Embodiment and Cultural Differences

Embodiment and Cultural Differences PDF Author: Bianca Maria Pirani
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443898236
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Embodiment and Cultural Differences focuses on the body as the equilibrium limit between the memory of time already passed and the dynamic where of unexpected happenings. The body’s ecology is fulfilled in the surrounding environment within this variable limit. Each embodiment operation is, in fact, an experimental setting that consists of the unrepeatable executive instants through which, like a musical score, the body synchronises human consciousness with the context of action. What distinguishes the architecture of this book is that, collectively, it constitutes a challenge to the digital media paradigm, in which the body is treated simply as a two dimensional icon of space and time; a relatively “free form” with all kinds of narratives generated by the multimedia. The volume demonstrates how fundamentally different ways of experiencing time are also determined by the differing cultural use of bodily rhythms. Central to the understanding of this interdependence is the study of synchronisation – increasing knowledge through the investigation of how rhythm, music, chants, dance, prayer and other harmonising practices support social integration. The book also touches upon the anxieties, fears, and ambivalences affecting contemporary European societies, particularly those that have followed in the wake of terrorist attacks and the influx of refugee populations. The participating authors are all members of the International Sociological Association, and part of the Research Committee 54 “The Body in the Social Sciences”. This is, in short, a book that will attract wide interest, especially from social scientists, researchers and academics in the social sciences, sociology, and digital studies, in addition to further afield, for example, in health, philosophy, education, and anthropology.

Embodiment and Cultural Differences

Embodiment and Cultural Differences PDF Author: Bianca Maria Pirani
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443898236
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
Embodiment and Cultural Differences focuses on the body as the equilibrium limit between the memory of time already passed and the dynamic where of unexpected happenings. The body’s ecology is fulfilled in the surrounding environment within this variable limit. Each embodiment operation is, in fact, an experimental setting that consists of the unrepeatable executive instants through which, like a musical score, the body synchronises human consciousness with the context of action. What distinguishes the architecture of this book is that, collectively, it constitutes a challenge to the digital media paradigm, in which the body is treated simply as a two dimensional icon of space and time; a relatively “free form” with all kinds of narratives generated by the multimedia. The volume demonstrates how fundamentally different ways of experiencing time are also determined by the differing cultural use of bodily rhythms. Central to the understanding of this interdependence is the study of synchronisation – increasing knowledge through the investigation of how rhythm, music, chants, dance, prayer and other harmonising practices support social integration. The book also touches upon the anxieties, fears, and ambivalences affecting contemporary European societies, particularly those that have followed in the wake of terrorist attacks and the influx of refugee populations. The participating authors are all members of the International Sociological Association, and part of the Research Committee 54 “The Body in the Social Sciences”. This is, in short, a book that will attract wide interest, especially from social scientists, researchers and academics in the social sciences, sociology, and digital studies, in addition to further afield, for example, in health, philosophy, education, and anthropology.

Embodied Difference

Embodied Difference PDF Author: Jamie A. Thomas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498563872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

Culture as Embodiment

Culture as Embodiment PDF Author: Paul Voestermans
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118485335
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Culture as Embodiment utilizes recent insights in psychology, cognitive, and affective science to reveal the cultural patterning of behavior in group-related practices. Applies the best of the behavioural sciences to contemporary issues of behavioural cross-fertilization in global exchange Presents an original theory to be used in the gender and integration debates, about what the acceptance of newcomers from different cultural backgrounds really entails Presents a theory that is also applicable to youth culture and the split in modern society between underclass, modal class, and the elite Contains an original approach to the persistence of religion, and relates religious thought to the cognitive capacity of generic belief

A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment

A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment PDF Author: Frances E. Mascia-Lees
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444340468
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment offers original essays that examine historical and contemporary approaches to conceptualizations of the body. In this ground-breaking work on the body and embodiment, the latest scholarship from anthropology and related social science fields is presented, providing new insights on body politics and the experience of the body Original chapters cover historical and contemporary approaches and highlight new research frameworks Reflects the increasing importance of embodiment and its ethnographic contexts within anthropology Highlights the increasing emphasis on examining the production of scientific, technological, and medical expertise in studying bodies and embodiment

Embodiment in Cognition and Culture

Embodiment in Cognition and Culture PDF Author: John Michael Krois
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027252074
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This volume shows that the notions of embodied or situated cognition, which have transformed the scientific study of intelligence have the potential to reorient cultural studies as well. The essays adapt and amplify embodied cognition in such different fields as art history, literature, history of science, religious studies, philosophy, biology, and cognitive science. The topics include the biological genesis of teleology, the dependence of meaning in signs upon biological embodiment, the notion of image schema and the concept of force in cognitive semantics, pictorial self-portraiture as a means to study self-perception, the difference between reading aloud and silent reading as a way to make sense of literary texts, intermodal (kinesthetic) understanding of art, psychosomatic medicine, laughter as a medical and ethical phenomenon, the valuation of laughter and the body in religion, and how embodied cognition revives and extends earlier attempts to develop a philosophical anthropology. (Series A)

Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture

Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture PDF Author: Christoph Durt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549255
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
The first interdisciplinary investigation of the cultural context of enactive embodiment, offering perspectives that range from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological. Recent accounts of cognition attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving cognition as enactive and the cognizer as an embodied being who is embedded in biological, psychological, and cultural contexts. Cultural forms of sense-making constitute the shared world, which in turn is the origin and place of cognition. This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection on the cultural context of embodiment, offering perspectives that range from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological. The book brings together new contributions by some of the most renowned scholars in the field and the latest results from up-and-coming researchers. The contributors explore conceptual foundations, drawing on work by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, and respond to recent critiques. They consider whether there is something in the self that precedes intersubjectivity and inquire into the relation between culture and consciousness, the nature of shared meaning and social understanding, the social dimension of shame, and the nature of joint affordances. They apply the notion of radical enactive cognition to evolutionary anthropology, and examine the concept of the body in relation to culture in light of studies in such fields as phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and psychopathology. Through such investigations, the book breaks ground for the study of the interplay of embodiment, enaction, and culture. Contributors Mark Bickhard, Ingar Brinck, Anna Ciaunica, Hanne De Jaegher, Nicolas de Warren, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Christoph Durt, John Z. Elias, Joerg Fingerhut, Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Vittorio Gallese, Duilio Garofoli, Katrin Heimann, Peter Henningsen, Daniel D. Hutto, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Alba Montes Sánchez, Dermot Moran, Maxwell J. D. Ramstead, Matthew Ratcliffe, Vasudevi Reddy, Zuzanna Rucińska, Alessandro Salice, Glenda Satne, Heribert Sattel, Christian Tewes, Dan Zahavi

Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice

Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice PDF Author: Carolyn Pedwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135999686
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice examines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device – with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts. This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines.

Embodying Culture

Embodying Culture PDF Author: Tsipy Ivry
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813548306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Embodying Culture is an ethnographically grounded exploration of pregnancy in two different cultures—Japan and Israel—both of which medicalize pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry focuses on "low-risk" or "normal" pregnancies, using cultural comparison to explore the complex relations among ethnic ideas about procreation, local reproductive politics, medical models of pregnancy care, and local modes of maternal agency. The ethnography pieces together the voices of pregnant Japanese and Israeli women, their doctors, their partners, the literature they read, and depicts various clinical encounters such as ultrasound scans, explanatory classes for amniocentesis, birthing classes, and special pregnancy events. The emergent pictures suggest that athough experiences of pregnancy in Japan and Israel differ, pregnancy in both cultures is an energy-consuming project of meaning-making— suggesting that the sense of biomedical technologies are not only in the technologies themselves but are assigned by those who practice and experience them.

Emergence and Embodiment

Emergence and Embodiment PDF Author: Bruce Clarke
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391384
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment, Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics’ attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work. In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana’s and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics. Contributors. Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe

Journeys of Embodiment at the Intersection of Body and Culture

Journeys of Embodiment at the Intersection of Body and Culture PDF Author: Niva Piran
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128094214
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Journeys of Embodiment at the Intersection of Body and Culture: The Developmental Theory of Embodiment describes an innovative developmental and feminist theory—understanding embodiment—to provide a new perspective on the interactions between the social environment of girls and young women of different social locations and their embodied experience of engagement with the world around them. The book proposes that the multitude of social experiences described by girls and women shape their body experiences via three core pathways: experiences in the physical domain, experiences in the mental domain and experiences related directly to social power. The book is structured around each developmental stage in the body journey of girls and young women, as influenced by their experience of embodiment. The theory builds on the emergent constructs of 'embodiment' and 'body journey,' and the key social experiences which shape embodiment throughout development and adolescence—from agency, functionality and passion during early childhood to restriction, shame and varied expressions of self-harm during and following puberty. By addressing not only adverse experiences at the intersection of gender, social class, ethnocultural grouping, resilience and facilitative social factors, the theory outlines constructive pathways toward transformation. It contends that both protective and risk factors are organized along these three pathways, with the positive and negative aspects conceptualized as Physical Freedom (vs. Corseting), Mental Freedom (vs. Corseting), and Social Power (vs. Disempowerment and Disconnection). - Examines the construct of embodiment and its theoretical development - Explores the social experiences that shape girls throughout development - Recognizes the importance of the body and sexuality - Includes narratives by girls and young women on how they inhabit their bodies - Invites scholars and health professionals to critically reflect on the body journeys of diverse girls and women - Addresses the advancement of feminist, social critical and psychological theory, as well as implications to practice—both therapy and health promotion