond to recent critiques. They consider whether there is something in the self that precedes intersubjectivity and inquire into the relation between culture and consciousness, the nature of shared meaning and social understanding, the social dimension of shame, and the nature of joint affordances. They apply the notion of radical enactive cognition to evolutionary anthropology, and examine the concept of the body in relation to culture in light of studies in such fields as phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and psychopathology. Through such investigations, the book breaks ground for the study of the interplay of embodiment, enaction, and culture. Contributors Mark Bickhard, Ingar Brinck, Anna Ciaunica, Hanne De Jaegher, Nicolas de Warren, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Christoph Durt, John Z. Elias, Joerg Fingerhut, Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Vittorio Gallese, Duilio Garofoli, Katrin Heimann, Peter Henningsen, Daniel D. Hutto, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Alba Montes Sánchez, Dermot Moran, Maxwell J. D. Ramstead, Matthew Ratcliffe, Vasudevi Reddy, Zuzanna Rucińska, Alessandro Salice, Glenda Satne, Heribert Sattel, Christian Tewes, Dan Zahavi

Culture as Embodiment utilizes recent insights in psychology, cognitive, and affective science to reveal the cultural patterning of behavior in group-related practices. Applies the best of the behavioural sciences to contemporary issues of behavioural cross-fertilization in global exchange Presents an original theory to be used in the gender and integration debates, about what the acceptance of newcomers from different cultural backgrounds really entails Presents a theory that is also applicable to youth culture and the split in modern society between underclass, modal class, and the elite Contains an original approach to the persistence of religion, and relates religious thought to the cognitive capacity of generic belief

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment offers original essays that examine historical and contemporary approaches to conceptualizations of the body. In this ground-breaking work on the body and embodiment, the latest scholarship from anthropology and related social science fields is presented, providing new insights on body politics and the experience of the body Original chapters cover historical and contemporary approaches and highlight new research frameworks Reflects the increasing importance of embodiment and its ethnographic contexts within anthropology Highlights the increasing emphasis on examining the production of scientific, technological, and medical expertise in studying bodies and embodiment

The present book contains a transcribed version of the lectures given by Professor Zoltán Kövecses in November 2010 as one of the three forum speakers for the 8th China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics. The topics presented in this book deal with the language and conceptualization of emotions, cross-cultural variation in metaphor, metaphor and metonymy in discourse, and the issue of the relationship between language, mind, and culture from a cognitive linguistic perspective.

Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel's anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel's view, to be human means in part to produce one's own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel's account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness.

The subject of cultural memory, and of the body’s role in its creation and dissemination, is central to current academic debate, particularly in relation to performance. Viewed from a variety of theoretical positions, the actions of the meaning-bearing body in culture and its capacity to reproduce, challenge or modify existing formulations have been the focus of some of the most influential studies to emerge from the arts and humanities in the last two and a half decades. The ten essays brought together in Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory address this subject from a unique diversity of perspectives, focusing on topics as varied as live art, puppetry, memorial practice, ‘cultural performance’ and dance. Dealing with issues ranging from modern nation building to the formation of diasporic identities, this volume collectively considers the ways in which the human soma functions as a canvas for cultural meaning, its forms and actions a mnemonics for constructions of a shared past. This volume is required reading for those interested in how bodies, both on stage and in everyday life, 'perform' meaning.

Students of culture have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which cultural values are 'inscribed' on the body. These essays go beyond this passive construal of the body to a position in which embodiment is understood as the existential condition of cultural life. From this standpoint embodiment is reducible neither to representations of the body, to the body as an objectification of power, to the body as a physical entity or biological organism, nor to the body as an inalienable centre of individual consciousness. This more sensate and dynamic view is applied by the contributors to a variety of topics, including the expression of emotion, the experience of pain, ritual healing, dietary customs, and political violence. Their purpose is to contribute to a phenomenological theory of culture and self - an anthropology that is not merely about the body, but from the body.