Social Embodiment Research Articles

Embodied constructions

Abstract In Ancient Greek two-place verbs can take three different argument structure constructions, with nominative first arguments and either accusative or genitive or dative second arguments. While the accusative is the default case across all verb classes, the genitive indicates low agentivity of the first participant and low affectedness of the second, and the dative is especially frequent with social interaction verbs. The paper focuses on constructional patterns and construction variation with experiential verbs. Referring to data from experimental psychology, I argue that the distribution of constructions with either accusative or genitive second arguments reflects physical embodiment based on narrow vs. broad attention focus, as also indicated by constructional patterns of perception verbs. Emotion verbs that take the dative indicate potentially interactive situations, including those that involve social judgment, thus conforming to the pattern of interaction verbs and reflecting social embodiment.

The social life of water rights: towards a contractual approach

Superseding the ambiguous distinctions between formal and informal or between de facto and de jure rights developed in water studies, the study of water rights got a new lease on life when Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann proposed a distinction between categorical and concrete rights. While this approach apparently explains the social embodiment of state, customary, or local normative formulations, a closer examination shows that water rights are not enacted as enforceable entitlements but constantly (re)negotiated at every water turn. Thus, the fluid and contingent social life of water rights in Farmer-Managed Irrigation Systems (FMIS) is best understood in terms of their contractual character.

Empathy and Umbanda

This article explores the intricate interplay between empathy and religious experience within the Brazilian Umbanda religion. Umbanda is a syncretic faith that integrates elements from African spiritual practices, Catholicism, and Kardecist spiritism, reflecting the diverse cultural and social dynamics of Brazilian society. The religion emphasizes communication with spirits, particularly the pretos velhos—spirits of old slaves—who are revered for their wisdom and connection to the divine. These spirits engage with practitioners through mediums in rituals held in terreiros, offering guidance and comfort. Central to our discussion is the concept of embodied empathy, which is vital for understanding the deep emotional connections between the practitioners and the spirits. We seek to understand why Umbanda rituals are not just spiritual sessions, but profound empathic exchanges that facilitate communal healing and personal transformation. Through the lens of the predictive processing theory and the concept of embodied cognition, we argue that these empathic interactions are not just psychological but are deeply rooted in the physical and social embodiments of the participants. This perspective helps in understanding how Umbanda serves both as a spiritual practice and a socio-cultural mechanism that aids individuals in navigating their personal and collective life challenges. The empathy experienced within Umbanda rituals exemplifies how religion can serve as a powerful conduit for social cohesion and personal introspection.

Смыслы ценности достоинства человеческой жизни и геноевгенизация

Background: Among the areas of modern scientific and technological development, one of the leading places is occu-pied by new technologies of medical genetics: genetic editing of the human embryo genome (embryoengineering), medical genetic counseling, prenatal, neonatal, preconception diagnosis of hereditary diseases, technologies for the selection and selection of embryos, therapeutic and reproductive cloning human, etc. The question arises: how do genetic technologies and the development of genomic medicine affect changes in public and individual consciousness, and, above all, on the meaning of the meaning of the value and dignity of human life? Aim: To consider the main results of the development of genomic medicine technologies, such as the increase in the detection of genetic diseases, the increasing need for eugenic abortions and the use of embryos in research, and the introduction of genetic testing. Materials and methods: The historical and logical research method, as well as the historical and philosophical approach, allow the author to identify not only the ethical novelty of the geneticization of healthcare, but also a new form of social embodiment of the ideas of naturalistic-pragmatic ethics. Results: The value-worldview understanding of the consequences of the development of genomic medicine technologies leads to the need to introduce the concept of «genoeugenization» as a characteristic of the moral meaning of processes occurring in society un-der the influence of new medical genetic practices.Conclusion: The author substantiates the importance of the humanitarian-educational, legal and moral-philosophical level of knowledge for solving the problems of preserving the traditional moral value of the dignity of human life.

Foundations of Creative Democracies

I refer to the social embodiment of creative intelligence as creative democracies. Today’s world pose great challenges and serious threats to human life and cannot be faced by just having new ideas or more knowledge and thoughts. Today’s world requires the power to face the unknown, a key feature of intelligence. Hence the urgent need of societies to mutate into creative democracies. We need to begin with a strong base. We need an understanding and development of human life from its foundations and the simplicity of its origin in the creative freedom of reality and its intra-active intelligence, the power of all humans in our global world to meet and share meaning and interests. This essaysuccinctly highlights their foundations, prefaced by three cautionary reflections.

