Embodiment theory in anthropology

René Descarte's mind-body dualism, also known as substance dualism or ‘Cartesian Dualism’, asserts an essential difference between mind and matter. In Descarte's interpretation matter is spatial, but the mind, which is the source of human thought, is immaterial.[9] Within this separation, the self becomes independent of the material body and the two can be studied as separate entities. Substance dualism has served as a pervasive influence in philosophical, anthropological, and sociological theory through the greater part of the 20th century.[2] Not only was the human body studied separately from the thinking, cultural, social self, it was perceived as a universal or essential aspect of being human that did very little to distinguish humanity in relation to the non-human world.[10] Numerous social theorists and philosophers in the latter half of the 20th century sought to bridge the schism created by conceptual dichotomies such as mind/body and nature/culture.[2]

In Techniques of the Body, Mauss outlines the ways in which traditional and learned bodily practices allow people to adapt their bodies for social use. Mauss included everything from movement, to dance, to practices of consumption and hygiene, to sexual positions in his definition of bodily 'techniques'.[11] Mauss identifies the body as man's first ‘tool’ and establishes that bodily uses are embedded in both group life and societal history.[11] Mauss saw human actions (and patterns of action) as “psycho-physio-social assemblages”[12] recognizing the intersection of material, cognitive, and cultural influence in human behavior. In a later essay, Mauss established la notion de la personne (the notion of the person/self)—the notion that all humans have self-awareness and a sense of their own individuality.[13] Thomas Csordas notes that while Mauss’ theories served as early precursors to both practice- and perception- based embodiment, the development of the concepts completely independently from one another reproduced cartesian dualisms instead of collapsing them.[4]

Phenomenological embodiment (or perception-based embodiment), is centered around human perception, experience, and the process of objectification. Merleau-Ponty, inspired by Heidegger's notion of ‘being-in-the world’ from “Being and Time”,[14] sought to situate the experience of ‘being-in-the-world’ as the root of human perception and the source of objectivity. According to Merleau-Ponty, there are no objects prior to human perception of them. Humans experience the world and orient themselves within it and in relation to other perceived ‘objects’ through the body.[15] The body then becomes the locus of pre-objective interaction with the external environment—where modality and cognition are integrated and ‘perception’ formed. Phenomenological embodiment collapses subject/object dualisms. In archaeology, pheonomenological approaches to lived experience have been used in landscape archaeology to discuss and analyze people's experience of landscape.[7]

Practice-based embodiment draws from Bourdieu's practice theory, most notably the concept of habitus, which Bourdieu developed substantially after the phrase was initially coined by Marcel Mauss in Techniques of the Body.[4][11] Bourdieu defines habitus as a “principle generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseparably cognitive and evaluative structures which organizes the vision of the world in accordance with the objective structures of a determinate state of the social world.”[16] Habitus can include tastes, dispositions, 'common' knowledge, assumptions, hierarchical structurings of people and concepts, and more. In simpler terms, Bourdieu saw bodily practice as influenced simultaneously by both sensory experience and sociocultural structuring of the self and the external environment. In this interpretation, the socially-informed behavioral environment is internalized in the body and in the psyche, collapsing mind/body dualisms.

Michel Foucault is often cited as an integral influence in the development of theories of embodiment.[5][8][2] Specifically, embodiment draws on his concept of biopower as it relates to institutionalized surveillance and state discipline, such as in barracks, factories, schools, and prisons.[17][18] Foucault invokes the term docile body to describe bodies that have internalized surveillance and discipline enacted upon them past the point of resistance.[18][19] Foucault asserted two concepts essential to embodiment theory: 1) that the body was a malleable and manipulable entity that was relatively unformed, and 2) that the body was shaped by power exercised upon it within a particular historical context. This established a basis through which mechanisms of power and political history could be embodied by individuals and communities. Foucault specified that power over and control of bodies was focused in “the processes of the activity rather than its result”[20] orienting himself towards a practice-based understanding of the embodiment of power.

