Embodiment in Anthropology | Sickness, Healing, and How We View the Body

Embodiment in Anthropology | How We View the Body
Full script article and at: https://apartialperspective.com/embodiment-how-anthropologists-think-about-the-body/

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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