Trans women’s status in contemporary Iran: Misrecognition and the cultural politics of aberu

In this paper, I explore the socio-legal status of trans women in contemporary Iran especially as it relates to Gender Affirmation Surgery. More specifically, I try to understand how trans women embody gender by investigating gender practices and relations in family, law, and medicine. Based on my fieldwork in Iran, the findings suggest that aberu – a phenomenon specific to Iranian culture – plays a big role in shaping trans women’s lives. By bringing together feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser’s work on the politics of recognition and sociologist Raewyn Connell’s understanding of social embodiment, I discuss how the status of trans women is pervasively misrecognised and how they are denied economic participation and democratic representation in Iranian society. Adopting the method of thematic analysis, I argue that the social pressure associated with aberu, and the lack of legal protection have made trans women simultaneously invisible and yet also subject to violence. Finally, I discuss how trans women go through the process of gender embodiment by problematising misrecognition, redefining femininity, and reclaiming womanhood through everyday life challenges.

Too hot to help or too cold to care? On the links between ambient temperature, volunteerism, and civic engagement.

We investigated the relationship between ambient temperature and prosocial behaviour in real-life settings. It was guided by two mechanisms of opposite predictions, namely (1) higher temperatures decrease prosociality by harming well-being, and (2) higher temperatures increase prosociality by promoting the embodied cognition of social warmth. In Study 1, U.S. state-level time-series data (2002-2015) supported the first mechanism, with higher temperatures predicting lower volunteer rates through lower well-being. Study 2 furthered the investigation by probing the relationship between neighbourhood temperature and civic engagement of 2268 U.S. citizens. The data partially supported the well-being mechanism and reported findings contradictory to the social embodiment mechanism. Higher temperatures predicted lower interpersonal trust and subsequently lower civic engagement. The unexpected finding hinted at a cognitive effect of heat and a compensatory mechanism in social thermoregulation. We discussed the findings regarding their methodological strengths and weaknesses, with cautions made on ecological fallacies and alternative models.

Суспільне уявне як сучасний механізм солідаризації української нації

The article is devoted to the pressing issue of defining modern solidarity mechanisms in the Ukrainian nation, one of which is the public imagination. The methodological basis of the presented intelligence is the scientific work of C.G. Jung, the founder of one of the philosophical concepts of the collective unconscious; the work of French scientist – G. Durand, author of the concept of l’imaginaire – imaginary, who emphasizes that the world around us is the result of a free play of imagination, and modern French sociologist M. Maffesoli, – a cross-cutting problem of his research also poses the phenomenon of its social imaginary embodiment in social and symbolic forms, and several Ukrainian architects – E. Afonin, D. Zaiets, A. Martynov, V. Pliushch, V. Tancher. Based on the analysis of the presented works, the author has obtained the basis for developing a unique “ontology of the imager” – an imaginary image that is always specific. One or another “colour” of the imaginary image gives the semantic meanings that a person remembers following particular objects of reality, including political, as well as a generalized imaginary image as an ideal of actions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviour corresponding to the archetype “Self”, determining the psychological integrity of the individual. It has been confirmed that a person remembers only the most essential characteristics of an object, which constitute a “complete” imaginary image. Still they may lose touch with a particular object, retaining its typical features. This fact makes it possible to state that the type of generalized imaginary image appears as a social imaginary that influences reality creation. At the same time, due to horizontal social ties and the diversity of the individual imagination, “organic” (according to E. Durkheim) solidarity is achieved, which is a kind of strategy to mobilize society, especially in times of severe crises or threats. The public imagination is a “complete” imaginary image, which may lose touch with a particular object but retain its typical features, which allows us to determine its archetypal matrix and modern mechanism of solidarity of the Ukrainian nation.

