Bodily Connection Research Articles

Bodies, religion and relationality: the paradox of the Buddhist trikāya

Rethinking religion along the lines of relationality rather than focusing on practice alone may substantiate the cultural meanings of embodiment. Yet, relationality may only provide a cover for exclusive practices that are intended to reduce the significance of the religious subject, as in the case of the practice of multiple embodiments in Tibetan Buddhism. This practice refers to the ability of lamas to activate a form of transcendental reciprocity in the service of their disciples’ salvation. But its application also suggests a paradox centring on the dissolution of bodies. It not only affirms ongoing relationships between lamas and their disciples but also reiterates the quest for transcendental goals beyond the intricacies of bodily connections. This paradox demonstrates that the question of bodies and subjectivity in religion may not be resolved simply by focusing on the meanings of personal relationships and relationality. The context of these meanings becomes clearer when a distinction is made between the lama's personal goals and the metaphor of spiritual empowerment in lama–disciple relationships.

Topographies of Flesh: Women, Nonhuman Animals, and the Embodiment of Connection and Difference

Because of risks of essentialism and homogenization, feminist theorists frequently avoid making precise ontological claims, especially in regard to specifying bodily connections and differences among women. However well‐intentioned, this trend may actually run counter to the spirit of intersectionality by shifting feminists' attention away from embodiment, fostering oppressor‐centric theories, and obscuring privilege within feminism. What feminism needs is not to turn from ontological specificity altogether, but to engage a new kind of ontological project that can account for the material complexity of social space in the twenty‐first century. Taking inspiration from the phenomenological concept of flesh as well as ecofeminism and María Lugones's theory of the colonial/modern gender system, this essay argues that our own flesh is related to that of others through lines of intercorporeal relations that collectively form topographies of flesh. When we attend to those material relationships present in a particular locality at a point in time, we are able to recognize topographical aggregates of beings that can serve as a basis for this new feminist ontology. An example from Toni Morrison's Beloved involving a human woman and a nonhuman one is used as a paradigm for thinking ontological connection and difference at the same time.

Embodied Wildlife Histories and the Urban Landscape

Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America says little about the bodily connections between humans and wildlife. But environmental historians' growing interest in health should be extended to wildlife stories because humans' relationships with wildlife have shaped environmental health ideas, policies, and inequalities. Embodied wildlife histories would also encompass many common creatures that are not typically considered wildlife, such as Norway rats. The same processes of urbanization and landscape change that endangered many of the more charismatic species in Matthiessen's account also supported synanthropic species like rats and white-tailed deer, and increased contact between them and human communities. Histories of zoonotic diseases such as plague and encephalitis that jump from wildlife to humans in cities and exurbs can shed light on similar threats that have recently arisen, including Lyme disease and West Nile virus.

Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard (review)

