Embodiment theory speaks to the ways that experiences are enlivened, materialized, and situated in the world through the body. Embodiment is a relatively amorphous and dynamic conceptual framework in anthropological research that emphasizes possibility and process as opposed to definitive typologies. Margaret Lock identifies the late 1970s as the point in the social sciences where we see a new attentiveness to bodily representation and begin a theoretical shift towards developing an ‘Anthropology of the Body.’
Embodiment-based approaches in anthropology were born of dissatisfaction with dualistic interpretations of humanity that created divisions such as mind/body, nature/culture, and object/subject. Within these dichotomies, the physical body was historically confined to the realm of the ‘natural’ sciences and was not considered to be a subject of study in cultural and social sciences. When the body was studied or considered in social science contexts employing these dualistic frameworks, it was treated as a categorizable, ‘natural’ object with little recognition of its dynamic or subjective potentialities.
Embodiment theory has been developed and expanded by the work of many scholars, as opposed to being credited to a single thinker. The work of Thomas Csordas and Margaret Lock marks some of the earliest explicit applications of embodiment theory in anthropology. More recent edited volumes compiled by Margaret Lock, Judith Farquhar, and Frances Mascia-Lees provide a better window into current applications of embodiment theory in anthropology. The theoretical background of embodiment is an amalgamation of phenomenology, practice theory, feminist theory, and post-structuralist thought. Mary Douglas, Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault are often cited as key precursory conceptual contributors to embodiment theory.
Background Embodiment theory stems from a broader project to bridge perceived gaps in anthropological study produced by dualistic ways of thinking about the world using binary groupings such as nature/culture and mind/body. These dualisms trace back to the 17th century philosopher René Descartes. Dualistic thinking about the mind or self as distinct from the body produced research and theory that treated practice, perception, biology, culture, physicality, and cognition separately. Theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault grappled with these dualistic framings of the world, but each only contributed a piece of the puzzle. It was not until the 1990s that anthropologists such as Margaret Lock and Thomas Csordas began to attempt to synthesize the intellectual contributions of these precursory thinkers into a cohesive theoretical paradigm of embodiment.
In his 1988 Sterling Award Essay, Thomas Csordas identified two key theorists through which to frame the anthropological paradigm of embodiment: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu. Merleau-Ponty developed the phenomenological foundations for perception-based embodiment, while Bourdieu's Practice Theory provided the framework for a practice-based embodiment. Csordas saw embodiment theory as a synthesis of these two theoretical approaches. Margaret Lock, publishing about 5 years after Csordas' initial essay, cites a much broader array of scholars and intellectual traditions as contributors to embodiment theory, amongst them Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Roy Ellen, Marshal Sahlins, Émile Durkheim, and Robert Hertz (in addition to Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu).
Feminist theory and critical race theory, categories of social theory utilized heavily in anthropology, have also contributed significantly to the development of embodiment theory as practiced in anthropology. Anthropologists draw broadly from other disciplines in the development of social theory. Not all of the scholars that contributed to embodiment theory as used in anthropology are classified as anthropologists, but all are widely cited in anthropological literature.
Cartesian Dualism and the mind/body split René Descartes' 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. 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. 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. 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.
Theoretical foundations of embodiment theory
Marcel Mauss 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'. Mauss identifies the body as man's first ‘tool’ and establishes that bodily uses are embedded in both group life and societal history. Mauss saw human actions (and patterns of action) as “psycho-physio-social assemblages” 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. 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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 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”, 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. 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, phenomenological approaches to lived experience have been used in landscape archaeology to discuss and analyze people's experience of landscape.
Pierre Bourdieu 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. 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.” 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 Michel Foucault is often cited as an integral influence in the development of theories of embodiment. 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. Foucault invokes the term docile body to describe bodies that have internalized surveillance and discipline enacted upon them past the point of resistance. 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” orienting himself towards a practice-based understanding of the embodiment of power.
Embodiment and feminist theory Feminist theorists have also played a critical role in the development of embodiment theory as anthropologists understand it today. Shatema Threadcraft attributes the connection between embodiment and feminist theory to the critical role the body plays in constructions of sexuality and gendered difference, as well as the bodily focus of much of the labor that is traditionally ascribed to feminine gender roles (e.g. childbirth, child rearing, aesthetic performance for men, etc.). The relationship between feminist theory, embodiment theory, and the materialist turn in general is fraught because female corporeality has been so tied up in biological determinism, essentialism, and biological fixedness that feminists have been fighting against for decades.
Embodiment and second wave feminism 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. 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. Others, like Adrienne Rich, saw women's bodies as something to be celebrated. They encouraged connection to and revaluing of the ‘female’ body. 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/transcendence 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.
Judith Butler