Unintelligibility, personhood and curriculum silences of intersex bodies in the Life Orientation high school classroom: A case study

Despite an increase in the research that promotes affirmative gender and sexual diversity in the South African Life Orientation (LO) education, there remains an uncomfortable silence on intersex bodies. In the absence of distinctive binary classifications of external genitalia, learners with variant intersex characteristics are incapable of integration into socio-educational environments. This article explores how individuals with variant intersex characteristics learn about the self in relation to society within LO lessons. It extrapolates factors that influence the educational and psycho-social agency in and around the classroom. This phenomenological study has drawn on in-depth interviews with six individuals with variant intersex characteristics post schooling. The evidence shows that the LO curriculum privileges distinct genital developments as a marker of normal human development and means of gender identification. Previous studies found that the mutually exclusive biological sex characteristics drawn from XY (male) and XX (female) chromosomal development were major determinants of social sexual and gender embodiment in puberty lessons. Lensed through the theory of unintelligibility, bodies that deviated from this normative development were seen as ambiguous and derogatively referred to as hermaphrodites. Their personal identities were marred with constructions of freaks and abnormality. Vilifying personhood rhetoric impacted the social skills of intersex learners and their peers. Learners with intersex bodies were uncomfortable to engage with the gender binary curriculum content, facilities and school culture. Silences on intersex bodies in the LO curriculum made these learners feel invisible which led to early school dropout. This article argues for the integration of intersex knowledge that affirms, humanises and protects all gender, sexual expressions and sex characteristics in the school context. The LO curriculum is well-positioned to disrupt problematic constructions of intersex bodies as deficit and embarrassing by including variant sex characteristic developments as a norm.

The impact of the physical and social embodiment of voice user interfaces on user distraction

The concept of calm technology envisions that interaction with technology should consume minimal resources and cause as few distractions as possible. The main goal of our study was to compare different forms of embodiment of Voice User Interfaces (VUI) in terms of how much they distract a user from a cognitive task. We used a voice-only system without physical embodiment (voice-only), a physical embodied system without anthropomorphic features (physical embodied), and a social embodied VUI with social cues such as eye movements (social embodied). In addition, we explored the relationship between design features of the VUI and perceived distraction, social presence, and perceived calm. Twenty-four participants carried out four different cognitive tasks with the three different VUI and one round of cognitive tasks without any VUI present. The cognitive tasks were chosen from a serious game (BrainTagger Suit) and included measurements of cognitive speed, working memory, visual memory, and process inhibition. Overall, results indicated the voice-only VUI caused the least distraction, especially for cognitive speed, while slightly showing impairment for visual memory. Social embodied VUI appeared to cause the most distraction across the four cognitive tasks with physical embodied VUI falling in between. Surprisingly, social presence was perceived as highest for the voice-only system which at the same time received the lowest scores for perceived calm. The advantages and disadvantages of each VUI are discussed.

Queer Panic

This essay utilizes a theory of social embodiment as an analytical frame for the consideration of contemporary Christian nationalists’ near obsession with criminalizing trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) embodiment and denying fundamental legal protections to TGNC individuals. It first presents a brief overview of Christian nationalism, understood as an expression of populist and nationalist identity, and Christian nationalists’ anti-TGNC efforts. Utilizing a constructive theoretical account of the metaphor of society as a kind of body, the paper goes on to argue that Christian nationalism takes shape as the expression of a desire for the imposition and maintenance of a very particular social and political order, grounded in the social body’s imagined normative shape or morphology. Within this theoretical frame, the essay argues that, in trans and gender nonconforming individuals, Christian nationalists are confronted with queer forms of embodiment that fundamentally undermine the imagined normative or “natural” embodiment, both individual and social, around which their social and political identity has taken shape. Considered from this theoretical perspective, Christian nationalist efforts aimed at criminalizing trans and gender nonconforming embodiment and denying the rights of trans and gender nonconforming individuals represent visceral, dysphoric responses toward individuals whose presence disfigures or transmogrifies the social body.

