Bodies and embodiment

Theories of the body and of embodiment explore the ways in which humans experience the world through their physical and social bodies. Arising from trends in sociology and anthropology, in response to structuralist theories which divide the world into dualistic distinctions between subject and object, these theories seek to understand how physical and social bodies are constituted and reconstituted via corporeal interactions with the material world, and other living and nonliving things. As such, they help to reveal something of the ontological and cosmological frameworks within which past societies, and past people, operated. Studies of the body and of embodiment are closely associated with considerations of personhood and materiality; phenomenological, emotional, and sensory perspectives; and entanglement and assemblage theory.