a body we can’t ignore

Embodiment — Essential Anthropological Concepts

…I would like to add the idea of embodiment and context primarily from an anthropological and sociological perspective.

Embodiment takes the body as a socialised body; our essential way of being is socialised including the way we walk, talk, turn, sing in different contexts wether it’s public, with family at home, and so on. This might be obvious at first but much of what’s written about, outside of crime and sports, focuses on the mind as the primary way of being. Knowing that our body is our primary source of experience/perception means how our bodies are socialised in the world changes how we experience the world and therefore all that we do is “embodied”.

With a perspective that puts the body as primary we can see why research methods like “survey questionnaires” can be extremely unreliable if the goal is to find the “correct” answer. Asking someone a question about something they do “every day” or that is said to be part of their habitus(Bourdieu) or inscribed(Foucault) within and on their person, outside of their context of doing can lead to “reasoned” about answers. In some cases this is good, but if you are trying to understand how a pilot “pilots” a plane, a survey he/she may simply tell you what he/she believes is the “correct” answer. Though we can’t “embody” the pilot, methods like ethnographic research or other in situ research methods, will likely start within following pilots through their day to day activities and understand how several pilots use their bodies as the primary source of truth or sensibility behind their decisions. A pilot can sense something is wrong because of how he/she experiences the world and his/her familiarity with flying and dealing with certain planes. While there are some questions you can ask the pilot while not in situ (being “there”), you shouldn’t expect them to “know” what and why they did in language since their understanding(s) is embodied and therefore bound and tied on their bodies and therefore not always aware of it. It doesn’t mean they can’t know some things explicitly, but it means that tacit embodied knowledge is central to being human so it isn’t sensible to ignore this or take it for granted.

Taking this further:

A lot of talk about “power” and “oppression” that come out of the structures of society are talked about as if they are simply “mentally” disabling or oppressing a group/cultures thought. This duality, between mind (human) and body(animal) often referred to as Descartes’ Cartesian duality, the mind body problem, subject/object distinction, can obscure what a person or person(s) are experiencing outside of the cognitive and sometimes we forget that embodiment can help explain phenomenon more holistically than thinking of purely mental constructs. The body plays a huge part in how we “act” and make decisions in the world, and I’m not just referring to why we decide not to walk across the street when a car seems to be approaching quickly.

Our body can limit or enable us to feel, engage, and think about how other’s experience the world, the very ideas and thoughts we come up with are inspired by the way we experience the world. In a way, it’s not that there is a world of “objective experience” out there but that our bodies (which includes the head) contain the truth of how we experience the world.

An example of embodiment:

I cannot listen to music and work. My girlfriend thinks it’s ridiculous. Her habit is to play music and she says it helps her “work” better. I listen to music when I work out. One day she was playing music without any people talking (classical) and she told me she was surprised I didn’t say turn it off.

Some time before that I discovered (this saddened me) that she never “listens” to lyrics when songs are played unless it’s insanely obvious. I have always listened to lyrics. My encounters with music in my family have always been very lyrical, so practices around listening to music for me always included the lyrics as constitutive of the song. I was a poet and I was awarded a Young Author’s Award when I was very young, so for me “the word” has always come first. So I typically hear lyrics when I listen to songs. She was a dancer when she was younger. Having really focused her body around dancing, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, cheer,- she was really focused on the “beat” or the “melody” of the song. While I am not saying this is exactly why, our practices may account for some of our differences which remains essential to what it means to be human and what it means to be an individual.

Originally posted on Quora “What are some things social scientists know but most people don’t”

Christian Ramsey — LinkedIn — I am a global ethnographer @ ESP Collective and a social impact ethnographer @ Aregacy