SOAS Research Online

Abstract

There is something about human body that defies borders; not only is one’s body unthinkable outside of its immediate environment—be that environment construed out of bodies of others, of certain human or even non-human shared corporeality, or of a space where the world, or worlding, happens—it is equally seemingly non-existent in the absence of other partial and perhaps necessarily imperfect connections: in language, sociality and other ways of being collective, or part of collectives, in one’s lifeworld. So, to draw a border, as Marilyn Strathern seems to have implied with her critical anthropological concepts of ‘dividuality’ and ‘partial connections’, means, in a way, to slip into an epistemic abyss where, in order to become something other than the other, one needs to at least partly lose oneself.