Mindful body and embodiment

Our body's representations - the techniques of production of sense, of control of sexuality and emotions - organize and structure in the worlds of daily life the ways of feeling and living our body; so as in clinical life and in a doctor and a specialist's authoritative reports, case sheets and pathology's definitions are devices of reification of it. And the symptom is the moment where our body resists to social and political results of poverty and illness, but also a bodily idiom legitimated and recognized by Biomedicine's languages.

Our body is a social and a political construction where a collective and an invidual dimension of experience, languages, symbols and social structures are interlaced. According to this point of view, pathology, for Nancy Scepher Hughes, in the backgrounds of poverty and social discrimination, is, both the overflowing effect of biopolitics and of the strong powers on our body; and the expression, the way of wording the experience of marginality: in other words the incorporation of uncertain conditions of life.

The term-concept of “mindful body” freezes and turns over our convinctions, the dichotomic categories of the Cartesian science and philosophy, the conceptual schemes of observation, reading and reification of our body in the Western culture.Our body is a precipitate of emotions, passions and conversational practices in a normative frame, in a compulsory set of rules that circumscribes the borders of “normal” and “deviant”, “pleasure” and “sexuality”.

A special attention in the Western culture's economy of bodies deserves the essentialist definition of identity, interiorized and expressed as “natural”; in other words, this is a changeless, neverending essence and not an “in fieri” construction. Identical, as defined, is always equal to itself, strandardized by science and biopolitchs' linguistical devices that contended to Church and State, between public and private, the control of our bodies and of incarnate subjectivities.

The second term-concept I'd like to analise is “embodiment”, formulated by the anthropologist Thomas Csordas that describes both an attitude of our body to incorporate techniques and social devices, and a creative vocation to invent and incorporate new and different expressive operative ways.

It's a descriptive concept of our bodily dimension in the junction between subjective and intersubjective dimension of experience, the strategies of resistance to control-devices and the normative set of rules of behavioural codes, of prohibitions and bodily prescriptions. So, our body is both presence and project in the world, bodily produtcion, and sedimentation of languages and practices of the strong powers on itself.

Therefore, the research on our body has to restart from the ways of incorporation and from the styles of bodily objectivation, from the historical and cultural variability of the relationships between mind and body, from knowledges and bodily practices, from our body's social construction.

Yet, inverting the causal relation between the historical and cultural determination of the processes of incorporation and our body's resistance to the inscriptions of biopower, the ways of bodily production, the neverending creative invention of our body's expressive techniques, break up and confuse language's powers and sedimentations: from clay to nets, from mass-media to new media, as far as cyberspace's nowherelands; piercing, tatoos and bodily writings, video-writing and computer-graphic eroded the borders of “inorganic” and “organic”.

Our body is a text, technique and language which overturns knowledges and hegemonic cultures of it.

Also the semiotical turning-point in Anthropology – Clifford Geertz defined culture as a text and a system of symbols – suggests an analogy between our body's materiality and a text, between the activity of bodily production and textuality as an activity of production that creates the text itself. Our body is a conversational production, a text to read and to interpret.

Yet, Csordas says, the definition of “text-body”, removed the simultaneity of the processes of incorporation of experience and of the activity of symbolic production, privileging colloquial production and our body's bodily construction. Our body, in fact, is not only an activity of production and construction of sense but also an incorporation of the ways to live it.

The processess of incorporation of experience are ways of cultural elaboration, production and reproduction. Therefore, incorporation is a process that we can analise thanks to the new interpretative schemes of an Anthropology from our body, it's the level of observation of the activity of bodily production of culture and social reality – and of an Anthropology of the body – where the benchmark of the analysis is the arbitrariness and the hegemony of the strong powers over our bodies, the colloquial ways that, removed from the field of consciusness, become common sense not argued. The applicative potentialities offered by the new terms can be tested in the field.

The concept-term “embodiment” is also a useful means for the critical analysis of a medical student's ways of learning in the formative processes, the removal of our body's peculiarities and its capacitity to make things happen, as incarnate subjectivity.

An anatomical dissection of a corpse, in a room where surgical departments are practiced, and the reification of a patient's body are experiences that are able to transform a person and to incorporate into his/her glance knowledge and medical practices.

The training of the glance alters the student's ways of feeling: our body becomes an inert object to explore, the parts of the body can be touched, cut. A body-corpse, a bunch of organs, is the only object of observation of an apprentice doctor. A look at the body-corpse, a biomedical decontextualized thing of observation – and also a medical student's one - , is therefore, not exhaustive. It's a partiality imposed by science's methodological requirements. We have to ask to a doctor and a medical student to replace now their glances and to observe critically the definitions of “health” and “illness”, the nosological labels that give a name to pain and to the incorporated experience of poverty and disease as objective facts, strategical elements of science.

The definitions of our bodily condition in a case sheet describe an alteration, a deviancy of our body from a perfect health and remove the social and political determining factors of illness: undernourishment, poverty, marginalization, unemployment. It's a structural violence on our body that becomes natural evidence keeping secret the relation between political and economical dynamics of oppression - and control - of our bodies and social agonies.

Therefore, the symptom is not only an alteration of our body, the indicator of a pathological condition expressed by a patient, but is also a metaphor, an incorporated act of resistance of our body to political, social - and not medical - determining factors of disease. And the request of medicalization expresses a need of legitimation of pain.

Anthropological and social sciences are asking now to focus on economical and politcal causes of pain, local structures of power on our bodies, the processes of exclusion from the access to resources, chronic undernourishment and illness as incorporated metaphores of inequality.

And they sharpen their interpretative schemes, their ways of reading our body: embodiment and mindful-body that allow to analise our body's experience both as a way of sedimentation of social processes - of colloquial practices in our bodies - and of bodily production, resistance to the estabilished authorities of the biopolitics of bodies.