Somatic Cultures and Consciousness
From Event Cognition to Self-Transformation. This legacy project page framed somatic cultures as communities where bodily practices, embodied episodes, and shared meanings shape distinctive forms of self-consciousness and social belonging.
- Organizers: Maddalena Canna and Rebecca Seligman
- Discussant: Rebecca Seligman, Northwestern University
- Place: Vancouver CC WEST, Room 212, Vancouver, Canada
- Time: Saturday 23 November, 4:15 PM-6:00 PM
Legacy abstract
Recent scholarly explorations of embodiment have explored the multiple ways in which cultural meaning and somatic experiences are intermingled through complex loops of influence between mind and body. The panel focused on somatic cultures: contexts where shaping, conditioning and transforming participants' bodies is pivotal for developing a distinctive sense of Self integrated into a specific community.
The legacy page described religious groups, sports practitioners, meditators, communities defined by sexual orientations, shared trauma, pathology, practices of consumption, and ascetic practices as places where transforming one's body can forge distinctive self-consciousnesses and selective socialities. The panel proposed to explore somatic enculturation by integrating anthropology, transcultural psychiatry, neurocognitive science, and biological science.
Its central distinction was between somatic events - discrete episodes marking integration into a community - and self-transformation, the broader dynamics of personal reconfiguration and re-socialization. The page retained examples including initiation, desired but unpredictable enlightenment, boxing careers, circumcision, ritual shaving, and enslavement piercings in BDSM practices. It argued for a bio-looping approach in which bottom-up bodily processes and top-down meaningful experiences co-dependently shape selves, biology, and social worlds.