Reviewed by: Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard Miriam Chirico Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard. By William Demastes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 224. $80.00 cloth. The machinations of a cast of characters attempting to reconcile their conflicting ambitions by evening's end is typical grist for the comic mill. Comedies that resolve in favor of the collective will seem to prioritize the status quo, but can these same plots also reward individual desires? In his book Comedy Matters, William Demastes analyzes the comic tension between individual desire and the social good. Drawing upon evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology, Demastes explores the dynamic interplay among nature, society, and the individual that comedy embraces. Comedy "matters"—that is, it both bears relevance and reflects material needs—because it showcases the transformation of society and the preservation of the species, as opposed to tragedy's glorification of principled idealism leading to self-destruction. In the comic agenda, social hierarchies are deconstructed through the dramatization of human interconnection, as exemplified by the "life force." Yet it is the intrinsically selfish behavior of humanity that sets the plots in motion. Herein lies the paradox: narratives of intense individualism underwrite comedy's larger agenda of united social betterment. Demastes draws upon an evolutionary model of species development to argue that an individual's biological drive for self-preservation undergirds comedy. Susanne Langer, in Feeling and Form, first theorized that a comic character struggles for homeostatic equilibrium and adapts to a changing environment. Society thus can correct for nonconforming behavior by forcing the individual to adjust to mutually beneficial goals. As Demastes explains, "unsociality, rather than immorality, is the subject of comedy" (18). Drawing upon Richard Dawkins's premise of the "selfish gene," Demastes wonders how comedy can work toward reciprocity if we, at the cellular level, are actually programmed to fight for individual survival. Even though a collective has a higher survival rate than an individual, we are not biologically designed to think collaboratively, a trait that disrupts the dramatic resolution of comedy. Demastes solves this problem by combining Marcel Mauss's analysis of gift-giving, which produces obligatory social bonds through the practice of exchanging gifts, with Timothy Wilson's model of the adaptive unconscious, which posits an unconscious self that secures its survival through a highly conditioned response to its environment. The model of gift-giving allows us to perceive reconciliatory characters such as Prospero and Portia in a new light, because their gifts of forgiveness and mercy, while approaching Derrida's notion of the "pure gift," nonetheless secure their own ends, which happen to be congruent with the community's well-being. A play like American Buffalo, however, does not exemplify comedy's gift-giving nature; according to Demastes, the economic motivation of each individual for himself overwhelms the free circulation of friendship and loyalty in a society represented by the pawn shop. [End Page 147] Demastes's second approach to comedy, modeled on the adaptive unconscious, illuminates how a character's interaction with his or her environment alters the self so that a comic resolution can be attained; rather than remain in a fixed worldview, as a tragic character might, the comic hero adapts to the way the world truly is, a process that leads to self-revelation. In light of the role-theorist's belief that each person possesses multiple selves, this model of an adaptive unconscious yields new interpretations of various plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, where, as Demastes shows, Jack Worthing puts forth the self most suited for any particular social environment. Moliere's character Alceste proves a failed comic character, by contrast, because he refuses to adapt to his hypocritical social milieu. Demastes further maintains that comedy negates a Cartesian mind–body dualism and draws upon current theories in neuroscience to demonstrate how mental processes are in no way separate from their bodily connections. Taking Shakespeare's Troilus and Hamlet as examples, Demastes argues that these figures are not comic, because not only do they adhere to a mind–body dualistic vision, but they erroneously prioritize the mind at the expense of the body. As the mind is physically embodied in...

Integrating semi-structured somatic practices and contemporary dance technique training

Previous research has examined the effects of more structured somatic practices, sometimes referred to as codified or structural integrity techniques, on contemporary dance education, yet few researchers have addressed the effects of open- or semi-structured somatic frameworks. This article is presented in two parts: the first part examines previous research as a ground from which to develop a method to deliver and study the effects of less codified somatic frameworks within a contemporary dance technique; the second part presents a short piece of practical research which developed from this basis. The research, conducted within a first-year college dance programme, consisted of a series of somatically informed contemporary dance technique classes. Results of the study included students' displaying enhanced bodily connection, creativity, confidence and critical understanding of tenets underlying somatic work, as well as some implications for dance technique. It also addresses some of the issues arising from introducing semi-structured frameworks within a contemporary technique class.

The Legacy and Rhetorics of Maternal Zeal

Lady Anne Halkett, author of this passage, lost her four-year old daughter to smallpox in 1660 and a son to a lingering disease one year later. The loss of all but one of her children was intensified by death of her husband, Sir James Halkett, on 24 September 1670. Meditating on her circumstances, newly widowed Halkett gains strength from reminding herself of the only and cheife thing that tyes [her] to world: despite her overwhelming grief, she knows her primary duty in life is to continue to care for her one surviving child, Robert, instructing him in ways of Church of England.2 Halkett s text is a mother s legacy, a genre that offers religious advice from a dying mother to her children as its primary purpose.3 These texts are shot through with a complex set of claims that are grounded in maternal body; legacy writers assert a vital, corporeal link with their children, which is unique result of having conceived, carried, and borne them. This bodily connection creates a naturalized bond between mother and child that authorizes composition: obligation a mother has to nurture her child's physical body begins in pregnancy and carries over into youth.4 Yet bodily authority has its limits. A dy ing mother?the rhetorical persona behind legacy?writes on verge of physical dissolution that spells loss of bond she shares with her infant. After all, how can a dead mother provide day-to-day care for her children? In response to this dilemma, legacy writers shift their claims away from their bodily substrate. They espouse an anti-worldly position, encouraging their children to reject lure of

The specters of bodies and affects in the classroom: a rhizo‐ethological approach

Drawing on the poststructuralist notions of the body and affect by Gilles Deleuze, the author will show that bodies and affects in the classroom may be redefined as intensities and energies that produce new affective and embodied connections. What he suggests is that reconceiving teaching and learning as a plane for the production of intense affects that connect bodies can perhaps problematize current educational discourses around ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘emotion management.’ It is important that we acknowledge and work with teachers and students to explore why and under what circumstances teaching and taught bodies are sometimes rendered as visible and other times as specters, as if they do not exist. Despite some limitations, Deleuzian ideas can open up planes where improbable affective and bodily connections can be made. In such planes, affects such as desire, pleasure, joy and even anger can form platforms for social solidarity and the understanding of differences.

