ABSTRACT
Some have implicated embodiment in the development of various psychological processes from perception to reasoning, but in this essay, I adopt a standpoint at the intersection of anthropology and philosophy in order to discuss the role of embodiment in the development of the religious experience. My broad thesis will be that the phenomenological kernel of religion resides in an embodied primordial sense of “otherness” or “alterity.” This kernel becomes elaborated developmentally through an embodied process of objectification, which leads to the differentiation of self and other, thus making us human, and at the same time bestowing on us the inevitability of religion.
