SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Social and cultural anthropology have historically relegated questions about human biology, physiology, bodily practice, and embodied learning to physical anthropology and the natural sciences. Mauss’s essay on techniques of the body, however, presents a notable early exception that, along with challenges in philosophy to the mind-body dichotomy during the first half of the twentieth century, gradually generated dedicated interest in the “whole person” acting, interacting, and learning in everyday contexts. Growing curiosity in embodied learning has been motivated by a number of factors including renewed appreciation for Marxist materialism in the 1970s; feminist and gender studies concerns with the body; phenomenology of the senses; research on apprenticeship, work, dance, and sport; and the efflorescence of the cognitive and brain sciences and the insights they offer into the nature of being human.