Within second wave feminism, there were different approaches to the body, with some advocating for bodily transcendence and others advocating for increased attention to be paid to ‘female’ bodily processes. Simone De Beauvoir, for example, emphasized the constructed nature of the body, asserting that bodies are not born with inherent sex/gender categorization, but bodies “become” women (or men) in The Second Sex.[23] Iris Young notes that De Beauvoir saw bodily concerns and existing configurations as something that women needed to transcend if they sought freedom, and that this transcendence would be realized through reconfiguration of women's bodily uses.[24][23] Others, like Adrienne Rich, saw women's bodies as something to be celebrated. They encouraged connection to and revaluing of the ‘female’ body.[25] Shatema Threadcraft problematizes both of these approaches: On the one hand, focusing on the body reinforces and naturalizes sex/gender differences, and on the other hand, bodily avoidance/transcendance ignores physical and embodied realities of the diverse multitudes of ‘female’ bodies that exist in the world. Both reproduce nature/culture dichotomies and overtly center the biological or ‘natural’ in feminist thought and activism.[8]

Judith Butler approaches embodiment of gender by acknowledging both its materiality and discursivity, conceptualizing a more expansive embodiment in which physical realities of gender are neither ignored nor essentialized. Butler evokes Michel Foucault to analyze the ways that gendered and sexed bodies are materialized via biopower. Butler saw gender as performative and embedded within cultural norms and practices.[26] For Butler, the performance and construction of gender is discursive but not immaterial; Bodies that Matter explores the ways that discourse on sex, gender, and sexuality is physically embodied, generating a normative and ‘natural’ category of sex.[27] In doing this, Butler collapses the dichotomy of the ‘natural’ sexed body and the socially constructed, gendered body that earlier theorists struggled with.

Davis's work explores the way that Western racial hierarchies complicated and transformed Black women's embodied experiences. In Women, Race, and Class, Davis focuses on the experiences of enslaved Black women, relating these experiences to Black female embodiment in the past and present. Davis highlights that the slave system centered the labor capacities of Black bodies, both male and female, in an undifferentiated capacity. The emphasis on labor capacities of Black women's bodies during slavery has encouraged the continued exploitation of Black women's labor in the present.[28] The orientation of Black women in relation to labor and production also served to alienate them from other aspects of the ‘female’ embodied experience that White feminists placed so much emphasis on such as being a mother or a wife.[28][8] With her examination, Davis demonstrates how the biopolitical constraints on Black women's bodies and identities are distinct from those imposed on White women and critiques the monolithic representation of the ‘female’ embodied experience espoused by white feminist theorists during the second wave.

bell hooks examined the sexualization of the Black female body in contemporary pop culture (especially music and film) and how that impacted Black women's embodied experiences. hooks asserts that the sexualization of Black bodies in the West allowed for the desexualization of White bodies, transforming the embodied experiences of both Black and White individuals. hooks elaborates that the fetishized bodies of Black women are problematically associated not only with sexuality, but with sexual deviance, aggression, and activity in the modern Western/American cultural landscape, and connects these associations back to much earlier 19th century representations of Black women in European and Western countries.[29][8] This is entirely different from the ways that White women's bodies were/are characterized and constructed. Key points from hooks’ analysis include the ‘Othering’ of Black bodies in the establishment of White biopolitical norms, and the high level of constraint but marked lack of protection that characterizes Black women's embodied experiences in the present.

Katherine McKittrick's book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle explores the meanings and intersections of Black women's geographies in relation to their struggle and resistance. In her analysis of the slave auction block in Green Hill as a locus of human geography, she asserts that “physical geography can be mediated by the space of the subject: the body, the self, identity, and subjectivity”,[30] exploring the ways that human geographies can also be embodied or invoke bodily norms, characterizations, and performances. For McKittrick, the auction block is not an empty space, but an active one that at once “ normalizes black pain, commodifies black working-sexual bodies, and potentially motivates resistances to the naturalized place of black femininity.”[30] Places help to situate bodies in relation to their environments and complicate our understandings of peoples lived experiences.

• Farquhar, Judith, and Margaret Lock, eds. 2007. Beyond the body proper: Reading the anthropology of material life. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.[5]
• Mascia-Lees, Frances E., ed. 2011. A companion to the anthropology of the body and embodiment. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.[6]
• Mascia-Lees, Frances E.. 2016. The Body and Embodiment in the History of Feminist Anthropology: An Idiosyncratic Excursion through Binaries. In: Lewin, E. and Silverstein, L. ed. Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century. Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press, pp. 146–167.[32]
• Van Wolputte, Steven. (2004). Hang on to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33(1), 251–269.[33]
• Mason, Katherine, and Natalie Boero. 2021. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment / Edited by Natalie Boero and Katherine Mason. edited by K. Mason and N. Boero. New York: Oxford University Press.[34]