Embodiment in Anthropology | Sickness, Healing, and How We View the Body
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.พ. 2025
- Embodiment in Anthropology | How We View the Body
Full script article and at: apartialperspe...
Are our bodies and minds really separable from one another? We are said to have gotten these ideas from Rene Descartes, but how accurate are these propositions?
In this video, I elaborate on how research in the social and biological sciences reject this kind of rigid separation of the mind and body. One way that we do this is through the concept of embodiment.
Embodiment helps us explore how the mind and body are deeply connected-with what happens in one having ramifications in the other.
I draw on Pierre Bourdieu, contemporary Medical Anthropological research (from anthropologists Clarence Gravlee, Alan Goodman, and social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger), and biosocial research by Rebecca Seligman to explore these concepts.
While embodiment is much deeper and can be more complicated than this, even drawing in gut-brain health/connection, this video serves as a starting point in a longer conversation that we all need to be having.
Beginning of Script:
When we think about “the mind” and “the body,” we usually talk about them as two different entities. This ontology has influenced biomedicine, psychology and psychiatry, and other disciplines that seem to separate the mind and the body. If your doctor asks you how you feel, it’ll be a question about a certain part of your body. Do your joints hurt? Does your stomach hurt? On the other hand, when a psychologist asks you how you feel, that’s said to be more subjective. It will reference your emotions and mental health, not your physical health. Are you sad? How are you coping with life circumstances? In both cases, it would “feel” inappropriate to give any answer besides those that are expected. One based in the body, and the other in the mind (or brain, specifically). You don’t go to a medical doctor to deal with “psychological” illnesses.
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References:
Clarke, D. (2003). Descartes's theory of mind. OUP Oxford.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice (Vol. 16). Cambridge university press.
David, R., & Collins Jr, J. (2007). Disparities in infant mortality: what’s genetics got to do with it?. American journal of public health, 97(7), 1191-1197.
Gravlee, C. C. (2009). How race becomes biology: embodiment of social inequality. American journal of physical anthropology, 139(1), 47-57.
Goodman, A. H. (2016). Disease and dying while black: how racism, not race, gets under the skin. New Directions in Biocultural Anthropology, 67-87.
Krieger, N. (2001). Theories for social epidemiology in the 21st century: an ecosocial perspective. International journal of epidemiology, 30(4), 668-677.
Kuzawa, C. W., & Thayer, Z. M. (2011). Timescales of human adaptation: the role of epigenetic processes. Epigenomics, 3(2), 221-234.
Kuzawa, C. W., & Quinn, E. A. (2009). Developmental origins of adult function and health: evolutionary hypotheses. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 131-147.
Seligman, R. (2014). Possessing spirits and healing selves: Embodiment and transformation in an Afro-Brazilian religion. Springer.
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You managed to explain this concept better than my lecturers and the millions of journals I read. Thank you!
Thanks for your comment! I’m glad you enjoyed the video. 🙏 😊
this is so cool, I didn't even know there was a way to understand some of these phenomena so clearly! very enlightening
YOU HAVE SAVED MY LIFE THANK YOU!!
Happy you found it useful! :)
well explained! this helps me to understand my anthro lecture on 'embodiment'.
Thanks, this is precisely what i have been looking for
We’re glad to help! Thanks for watching!
Hey, that was a really nice summarisation of the three perspectives from of the three fields. I learnt a lot.
I’m happy to hear you got a lot out of this! How would you characterize the psychological perspective? Is it linked to embodied cognition?
@@apartialperspective Yep, exactly! Although there is lot of variation depending on which school schools or areas of study you belong to, and almost all of it, highly contested.
The Cognitive Science perspective studies how body interactions shape even some of our basic cognitive processes like object recognition right up to more complicated processes like language.
The perspectives your essay covers focus on how "culture enters the body," a top down approach, cognitive science has a more bottom up approach, how body enters thought.
Putting link to the SEP entry for a more legit summary (:P) :
plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/
Thank you so much for that! 🙏 that sort of bidirectionality (top down & bottom up) is what I’d like to explore. I’ve got some reading to do. :)
I’ve recently gotten more into phenomenology and the whole “being-in-the-world” that embodied cognition talks about. Though I’ve been exploring it from an anthro perspective, it’s so much a part of psychology that I’ve been exploring that literature so much more. Of all of the topics I may do a video about in the future, these are definitely some of my favorites!
well done, I do think it's interesting the ways in which culture can shape how we interact or understand our own bodies. I was reading a discussion thread the other day on American women who were discussing how women have a much higher tolerance for pain because the shared experience of going to the doctor is to be told you're over reacting or being too emotional and so women often will put up with pain a lot longer than they should because they don't expect doctors to believe them
Thank you for watching! That’s really interesting! It shows how subjective many of these measures are, no matter how much we’d like for them to be systematized and accurate. Those little nuances matter.
A couple of semesters ago, a nursing student in one of my classes was saying how in her hospital, newborns, depending on race, are expected to be more or less whiney. So much of that has got to be a self fulfilling prophecy, or even confirmation bias. Yet, the medial field is filled with those kinds of beliefs. :/
very good explanation
Thank you for posting this!
Thank you for watching! 🙏
That was amazing, thank u
I think i just gained an I.Q. point. Cheers!
Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it :)
Thanks
These things are known intuitively by all people who have the lived experience. We know what causes harm and how; and I think directly impacted/marginalized need more resources and maybe consultation support as we're building collective power to change discriminatory policies of institutions, and organizations, and businesses, etc. people who are abusing/discriminating with their resources. In usa Close the concentration camps and abolish ICE who kidnap community members and reinvest away from sanctions/military/police/prisons and into community resources: grant asylum, affordable healthcare Medicare for All and Medicaid expanision, protecting workers rights/unionizing, Green New Deal climate justice, transformative justice accountability processes.
Cool
First