From the Physical Body to Dynamic Embodiment: Towards an Anthropological Study of Martial Arts Body Movement

This paper seeks a theoretical approach to the body best suited to the anthropological study of body movement in the martial arts. It follows the development of the anthropological attitude to the body from its formative period up until the present day, and this is done from the position of the “embodiment” paradigm as a theoretical orientation which enables a deeper understanding of the connection between specific cultural environments in which martial arts evolve and the meaning of the movements themselves. The introductory section provides a brief summary of “unembodied” theoretical schools of thought, which laid the foundations for the “somatic revolution”. The paper then considers the authors who have made the most significant contribution to the anthropological study of embodiment, and looks at four theoretical perspectives on the body, namely, the physical, socio-cultural, embodied, and dynamic embodiment perspectives. The paper also considers the question of overcoming the ontological body-mind dichotomy, which is the legacy of Cartesian dualism. Particular attention has been given to the embodiment and dynamic embodiment perspectives, and to their potential for application in anthropological studies of martial physical practices, illustrated with concrete examples.

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From the Calendar to the Flesh: Movement, Space, and Identity in a Mexican Body Culture

Societies ◽

10.3390/soc8030066 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 8 (3) ◽

pp. 66 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

George Jennings

Keyword(s):

Human Development ◽

Martial Arts ◽

Body Movement ◽

Political Context ◽

The Body ◽

Combat Sports ◽

Class Session ◽

Body Culture ◽

Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽

Martial Art

There are numerous ways to theorise about elements of civilisations and societies known as ‘body’, ‘movement’, or ‘physical’ cultures. Inspired by the late Henning Eichberg’s notions of multiple and continually shifting body cultures, this article explores his constant comparative (trialectic) approach via the Mexican martial art, exercise, and human development philosophy—Xilam. Situating Xilam within its historical and political context and within a triad of Mesoamerican, native, and modern martial arts, combat sports, and other physical cultures, I map this complexity through Eichberg’s triadic model of achievement, fitness, and experience sports. I then focus my analysis on the aspects of movement in space as seen in my ethnographic fieldwork in one branch of the Xilam school. Using a bare studio as the setting and my body as principle instrument, I provide an impressionist portrait of what it is like to train in Xilam within a communal dance hall (space) and typical class session of two hours (time) and to form and express warrior identity from it. This article displays the techniques; gestures and bodily symbols that encapsulate the essence of the Xilam body culture, calling for a way to theorise from not just from and on the body but also across body cultures.

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Deadlift Recognition and Application based on Multiple Modalities using Recurrent Neural Network

Electronic Imaging ◽

10.2352/issn.2470-1173.2020.17.3dmp-a17 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2020 (17) ◽

pp. 2-1-2-6

Author(s):

Shih-Wei Sun ◽

Ting-Chen Mou ◽

Pao-Chi Chang

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Recurrent Neural Network ◽

Network Structure ◽

Inertial Sensors ◽

Body Movement ◽

The Body ◽

Body Parts ◽

Multimodal Sensing ◽

Multiple Devices ◽

Neural Network Structure

To improve the workout efficiency and to provide the body movement suggestions to users in a “smart gym” environment, we propose to use a depth camera for capturing a user’s body parts and mount multiple inertial sensors on the body parts of a user to generate deadlift behavior models generated by a recurrent neural network structure. The contribution of this paper is trifold: 1) The multimodal sensing signals obtained from multiple devices are fused for generating the deadlift behavior classifiers, 2) the recurrent neural network structure can analyze the information from the synchronized skeletal and inertial sensing data, and 3) a Vaplab dataset is generated for evaluating the deadlift behaviors recognizing capability in the proposed method.

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Machine–Humans and Body-Subjects

10.1093/oso/9780198768913.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Early Cinema ◽

Cartesian Dualism ◽

Charlie Chaplin ◽

Human Interface ◽

The World ◽

Body Subject

This chapter presents an alternative to the popular critical vein that sees Joyce’s Ulysses and early cinema as conveying a mechanical, impersonal view of the world. It is argued that Ulysses and certain genres of early cinema were engaged—naively or otherwise—in a revaluation of Cartesian dualism, involving the reappraisal of mind/body and human/machine binaries. The physical comedy of Bloom and Charlie Chaplin is analysed with reference to phenomenological ideas on prosthesis and the machine–human interface, while other genres of early cinema, such as Irish melodrama and trick films, are considered in the light of phenomenological theories of gesture and embodiment. By comically mocking mind/body separation and depicting the inseparability of subjectivity and corporeality, Joyce and the early film-makers go beyond the ideas of Bergson and anticipate Merleau-Ponty’s later notion of the ‘body-subject’.

