Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #436087 in Books
• Published on: 1994-11-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

Review
"The authors of Embodiment and Experience broach several interesting paths for future research." William S. Lachicotte, Jr., Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

Customer Reviews

At last! A viable alternative to Foucault!
In a stimulating and original collection of essays, Csordas and his colleagues map out an alternative theory of embodiment to that tired old Foucauldian constructivism.Instead of theorising the body as a passive effect of discourse, the authors understand embodiment as "the existential condition of cultural life." Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, here is an approach to social theory which goes beyond textual analysis to take seriously the joys and sufferings of the lived body.