Looking into the kaleidoscope of activism: the engagement of care ethics and global bioethics for a refined health security

During public health crises, the United States utilizes a statist approach for securing its population’s health, which places state structures at the center of a (mainly economic) health security. The fairness of this approach relies on a distribution of resources to “trickle down” from institutions to individuals. Yet, “fairness,” in this regard, is determined a priori, that is, without reference to specific individuals who are receiving resources of health. This ignores contextual needs that arise from the disproportionate damage that epidemics and pandemics have on vulnerable populations. A statist approach can make a more equitable impact on global society if it integrates care ethics into its distributive justice. In this paper, I demonstrate how an ethic of care can substantiate health security. First, I show how an ethic of care can be engaged anywhere embodiment is recognizable—not just in the one-on-one setting of the clinical encounter—but in the (inter)national contexts through which public health crises have a full effect on. Second, I provide a methodology for state institutions to recognize the social embodiment necessary to engage an ethic of care in these contexts, specifically engaging the social embodiment that manifests through the social activism of vulnerable populations during public health crises. Third, I demonstrate how the social embodiment that activism lives through forces an encounter with state institutions, mimicking in this manner a clinical encounter on a macrocosmic scale. Finally, I assign an ethic of care to this encounter, meshing caring values to the criteria of distribution.

Speed Dating with Voice User Interfaces: Understanding How Families Interact and Perceive Voice User Interfaces in a Group Setting.

As voice-user interfaces (VUIs), such as smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or social robots like Jibo, enter multi-user environments like our homes, it is critical to understand how group members perceive and interact with these devices. VUIs engage socially with users, leveraging multi-modal cues including speech, graphics, expressive sounds, and movement. The combination of these cues can affect how users perceive and interact with these devices. Through a set of three elicitation studies, we explore family interactions (N = 34 families, 92 participants, ages 4–69) with three commercially available VUIs with varying levels of social embodiment. The motivation for these three studies began when researchers noticed that families interacted differently with three agents when familiarizing themselves with the agents and, therefore, we sought to further investigate this trend in three subsequent studies designed as a conceptional replication study. Each study included three activities to examine participants’ interactions with and perceptions of the three VUIS in each study, including an agent exploration activity, perceived personality activity, and user experience ranking activity. Consistent for each study, participants interacted significantly more with an agent with a higher degree of social embodiment, i.e., a social robot such as Jibo, and perceived the agent as more trustworthy, having higher emotional engagement, and having higher companionship. There were some nuances in interaction and perception with different brands and types of smart speakers, i.e., Google Home versus Amazon Echo, or Amazon Show versus Amazon Echo Spot between the studies. In the last study, a behavioral analysis was conducted to investigate interactions between family members and with the VUIs, revealing that participants interacted more with the social robot and interacted more with their family members around the interactions with the social robot. This paper explores these findings and elaborates upon how these findings can direct future VUI development for group settings, especially in familial settings.

THE WORLD OF MULTIPLIES AS A MIRROR OF THE KEY WORLDVISION PARADIGMS

The article makes an attempt to comprehend the worldview paradigms based on the dialectic of the concepts “part” - “whole”, on the one hand, and “time” - “eternity,” on the other. These paradigms are realized in theological concepts, mathematical theories and social doctrines. It is the social embodiment of these paradigms that is most acute. Analyzing the world of sets and its broader context of Neoplatonism, one can formulate a hypothesis about deep collisions of the leading doctrine of modern society and possible ways of resolving these collisions.

Birth integrity through the lens of medicalization, risk, embodiment and intersectionality

Abstract Background Women globally report suboptimal conditions during facility-based childbirth. Most approaches that capture abuse, violence or mistreatment in epidemiology do not reflect a theoretical perspective in their measurement. In order to contribute to a more valid consideration of the cultural drivers, institutional conditions, direct expressions and individual perceptions that violate or preserve what we define as “birth integrity”, we developed a new theory-informed approach and an accompanying multilevel framework. Methods We theoretically substantiated birth integrity, referring to medical anthropology, sociology, social epidemiology and a critical-feminist theory, in particular: risk and medicalization of childbirth, social embodiment and intersectionality. We then contextualized birth integrity within a multilevel framework to operationalize its potential for epidemiological research. Results We present a six-field theoretical framework to operationalise and measure birth integrity violations, from institutional discrimination, to gender norms structuring labour room interactions and restrictions on autonomy. It allows to measure birth integrity violations that women experience at the macro-to-micro level as implicit, invisible and normalized, or explicit, visible and societally accepted. Conclusions Our new multilevel framework, based on a theory-informed construct of birth integrity, allows to measure drivers of health inequality and gender-based violence in more dimensions than so far represented in epidemiological research. Key messages The birth integrity concept integrates theories of medicalization, risk, embodiment and intersectionality into a multilevel framework. Our birth integrity framework is useful in epidemiological approaches to explicitly acknowledge and integrate cultural drivers of gender-based violence and inequalities in maternity care research.