Bodily Connections and Practising Relatedness: Aboriginal Family and Funerals in Rural North Queensland

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. This research was undertaken during my doctoral candidacy and subsequent employment at James Cook University, Townsville, from 2000 to 2005, with the assistance of an APA(I) grant, and of the Central Queensland Land Council Aboriginal Corporation. My thanks to Kudjala women and men who generously put up with my presence and questions. I also thank Mike Wood and Rosita Henry for their most helpful comments on an earlier draft. I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful editing. 2. This legislation and Amendments in 1901, 1934 and 1939 severely restricted Aboriginal men's and women's wages, marriage, association, travel and living arrangements. Underlying these restrictions was the ability of local ‘Protectors’ to remove individuals or whole families to settlements and missions. 3. People who were sent to Cherbourg, Woorabinda or Yarrabah settlement/mission have returned in much fewer numbers than those who were sent to Palm Island. 4. I did not set out to conduct research on funerals during my fieldwork. Rather, once ‘out of the field’, the material arose out of my impressions of the impact and relative frequency of these events. 5. About 45 per cent of deaths among Indigenous males, and 34 per cent among Indigenous females, occur before the age of 45, and most (males 76 per cent, females 65 per cent) die before the age of 65. This is compared to other Australians, amongst whom most males and females (73 and 84 per cent) live beyond the age of 65 (UN Human Development Report 2003 in Indigenous Health Statistics—Summary, www.antar.org.au/health/health_stats/html; accessed 21 July 2005). 6. All of the personal names in this paper are pseudonyms. 7. In this case, the mothers of the deceased's wife and Doris are first cousins rather than sisters, but are ‘considered sisters’, I am told, by their descendants. The relationship is also multiple, because the deceased's eldest daughter is a long‐term partner to Doris's brother. On the basis of these family relationships, Doris said that she should have been told by someone ‘close’. Through her brother, Doris was a ‘sister‐in‐law’ to the deceased's eldest daughter; however, the partnership had been unstable in the previous months. It is possible that there was an element of these tensions being played out in the daughter of the deceased not informing Doris sooner, but also possible that there was a disjunction in the two women's understandings of their relationship. 8. In the last two years it seems that this concern might be minimised, since people can now nominate when during the fortnight they will be paid their benefits. 9. Ingrid runs cross‐cultural training workshops for industry, such as mining and exploration companies, teaching them some aspects of Aboriginal kinship, relationships to land, history and bush tucker. 10. While some people attend church services regularly and others say they were ‘brought up Christian’ on Palm Island, there is minimal overt practice of Christian ritual among Aboriginal people in Charters Towers, and there has never been a Christian mission in the town. 11. Funds come from the organisations themselves or trust funds administered by these organisations. For example, the Aboriginal and Islander Catholic Council contributes $100 to the cost of every funeral of an Aboriginal person in the town. On the other hand, the administrator of the Inland Land Council was often responsible for organising the release of funds from a trust fund for traditional owners. The monies in this fund were the result of compensation negotiations with a multinational mineral and explorations corporation, whose activities impact on cultural heritage and native title claims.

Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (review)

Reviewed by: Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer Judith Dale Holsinger, Bruce W. , Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001; paper; pp. xxiv, 469; 20 b/w illustrations, 3 musical examples; RRP A$59.95; ISBN 0804740585. This is a marvellous book. Harking to the sonorous musical bodies of the Middle Ages, Bruce Holsinger addresses 'an intangible and perhaps unlikely object of historical enquiry', through a remarkable amalgam of cultural-materialist analyses [End Page 239] in literary criticism and musicology, even while making, as well, a sophisticated contribution to queer studies. The performativity of music, musical embodiment, is central. 'For a civilisation ever alert to the perils of carnality, the human body represents nevertheless the very ground of musical experience. Music [may] effectively erase sensual and epistemological boundaries between sexual and other modes of experience in the flesh' (pp. 1, 10). Holsinger develops important affinities between the musical speculations of the classical world and patristic discourse on music and corporeality, as 'Latin Christendom struggled to reconcile the sublimating aspirations of classical musical thought with its own incarnational aesthetic.' Thus, '[t]he legacy of patristic theology to the musical cultures of the Middle Ages was a musical worldview not uniformly hostile to the body, but rather deeply aware of the musicality of human flesh.' Augustine's later writings, in particular, display a 'surprisingly materialist construction of music's role in the creation, vivification and resurrection of human bodies' (p. 21). Holsinger's close readings are brilliantly and exquisitely done, in Latin and English literature and in music (notably Hildegard's), and also for medieval visual culture: the Guidonean hand, Hildegard, the panel from Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' reproduced on the cover. About Hildegard much, of course, has been written in the past decade. Holsinger develops an analysis of the constructions of corporeality and the sexual body, in her medical writings and letters, into a reading of musico-poetic imagery in the visionary texts and songs. The result is a sense of female spirituality expressive of homoerotic desire, within the Marian devotional music of an all-female monastic culture. In this way, Hildegard's range of talents and passions achieves a new synthesis, expanding our reading of her to include a place in the history of 'lesbian-like' identities. The centre of the book and its nexus of issues is a fascinating enquiry into circumstances surrounding the liturgical music of twelfth century Paris. As the Notre Dame school emerged to become the origin of polyphonic music in the west, so Holsinger claims that the new polyphony, attacked with polemical invective for its aberrancy and discord, was at the same time read as – and vilified for – parallelling and imaging the sexual dissidences of homoeroticism. The sensate connections of the new polyphony offend the ordered canons of musical orthodoxy just as much as same-sex bodily connection offends hetero-normalcy. In endorsing this claim, Holsinger presents a further analysis of his work on the otherwise hitherto neglected erotic verse-epistles of the poet Leoninus. Holsinger identifies this Leoninus with the Leonin of the Notre Dame school, and thus with [End Page 240] the 'musical homoerotics of polyphony' (pp. 21-2). Musical and theological figures of significance from the twelfth century are again seen as formative, now in an emerging history of homoeroticism. For those of us in Engl. Lit., the chapter on 'Polyphones and Sodomites' concludes with a gem of a discussion to accompany the perverse musicality of Chaucer's summoner and 'his freend and his compeer' the pardoner. The sonorous potential of the body in biblical hermeneutics also leads to considering the discourse of musicality in the pain of bodies suffering under torture or as martyrs. Thirteenth century Latin religious texts (from a Low Countries friar, an English Franciscan later Archbishop of Canterbury, and two of the visionary nuns of Helfta) are examined as 'The Musical Body in Pain: passion, percussion, and melody'. Music-making was also allied with violence and bodily suffering in the pedagogical disciplines of the liturgical chant-schools. When Chaucer's clergeon with his 'throte kut unto [the] nekke boon...

A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler's "Kindred" and Phyllis Alesia Perry's "Stigmata"

frican American writers are still writing slave narratives. One hundred thirtynine years after emancipation, more than four decades after the Civil Rights movement, the experience of slavery, the costs of escape, and the pain of remembering still compel attention. Yet even as the racial realities of modern America press literary scholars, historians, filmmakers, and others to keep our dark national history fresh in our collective consciousness, the march of time makes our peculiar institution seem reassuringly distant to some, and less recoverable than ever. As we began the twentieth century, thousands of ex-slaves were still alive, many testifying to their experiences (albeit often in compromised ways) through public forums such as the Work Projects Administration interviews. As we enter the twentyfirst century, no survivors remain, and very few who have actually beheld or spoken to a former slave. An experiential and bodily connection to slavery has been lost. No one alive bears the physical scars of African American enslavement, those visible

Consuming grief: compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian society

