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.

Embodied Practice and Materialist Phenomenology

This chapter critically examines the Materialist-Phenomenological Method for studying religion and the work of the sociologist of religion Manuel A. Vásquez. This method focuses on the study of embodied religious practices, visual cultures, vernacular idioms, and particular locales as these are studied according to historical and often ethnographic methods of analysis. The chapter interrogates Vásquez’s work More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion, which proffers a “somatocentric” theory that aims to escape the legacy of Cartesian dualism. The chapter raises questions about Vásquez’s philosophical anthropology and shows how he repeats and reinforces the firewall separating the study of religion from reasons for studying it. In More than Belief, the chapter shows, one encounters the fact-value dualism that underwrites the ascetic ideal in religious studies, one so thoroughgoing that it prevents Vásquez from grasping the need to provide philosophical reasons to justify his theory.

Cartesian Dualism, Real and Literary Madness in the Regency, and the Mind and Madness in Austen’s Novels

Austen’s ability to represent psychologically plausible characters poses the question of what she would have known about the mind and its disorders. An answer requires insight into the ways the mentally afflicted were treated during the Regency and mind and madness understood by some of Austen’s literary influences (William Shakespeare, James Boswell, and Elizabeth Hamilton). Austen’s depiction of mind and madness in her novels contrasts with what she knew and wrote about medicine and medical practices for physical illnesses and injuries. The tenor of the times and the circumspect treatment of mind and madness in her novels, in turn, suggest that whatever firsthand knowledge she would have had from witnessing mental impairment in two family members was scrupulously hidden.

Chemical imbalance and mental health

No chemical imbalances have been proven to exist in relation to any mental health condition, like serotonin deficiency in synapses in the so-called depressive disorders or dopamine imbalance and dopamine receptors distribution in socalled schizophrenia. No independent objective biological marker or current brain imagining science like fMRI exist to date in support of any psychiatric diagnosis, and finally yet importantly, no biological causes exist for any of the socalled psychiatric disorders. If we avoid Cartesian dualism, the claim that mental disorders are biological is obviously a tautology. Given the facts above, psychiatric diagnostic manuals, such as the DSM and ICD, are school examples of what evidence-based science is not and represent nothing but a failed attempt to build a legal road from Health Care to Hell Care by over-medicalization and by the suffering of human and non-human animals. Furthermore, psychiatric drugs can have long-lasting effects on the brain and the central nervous system, while, the withdrawal from them can cause a range of severe physical and psychological effects.

Movement as Medicine and Screendance as Survivance: Indigenous Reclamation and Innovation During Covid-19

Indigenous screendance challenges US settler colonial constructions that drive political, environmental, and global injustices, which the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated. This article analyzes online workshops taught in 2020 by Rulan Tangen, Founder and Director of DANCING EARTH CREATIONS, as "movement as medicine" and "screendance as survivance." By connecting Tangen's workshops to Indigenous peoples' historical and ongoing uses of dance and the digital sphere for wellbeing and survival, we show how and why these practices provide powerful possibilities to counter settler colonial concepts of anthropocentrism, Cartesian dualism, patriarchy, and chronological time. Tangen's teaching offers ways for humans and more-than-humans—meaning land, cosmos, nonhuman animals, water, and plants—to (re)connect, drawing on the past to imagine the future and building human solidarity, which we theorize as "homecoming." Ultimately, we link our concept of "homecoming" to the Land Back movement because of the vital connections among Indigenous bodies, sovereignty, and survival.

Echoes Down the Years

This chapter examines the history of human-machine assemblages used to speak for the dead, comparing the practices of the nineteenth-century American Spiritualist movement with those of present-day transhumanist mind-uploading. In both cases, forms of mediated communication give the dead a continuing voice in society through a participatory performance involving the medium—a person whose consciousness is suspended in a state of trance, or a set of algorithms—the deceased, and an audience. Mediumship becomes a theater in which audiences both desire and interrogate the capabilities of necro-communication technology. The chapter attends to these technologies’ implied models of selfhood, which disaggregate mental content—software—from the vehicle of its expression—hardware—in the tradition of Cartesian dualism. The chapter argues that the technologies in question inevitably structure, in concerning ways, political notions of possessive individualism, which become commoditized in the shift from human-performed mediumship to selfhood instantiated in proprietary software products.

