Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self

by Edited by Thomas J. Csordas

• ISBN13: 9780521458900
• ISBN10: 0521458900
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-01-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
List of contributors	x
Preface	xi
Introduction: the body as representation and being-in-the-world	1	(26)
Thomas J. Csordas
Part I Paradigms and polemics
Bodies and anti-bodies: flesh and fetish in contemporary social theory	27	(21)
Terence Turner
Society's body: emotion and the ``somatization'' of social theory	48	(21)
M. L. Lyon
J. M. Barbalet
Part II Form, appearance, and movement
The political economy of injury and compassion: amputees on the Thai-Cambodia border	69	(31)
Lindsay French
Nurturing and negligence: working on others' bodies in Fiji	100	(16)
Anne E. Becker
The Silenced body-the expressive Leib: on the dialectic of mind and life in Chinese cathartic healing	116	(23)
Thomas Ots
Part III Self, sensibility, and emotion
Embodied metaphors: nerves as lived experience	139	(24)
Setha M. Low
Bodily transactions of the passions: el calor among Salvadoran women refugees	163	(20)
Janis H. Jenkins
Martha Valiente
The embodiment of symbols and the acculturation of the anthropologist	183	(18)
Carol Laderman
Part IV Pain and meaning
Chronic pain and the tension between the body as subject and object	201	(28)
Jean Jackson
The individual in terror	229	(19)
E. Valentine Daniel
Rape trauma: contexts of meaning	248	(21)
Cathy Winkler
Kate Wininger
Words from the Holy People: a case study in cultural phenomenology	269	(22)
Thomas J. Csordas
Index	291