Embodiment and Body Politics

Being a concept used for both describing and surmounting the mind-body dualism, embodiment is at the core of theories of cultural, social, personal, and psychological dimensions of identity—especially for issues about body politics. However, the very broad use of the term in diverse contexts (and also in the context of differing concepts of identity) has led to a variety of meanings that can be assigned to the term. Roughly speaking, the most prominent aspects of embodiment for recent theory can be subsumed under three major interests: embodied action/agency, embodied thought/knowledge, and embodied meaning/information. The most unifying aspects that make embodiment a paradigm for recent theories can be seen in the following generalizations: On the one hand, embodiment implies situatedness—thus, it is always about a here and now. On the other hand, embodiment is always about something that also exists in disembodied forms or processes of disembodiment—thus, the embodied can be an object of either abstraction/generalization or of transmission.

These generalizations allow for the emergence of quite different concepts of embodiment: A neuroscientist or a cybernetic thinker conceives of the embodied mind in terms of the functions of mental activity in an embodied context. For a phenomenologist, situatedness corresponds to so-called first-person experience and its state of sensing by the body (e.g., the insurmountable location of the eyes in visual experience of a place). To the phenomenologist's eyes, this very experience can be differentiated from the third-person experience of disembodiment (which corresponds, for example, to the experience of imagining one's own location on a mental map of the place in which one is situated—indeed, the difference between “embodied” way-finding and “disembodied” mapping is one of the most striking examples of this difference).

In theories of identity, the prevailing premises of embodiment are its relation to human personhood, as linked to consciousness (and its situatedness in basic environmental responsive activities), and as linked to meaning and communication. This entry provides a brief overview of phenomena of embodiment with regard to these three overlapping grounds and discusses the concepts of embodiment and disembodiment as both a challenge to and support for anthropological theories of identity.

As a preliminary historical consideration of this brief overview, one issue about the concept of embodiment must be highlighted, an issue that can sometimes obscure an adequate understanding of less recent concepts of embodiment and even the related theological concept of incarnation. When considering the relations of embodied (material) and disembodied (spiritual) items, one should not forget that only a few centuries ago the predominating medical theory conceived the body itself as lifeless—an object animated only by the spiritual forces of the soul. So if today we conceive the embodiment of something spiritual as “giving life (and sensual reality) to an idea,” not very long ago the same process was thought of as “giving life (and senses) to a body.” Thus, if today the semiotic problem of prereflective meaning is a problem of embodiment, not very long ago, it was instead crucial to mystic and purely spiritual (disembodied) experience as well.