Confronting the problem of embodiment

Abstract

Embodiment has become an important construct for those in disciplines and specialty areas concerned with the form and function of the human body. This article suggests that accounts of embodiment have collapsed into an exclusionary framework that locates culture and cognition on oppositional terms. For some scholars, embodiment represents the performance of one’s body with cultural contexts that sanction particular forms of comportment and display. Others attend to the neurological or cognitive functions that arise from bodily activity. After a historical analysis that documents how these exclusionary constructs have gained legitimacy in the American academy, this article suggests that critique of the longstanding dichotomy of mind and body necessitates a conciliatory model. I advocate a theory of ‘embodied cognition’ that explains how the human body, despite its condition as an object of culture, exerts subjective influence on the mind. To illustrate how cognition is embodied, I report on an ethnographic study that documented the athletic learning of members of a single women’s intercollegiate basketball team.

Notes

For accounts of embodiment that emphasize the productive influence of culture in anthropology, see Douglas, 1966; Mauss, 1973; Connerton, 1989; Becker, 1995; Jackson, 1995; Casey, 1998; Young, 1994. In medical anthropology, see Lock & Scheper‐Hughes, 1987; Olsen, 1991; Turner, 1992; Jackson, 1994; Komesaroff, 1995; Rothfield, 1995. In cultural and feminist studies, see Foucault, 1979, 1984; Anzaldua, 1987; Goldenberg, 1990; Haraway, 1991; Bordo, 1993; Butler, 1993; Fiske, 1993; Grosz, 1994; Sappington & Stallings, 1994; Gallop, 1995; Brumberg, 1997. In African‐American studies, see Giddings, 1984; Lorde, 1984; hooks, 1991, 1994; Williams, 1991. For accounts in disability studies, see Fine & Asch, 1988; Morgan, 1991; Thomson, 1996; Davis, 1997; Mitchell & Snyder, 1997. In education, see McLaren, 1993; Payne, 2000; Cheville, 2001; Leander, 2001. In philosophy, refer to Merleau‐Ponty, 1969, 1995; Young, 1990; Welton, 1998.

For accounts of embodiment that emphasize the formative nature of the human body, see John‐Steiner, 1985; Johnson, 1987; Varela et al., 1991; Edelman, 1992; Sheets‐Johnstone, 1992; Damasio, 1995; Sacks, 1995; 1999; Gardner, 2000; Root‐Bernstein, 2000.

Admittedly, this isolated analysis does not fully recognize those scientists who took a middle course by recognizing both the influence of heredity and culture (Conklin, 1915; Morgan, 1924; Lillie, 1925). My intent, however, is to show how emergent discourses in the academy resulted in divergent conceptions of the human body that continue to disrupt our appreciation for the relation of culture and cognition.

Scholarship in situated cognition has considered how patterns of activity (Scribner, 1990; Wertsch et al., 1995; Kirshner & Whitson, 1997; Walkerdine, 1997, 1998; Engestrom et al., 1999) and community (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1995; Lave, 1997; Wenger, 1998) mediate thought.

In cognition and language, see Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1991; Fauconnier, 1997; Fauconnier & Turner, 1998; Rohrer, 2001. In computational neuroscience, see Calvetti & Deer, 2000; Flash & Sejnowski, 2001; Tiesinga et al., 2002. In artificial intelligence, see Dautenhahn, 1998, 1999.