Relational bodies: affordances, substances and embodiment in Chinchorro funerary practices c. 7000–3250 BP

Funerary art has the body as its main material component, expresses responses to death and offers insight into relationships between the living and the dead. Chinchorro hunter-gatherer-fisher societies along the Atacama Desert coast provide a key example of such connections, having developed one of the world's oldest-known systems of post-mortem body transformation (c. 7000–3250 BP). A study of 162 modified Chinchorro bodies identifies diachronic changes in these practices, including a decrease in internal stuffing—adding invisible contents that created corporeal volume—and an increase in external body treatment that created visible features. The authors propose that such manipulation was a meaningful form of social embodiment designed to construct a collective identity.

RELATION OF EMPATHY TO BODY REFLACTION IN DIFFERENT OCCUPATIONAL GROUPS

The article contains a theoretical and methodological analysis of such concepts as body reflection, emotional regulation, empathy. The concept of a somatic marker by Antonio Damasio is considered in the context of the neurobiological substantiation of the connection between the body and emotions in the decision-making process. The ideas of William James about bodily reflection as an indicator of a person's personal maturity are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the concept of embodied cognition and its component - the theory of social embodiment, which studies the role and significance of the body in social interaction and cognition from the point of view of cognitive science. Separately, the issue of the absence of a unified scientific understanding of the phenomenon of awareness, which is intensifying due to the variety of options for translating this term from English-language primary sources, is discussed. Based on the theoretical work carried out, a hypothetical assumption is made about the presence of a statistically significant connection between body reflection and empathy in representatives of various professions. The design and psychodiagnostics methods of empirical research are described, the task of which was to study such parameters as: body reflection, intuitive style of thinking, cognitive and emotional empathy. The subjects were representatives of professions such as "man - man", "man - artistic image" and "man - sign system". The article analyzes and interprets high correlations between the level of bodily reflection and different types of empathy, and also evaluates the confirmed counter-hypotheses, which were also the results of the study. The study of the processes of body reflection and empathy, as a component of emotional regulation, allows to transfer the results obtained to psychotherapeutic practice.

Love and Money: Erotic Materialism In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals Of Blood

This paper offers a reading of Petals of Blood (1977) in which Ngũgĩ exposes the practical, utilitarian side of intimate relationships, revealing ambiguities that complicate the romantic love ideal that is the social embodiment of his utopian political vision. It is clear that the term “materialism” in all its connotations is a central concern in Ngũgĩ’s philosophy. As a Marxist materialist, an ideological paradigm that influences the construction of the novels from his middle career, Ngũgĩ writes novels that repeatedly show how the unjust economic base of Kenyan society, and its unequal relationship with the world economy, is the root cause of many of its social ills. This paper examines materialism in the ambiance of romantic love as well as investigates the intricacies revolving around love and marriage. From the analysis, this study draws conclusion that the implications of materialist love defeat the notion of romantic love which naturally results in marriage.

The Fuzzy Side of Publicness: Visualizing Street Politics of Everyday life through the Lens of Distance

The description of public space usually hinges on two narratives of publicness: one narrative criticizes the State’s attempts to condition publicness on the basis of functionality, and the other denotes publicness with space that can be appropriated by ordinary people. However, there are no “pure” moments in which either narrative is neatly differentiated since they are simultaneously active, or fuzzy, in situations of everyday life. Exploring this fuzziness, we propose a visibility framework for studying the physical and social embodiment of publicness as a lived experience. The framework employs socio-spatial distance as a variable for interpreting the emergence of situations that promote urban justice. Based on visual ethnography in public spaces in Cairo and Alexandria, the framework allows us to interpret the multi-valence and uncertainty characterizing the fuzzy side of publicness. The article concludes with reflections on the tense interface of control and self-organization that animates the dynamics of street politics.

Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking

In this paper, we propose that there is a politics of encounters centered on the body at play in seeking asylum and refuge, and that it is critical to study how it unfolds from the point of view of both governing and agency. Building on existing work that looks at the role of embodiment in the political struggles of refugees, and leaning on Helmuth Plessner’s original thinking about social embodiment, we develop a theoretical understanding of this political dynamic, illustrating how it can help us make sense of power relations and forms of governance and (latent) resistance involved in it.