scholarly journals The Shared Origins of Embodiment and Development

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Marshall ◽  
Troy M. Houser ◽  
Staci M. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Evolution Of Development ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

As a domain of study centering on the nature of the body in the functioning of the individual organism, embodiment encompasses a diverse array of topics and questions. One useful organizing framework places embodiment as a bridge construct connecting three standpoints on the body: the form of the body, the body as actively engaged in and with the world, and the body as lived experience. Through connecting these standpoints, the construct of embodiment shows that they are not mutually exclusive: inherent in form is the capacity for engagement, and inherent in engagement is a lived perspective that confers agency and meaning. Here, we employ this framework to underscore the deep connections between embodiment and development. We begin with a discussion of the origins of multicellularity, highlighting how the evolution of bodies was the evolution of development itself. The evolution of the metazoan (animal) body is of particular interest, because most animals possess complex bodies with sensorimotor capacities for perceiving and acting that bring forth a particular sort of embodiment. However, we also emphasize that the thread of embodiment runs through all living things, which share an organizational property of self-determination that endows them with a specific kind of autonomy. This realization moves us away from a Cartesian machine metaphor and instead puts an emphasis on the lived perspective that arises from being embodied. This broad view of embodiment presents opportunities to transcend the boundaries of individual disciplines to create a novel integrative vision for the scientific study of development.

Drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness: Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsófia Demjén
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Linguistic Methods ◽  
Linguistic Approach

This paper demonstrates how a range of linguistic methods can be harnessed in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the ‘lived experience’ of psychological disorders. It argues that such methods should be applied more in medical contexts, especially in medical humanities. Key extracts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath are examined, as a case study of the experience of depression. Combinations of qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods, and inter- and intra-textual comparisons are used to consider distinctive patterns in the use of metaphor, personal pronouns and (the semantics of) verbs, as well as other relevant aspects of language. Qualitative techniques provide in-depth insights, while quantitative corpus methods make the analyses more robust and ensure the breadth necessary to gain insights into the individual experience. Depression emerges as a highly complex and sometimes potentially contradictory experience for Plath, involving both a sense of apathy and inner turmoil. It involves a sense of a split self, trapped in a state that one cannot overcome, and intense self-focus, a turning in on oneself and a view of the world that is both more negative and more polarized than the norm. It is argued that a linguistic approach is useful beyond this specific case.

scholarly journals Consumer-run services research and implications for mental health care

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 410-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. P. Segal ◽  
S. L. Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Functional Improvement ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Services Research ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Mental Health Consumers ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

Mental health consumers/survivors developed consumer-run services (CRSs) as alternatives to disempowering professionally run services that limited participant self-determination. The objective of the CRS is to promote recovery outcomes, not to cure or prevent mental illness. Recovery outcomes pave the way to a satisfying life as defined by the individual consumer despite repetitive episodes of disorder. Recovery is a way of life, which through empowerment, hope, self-efficacy, minimisation of self-stigma, and improved social integration, may offer a path to functional improvement that may lead to a better way to manage distress and minimise the impact of illness episodes. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is the defining objective of the process activity that defines self-help. It is the giving of agency to participants. Without such process there is a real question as to whether an organisation is a legitimate CRS or simply a non-governmental organisation run by a person who claims lived experience. In considering the effectiveness of CRSs, fidelity should be defined by the extent to which the organisation's process conveys agency. Unidirectional helping often does for people what they can do for themselves, stealing agency. The consequence of the lack of fidelity in CRSs to the origins of the self-help movement has been a general finding in multisite studies of no or little difference in outcomes attributable to the consumer service. This, from the perspective of the research summarised herein, results in the mixing of programmatic efforts, some of which enhance outcomes as they are true mutual assistance programmes and some of which degrade outcomes as they are unidirectional, hierarchical, staff-directed helping efforts making false claims to providing agency. The later CRS interventions may provoke disappointment and additional failure. The indiscriminate combining of studies produces the average: no effect.

The transfusion of blood

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Richard M. Titmuss
Keyword(s):  
Blood Transfusion ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
The World ◽  
Blood Transfusion Service ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Circulation Of The Blood ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes

This chapter discusses the transfusion of blood. Beliefs and attitudes concerning blood affect in varying degrees throughout the world the work of transfusion services in appealing for and recruiting blood donors. A deeply rooted and widely held superstition is that the blood contained in the body is an inviolable property and to take it away is sacrilege. In parts of Africa, for example, it is believed also that blood taken away cannot be reconstituted and that the individual will therefore be weakened, be made impotent, or be blinded for life. The growth of scientific knowledge about the circulation of the blood, the composition and preservation of blood, and the distribution of blood group genes throughout the human race has provided a more rational framework. However, it is only more recently that scientific advances have made a blood transfusion service an indispensable and increasingly vital part of modern medicine.

Languages and Idiolects: Their Language and Ours

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Higginbotham
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual

An idiolectal conception of language is compatible with a substantive role for external things — objects, including other people — in the characterization of idiolects. Illustrations of this role are not hard to come by. The point of looking outward from the individual is pretty evident for the case of reference to perceptually encountered objects: had the world been significantly different, a person with the same molecular history would have acquired, and called by the same familiar names, different physical and other concepts. An idiolectal conception of language is by no means committed, and has some reason to be opposed, to internalism, and to individualism in Burge's sense; that is, to the view that the organization of the body, abstracting from external things, is constitutive of any linguistically significant aspect of language.