How Evidence-Based is Evidence-Biased Medicine

No chemical imbalances have been proven to exist in relation to any mental health condition, like serotonin deficiency in synapses in the socalled depressive disorders or dopamine imbalance and dopamine receptors distribution in so-called schizophrenia. No independent objective biological marker or current brain imagining science like fMRI exist to date in support of any psychiatric diagnosis, and finally yet importantly, no biological causes exist for any of the so-called psychiatric disorders. If we avoid Cartesian dualism, the claim that mental disorders are biological is obviously a tautology. Given the facts above, psychiatric diagnostic manuals, such as the DSM and ICD, are school examples of what evidence-based science is not and represent nothing but a failed attempt to build a legal road from Health Care to Hell Care by over-medicalization and by the suffering of human and non-human animals. Furthermore, psychiatric drugs can have long-lasting effects on the brain and the central nervous system, while the withdrawal from them can cause a range of severe physical and psychological effects.

‘Nothing is what it seems’: Posthumanism and late capitalism in Altered Carbon

This article explores how class politics are interpreted within Altered Carbon, the 2018 television series based on the 2002 book of the same name by Richard K. Morgan. The series follows Takeshi Kovacs, a soldier turned rebel turned private detective, as he awakens after 250 years in stasis. Like all humans in this fictional world, Kovacs’s existence, or essence, has been compressed into a small disk known as a cortical stack. Altered Carbon does not present a liberated or democratic future, instead, it demarcates how our posthuman fantasies can mimic, or fully embody, the class politics we see today in our late-capitalist society. Altered Carbon asks us to consider where the boundaries of the self and the body truly lie and how those boundaries, or lack thereof, are open for exploitation by those with financial means. We must critique how posthumanism has, or has not, taken up class. I believe this issue is most salient when we consider how class mediates our past, present and potential futures. I analyse the cortical stack itself as a posthumanist interpretation of Cartesian dualism and how that mind and body divide is central to maintaining capitalism through the alienation of the worker. Altered Carbon asks us to consider what happens when one’s flesh and one’s identity in and of itself become transferable and never truly one’s own.

The influence of J.-P. Sartre’s philosophy on the mimetic theory of R. Girard

Certainly Sartre had an enormous influence on the subsequent philosophical thought, primarily in France. Rene Girard did not ignore this thinker either. In this article we will look at the influence of Sartre’s philosophy on the formation of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory. Already in his early work, “Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure”, Rene Girard repeatedly refers to the work of Sartre, explaining how his work can be considered in the context of mimetic theory. Further, in an interview with Michel Treger in 1992, Girard controversially proposes to examine the existential-phenomenological constructions of Sartre by means of mimetic theory, putting forward his vision and critical view on overcoming the Cartesian dualism that Girard finds in Sartre’s philosophy. The author of the article considers the convergence of the mimetic theory of R. Girard with some provisions of the work by J.-P. Sartre, turning to one of the main philosophical works of J.-P. Sartre “Being and Nothingness”, which also influenced the early work of R. Girard. It should be noted that J.-P. Sartre does not offer a system describing the mechanisms of mimetic desire. But through the prism of mimetic theory we can see certain philosophical intuitions that reveal to us the nature of mimetic desires in the works of Sartre.

Swinburne’s Hyper-Cartesian Dualism

This paper maintains that Swinburne’s argument that the body is not essential to who I am is vulnerable to a similar objection to that put forward by Arnauld against Descartes: how do I know that my self-identification furnishes a complete and adequate account of the essential “me,” sufficient to show I could really continue to exist even were the body to be destroyed? The paper goes on to criticize Swinburne’s “hyper-Cartesian” position, that we are simply “souls who control bodies,” and thus only contingently human. This denial of our essential humanity compares unfavorably with Descartes’s own more intuitively attractive view that the human being is a genuine entity in its own right.