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Estimation of Motion and Respiratory Characteristics during the Meditation Practice Based on Video Analysis

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21113771 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (11) ◽

pp. 3771

Author(s):

Alexey Kashevnik ◽

Walaa Othman ◽

Igor Ryabchikov ◽

Nikolay Shilov

Keyword(s):

Respiratory Rate ◽

Evaluation System ◽

Body Movement ◽

Absolute Error ◽

The Body ◽

Meditation Practice ◽

Body Parts ◽

Mental Health Training ◽

Negative Thoughts ◽

The Mean

Meditation practice is mental health training. It helps people to reduce stress and suppress negative thoughts. In this paper, we propose a camera-based meditation evaluation system, that helps meditators to improve their performance. We rely on two main criteria to measure the focus: the breathing characteristics (respiratory rate, breathing rhythmicity and stability), and the body movement. We introduce a contactless sensor to measure the respiratory rate based on a smartphone camera by detecting the chest keypoint at each frame, using an optical flow based algorithm to calculate the displacement between frames, filtering and de-noising the chest movement signal, and calculating the number of real peaks in this signal. We also present an approach to detecting the movement of different body parts (head, thorax, shoulders, elbows, wrists, stomach and knees). We have collected a non-annotated dataset for meditation practice videos consists of ninety videos and the annotated dataset consists of eight videos. The non-annotated dataset was categorized into beginner and professional meditators and was used for the development of the algorithm and for tuning the parameters. The annotated dataset was used for evaluation and showed that human activity during meditation practice could be correctly estimated by the presented approach and that the mean absolute error for the respiratory rate is around 1.75 BPM, which can be considered tolerable for the meditation application.

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Tuning of a Basic Coordination Pattern Constructs Straight-Ahead and Curved Walking in Humans

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00817.2003 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 91 (4) ◽

pp. 1524-1535 ◽

Cited By ~ 96

Author(s):

Grégoire Courtine ◽

Marco Schieppati

Keyword(s):

Principal Components ◽

Lower Limb ◽

Time Course ◽

Body Movement ◽

The Body ◽

Whole Body ◽

Coordination Pattern ◽

Data Set ◽

Coordination Patterns ◽

Straight Ahead

We tested the hypothesis that common principles govern the production of the locomotor patterns for both straight-ahead and curved walking. Whole body movement recordings showed that continuous curved walking implies substantial, limb-specific changes in numerous gait descriptors. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to uncover the spatiotemporal structure of coordination among lower limb segments. PCA revealed that the same kinematic law accounted for the coordination among lower limb segments during both straight-ahead and curved walking, in both the frontal and sagittal planes: turn-related changes in the complex behavior of the inner and outer limbs were captured in limb-specific adaptive tuning of coordination patterns. PCA was also performed on a data set including all elevation angles of limb segments and trunk, thus encompassing 13 degrees of freedom. The results showed that both straight-ahead and curved walking were low dimensional, given that 3 principal components accounted for more than 90% of data variance. Furthermore, the time course of the principal components was unchanged by curved walking, thereby indicating invariant coordination patterns among all body segments during straight-ahead and curved walking. Nevertheless, limb- and turn-dependent tuning of the coordination patterns encoded the adaptations of the limb kinematics to the actual direction of the walking body. Absence of vision had no significant effect on the intersegmental coordination during either straight-ahead or curved walking. Our findings indicate that kinematic laws, probably emerging from the interaction of spinal neural networks and mechanical oscillators, subserve the production of both straight-ahead and curved walking. During locomotion, the descending command tunes basic spinal networks so as to produce the changes in amplitude and phase relationships of the spinal output, sufficient to achieve the body turn.