Habitus and Field

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Leander
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
International Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Heuristic Devices

The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.

scholarly journals "Det føles ikke-mandigt på en måde"

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Generational Differences ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fertility Treatment ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Infertile Men ◽  
The World ◽  
Individual Ability ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual

The article addresses the theme of "masculinities" from the perspective of infertile men and their partners. It argues that experiences of infertility should be understood as disruption in relation to the body and in relation to the narrative of life that is informed by cultural notions of kinship and gender. These notions are closely connected to a culturally specific story of coming-into-being, which gives symbolic priority to biological procreation and genetic connectedness. Being a real father and a real man depends on procreative abilities. In order to come to terms with infertility, infertile men try to redefine such ideologies of authenticity. The article illustrates how infertile men are confronted by strong cultural associations between fertility, sexuality and masculinity, and how these notions are related to other ideas of masculinity such as independence of the individual, ability to be a provider and a conception of the "intact" body. Finally, the article demonstrates how men and women differ in coping with infertility, childlessness and fertility treatment, and their longings for parenthood. However, gender is not the only difference, which makes a difference in the world of infertile and childless people. The ideas of masculinities unfold through men's relations with other men and through generational differences and similarities.

Empirical Implications

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-179
Author(s):  
J. Arvid Ågren
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Genetic Elements ◽  
Selfish Genetic Elements ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Genome Wide ◽  
The Individual

The initial success of the gene’s-eye view came from making sense of old problems in evolutionary biology, in particular those related to social behaviour. It also stimulated new empirical research areas. This chapter is about three such new areas. The first is extended phenotypes, which are examples of phenotypic effects that occur outside of the body in which a gene is located. The second area is greenbeard genes, which gets its name from the thought-experiment devised to show that for altruism to evolve it is the relatedness between the actor and the recipient at the locus underlying the altruistic behaviour that matters, not the genome-wide relatedness. Finally, selfish genetic elements are genetic elements that have the ability to promote their own transmission even if it come at the expense of the fitness of the individual organism. The chapter outlines the current understanding of these topics and the role of the gene’s-eye view in uncovering them.

Autoprobiotics for personalized nutrition of school children

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-68
Author(s):  
V.I. Ganina
Keyword(s):  
General Education ◽  
The Body ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
School Age ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Impaired Health ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Positive Effect

According to the Ministry of Health and Social Development of Russia, the health status of children and adolescents in the Russian Federation is characterized by the following indicators: more than half of school-age children have impaired health; two-thirds of children under 14 have chronic diseases; only 10-15 percent of graduates of general education institutions can be classified as healthy. In recent decades, with the development of nutrigenomics, the world community of scientists has come to understand the importance of the role of the microbiota in the human body and its relation with nutrition. Normal intestinal microbiota is involved in a variety of physiological functions of the body of school-age children: protective, digestive, detoxifying and anticarcinogenic, synthetic, genetic, immunogenic, metabolic, and others. Probiotic bacteria are one of the functional ingredients that have proven to have a positive effect on children's bodies. Methods of normoflora correction are proposed, aimed not only at restoring evolutionarily conditioned microbial populations, but also providing an effective impact on the individual organism.

scholarly journals Place Memory and the Body

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 32-44
Author(s):  
Margaret Kerr
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Altered States Of Consciousness ◽  
Altered States ◽  
Psychological Pain ◽  
Place Memory ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
At Will

Christopher Bache’s work, Dark Night Early Dawn (2000) draws on his experiences in altered states of consciousness to illustrate how the individual psyche is deeply interlaced with the minds, emotions and life events of others across time and space. He suggests that this interconnectedness enables us to go beyond healing personal psychological pain, to help heal individual and collective suffering. Bache’s account concentrates on what might be called the world of “spirit” rather than matter. The current paper is an endeavour to extend his work into the world of matter through theoretical exploration and physical engagement with body and land. To this end, I present a heuristic enquiry into two psycho-geographic journeys made at sites of collective suffering in rural Scotland. While working in altered states of consciousness and engaging in somatic practice, I felt residues of what seemed to be this suffering, coming to consciousness through my body. The work of understanding and honouring this involved performance, ritual and artwork. My suggestion is that such embodied practice allows both a profound acknowledgement of historical events and a therapeutic release of pain. Working in this way may also show us how deeply our bodies and minds are woven into the rest of nature. Once we experience this, places can come alive to us in a different way. Matter is no longer a dead substance for humans to use at will. It is a mystery that we are all part of, and one that invites our deepest respect and care. KEYWORDS interconnectedness, parapsychology, altered states of consciousness, ecopsychology, place memory.

scholarly journals Ken Donald and Muscular Christianity

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Mark Loane
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Physical Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
The World ◽  
Muscular Christianity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind

?MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY? was a system which relied upon sport to allow people to grow in a moral and spiritual way along with their physical development. It was thought that . . . in the playing field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still temper, self restraint, fairness, honor, unenvious approbation of another?s success, and all that ?give and take? of life which stand a man in good stead when he goes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial [Kingsley cited from Haley, in Watson et al].1 This system of thought held that a man?s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes [Hughes, cited in Watson et al].1 The body . . . [is] . . . a vehicle by which through gesture the soul could speak [Blooomfield, cited in Watson et al].1 In the 1800s there was a strong alignment of Muscular Christianity and the game of Rugby: If the Muscular Christians and their disciples in the public schools, given sufficient wit, had been asked to invent a game that exhausted boys before they could fall victims to vice and idleness, which at the same time instilled the manly virtues of absorbing and inflicting pain in about equal proportions, which elevated the team above the individual, which bred courage, loyalty and discipline, which as yet had no taint of professionalism and which, as an added bonus, occupied 30 boys at a time instead of a mere twenty two, it is probably something like rugby that they would have devised. [Dobbs, cited in Watson et al]1 The idea of Muscular Christianity came from the Greek ideals of athleticism that comprise the development of an excellent mind contained within an excellent body. Plato stated that one must avoid exercising either the mind or body without the other to preserve an equal and healthy balance between the two.

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