Acknowledgments About the Artist and Illustrations A Note on Orthography Introduction Part I: Contexts Chapter One: Cannibal Epistemologies Chapter Two: Wari' Worlds Chapter Three: Cultural Collisions Part II: Motifs and Motives Chapter Four: Funerals Chapter Five: Explanations of Eating Part III: Bodily Connections Chapter Six: Social Anatomy Chapter Seven: Embodied Identities Chapter Eight: Burning Sorrow Part IV: Eat and Be Eaten Chapter Nine: Predator and Prey Chapter Ten: Hunting the Ancestors Chapter Eleven: Transforming Grief Afterword Appendix A: The Story of Mortuary Cannibalism's Origin Appendix B: The Story of Hujin and Orotapan Notes References Index

Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (review)

Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Beth A. Conklin. Austin, Texas: University Of Texas, 2001; 285 pp. There are very few topics in anthropology that are as exotic as cannibalism. We might like think of ourselves as open-minded and adventurous, but we nevertheless still recoil at the thought of eating human flesh. Cannibalism, as much as any other practice, still represents a limit cultural relativism. However, as a consequence of colonialism and evangelization, cannibalism is almost entirely a thing of the past. Nowadays, the only way study it is through the testimony of witnesses who have eaten either co-socials in funerals (endocannibalism), or victims of confrontations with neighboring groups (exocannibalism). In Consuming Grief, Beth A. Conklin and her informants describe the ways in which funerary cannibalism was practiced until the 1960s by the Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest. According the author, practice of endocannibalism is embedded in the way social relations are constructed among the Wari'-especially between consaguines and affines-and in how they see themselves as part of a world in which human/animal identity is fluid in this life, as well as in the afterlife. Conklin shows that funerary cannibalism was a main component of a grieving process in which causing the body of the deceased to disappear helped the family and friends come terms with their loss more easily and more quickly. The book is divided in four well integrated parts. The first part, Contexts, opens with a synthetic chapter on Cannibal Epistemologies that, as its title suggests, takes us through the different types of evidence that cannibalism has existed as a social practice in human history. This book is a convincing challenge William Arens' (1979) claim, in The Man-Eating Myth, that cannibalism is purely a Western construct. The chapter also puts into perspective Amazonian cannibalism by comparing it medicinal cannibalism carried out for centuries in Europe. Chapter Two, Wari' Worlds, presents an in-depth description of social organization and environment both as they were before the contact with Europeans (who tried put a stop the cannibalistic tradition) and as they evolved in the post-contact period. Cultural Collisions relates the Westerners' reaction their encounter with the and, especially, their discovery of cannibalistic funerary practices. The conquerors soon pressured the abandon these practices and adopt the custom of burying corpses instead of eating or cremating them. The second part of the book, entitled Motifs and Motives, aims answer why and how the practiced endocannibalism. In Chapter Four, Conklin depicts funerals in rich detail, as they were before and after the contact, and offers accounts of perspectives on illness and death. In Explanations of Eating, she takes us on an intellectual journey through the various classical explanations of cannibalism: lack of proteins in the diet, sublimation of aggression, respect for the ancestors, desire incorporate the essence of the deceased into one's own body, etc. In the third part, Bodily Connections Conklin examines the ways in which the individual's body and its components are fitted into a network of social relations. Those relations are in part intertwined through the exchange of bodily fluids (Chapter Six) between parents and children, lovers, and consanguines. Conklin explains why only affines could consume a corpse without any danger and how this act reinforced existing ties among consanguines and affines. Chapter Seven, Embodied Identities, focuses once again on the body, but this time the author clarifies the ways in which the body serves as a central concept for defining juxtaposed identities. …

Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved

In Beloved, Toni Morrison expresses the dislocations and violence of slavery through disruptions in language. The novel tells the “unspeakable” story of Sethe, a slave mother whose act of infanticide leaves a gap in family narrative; bars her surviving daughter, Denver, from language use; and hinders her own ability to speak. Morrison's inclusion of voices previously left out of historical and literary narratives disturbs the language of the novel itself. The Africans piled on the slave ships, the preverbal child who comes back in the shape of the ghost Beloved, and a nursing mother who insists on the primacy of bodily connection: the expression of these subjects' heretofore unspoken experiences and desires distorts discursive structures, especially the demarcations that support normative language. Morrison's textual practice challenges Lacan's assumptions about language and language users, and her depiction of a social order that performs some of the functions of mothering challenges his vision of a paternal symbolic order based on a repudiation of maternal connection.