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Caudal Fin and Body Movement in the Propulsion of some Fish

Journal of Experimental Biology ◽

10.1242/jeb.40.1.23 ◽

1963 ◽

Vol 40 (1) ◽

pp. 23-56 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

RICHARD BAINBRIDGE

Keyword(s):

Body Movement ◽

Wave Length ◽

The Body ◽

Whole Body ◽

Tail Region ◽

Caudal Fin ◽

A Value ◽

Total Thrust ◽

Transverse Movement ◽

Relationship Of

1. Observations made on bream, goldfish and dace swimming in the ‘Fish Wheel’ apparatus are described. These include: 2. An account of the complex changes in curvature of the caudal fin during different phases of the normal locomotory cycle. Measurements of this curvature and of the angles of attack associated with it are given. 3. An account of changes in area of the caudal fin during the cycle of lateral oscillation. Detailed measurements of these changes, which may involve a 30 % increase in height or a 20 % increase in area, are given. 4. An account of the varying speed of transverse movement of the caudal fin under various conditions and the relationship of this to the changes in area and amount of bending. Details of the way this transverse speed may be asymmetrically distributed relative to the axis of progression of the fish are given. 5. An account of the extent of the lateral propulsive movements in other parts of the body. These are markedly different in the different species studied. Measurements of the wave length of this movement and of the rate of progression of the wave down the body are given. 6. It is concluded that the fish has active control over the speed, the amount of bending and the area of the caudal fin during transverse movement. 7. The bending of the fin and its changes in area are considered to be directed to the end of smoothing out and making more uniform what would otherwise be an intermittent thrust from the oscillating tail region. 8. Some assessment is made of the proportion of the total thrust contributed by the caudal fin. This is found to vary considerably, according to the form of the lateral propulsive movements of the whole body, from a value of 45% for the bream to 84% for the dace.

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Anthropological study of the early bronze age-early ice age skeleton of Esbeck with basic consideration of the body height and index problems

Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie ◽

10.1127/zma/66/1975/129 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 66 (2) ◽

pp. 129-160

Author(s):

E. May ◽

F. Speitling

Keyword(s):

Bronze Age ◽

Body Height ◽

The Body ◽

Ice Age ◽

Early Bronze Age ◽

Anthropological Study

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Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification

TDR/The Drama Review ◽

10.1162/dram.2006.50.4.36 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 50 (4) ◽

pp. 36-43 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Peter Sloterdijk

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Body Movement ◽

The Body ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

Peter Sloterdijk ◽

First Time ◽

The Relationship

The articles in this first installment of a series on choreography that considers the relationship between philosophy and dance interrogate conceptions of the body, movement, and language. Translated for the first time into English, the selection by José Gil reads the dancing body as paradoxical through the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; and the chapter by Peter Sloterdijk examines modernity's impulse toward movement and posits a critical theory of mobilization. An interview with choreographer Hooman Sharifi accompanies a meditation on his recent performance.

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IoT based Paralyzed Patient Health and Body Movement Monitoring System

International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology ◽

10.22214/ijraset.2021.35721 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (VI) ◽

pp. 4495-4500

Author(s):

Hemanth Kumar. R

Keyword(s):

Monitoring System ◽

Spinal Cord Injuries ◽

Body Movement ◽

Developed Countries ◽

Health Condition ◽

The Body ◽

Raspberry Pi ◽

Normal Person ◽

Patient Health ◽

Paralyzed Patient

Healthcare systems are a very important part of the economy of any country and for the public health. The IoT-based monitoring system for patients with paralysis, which helps to promote the health condition of a patient with paralysis, in addition to the day-to-day life. India has suffered a stroke, the incidence is much higher than that of the more developed countries, it is home to around 2.1 million Indians suffered from the boom of the (lame) per year. If a patient is suffering from a paralysis attack in all or any part of the body can be turned off in order to move in, which means that their movement is restricted and they can barely communicate with anyone at all, because they can't talk like a normal person. Raccoons will find it difficult to understand what they are saying, and help them deal with their day-to-day needs, such as food, water, etc.). At present, work is in progress on the review of the motion parameters on the legs, arms, and head of the paralytics. This paper investigates the development of an integrated and portable prototype is a model of a system for the monitoring of the various movements of the body, spinal cord injuries, with the help of sensors. The tests were carried out by placing the sensors on the head, arm, and leg of the paralyzed patient the data received from these sensors are sent to the raspberry pi 3 model. In the Android app, you'll receive a verbal warning, and if the patient is in need of help via Bluetooth, which, in turn, is connected to the raspberry pi.

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