ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book explore the role of the body as lived experience and the body as physical object in the development of meaning, consciousness, and psychological functioning. Body as lived experience and body as physical object-understood as coequal and indissociable complementarities-constitute the fundamental notion of embodiment. Behavior emerges from the embodied person actively engaged in the world. Thus, embodiment is the claim that perception, thinking, feelings, and desires-that is, the way we behave, experience, and live the world-are contextualized by our being active agents with this particular kind of body (Taylor, 1995). In other words, the kind of body we have is a precondition for our having the kind of behaviors, experiences, and meanings that we have. As Johnson (1999) stated, “Human beings are creatures of the flesh. What we can experience and how we make sense of what we experience depend on the kinds of bodies we have and on the ways we interact with the various environments we inhabit” (p. 81). The chapters in this book explore embodiment from several theoretical orientations and focus on diverse functions of embodiment. Vonèche’s chapter 4 and Thelen’s chapter 5 examine the place of embodiment in cognitive functioning and development as a whole. Liben’s chapter 8
focuses on spatial cognition and development. Johnson’s chapter 2 and Scholnick and Miller’s chapter 10 explore embodiment and conceptual meaning and the impact of culture, as does Fegley, Spencer, Goss, Harpalani, and Charles’ chapter 11. In addition, Gao and Zelazo’s chapter 9 considers language and the development of levels of consciousness as this process entails a distancing of the conceptual from overt bodily activity, described as a move toward disembodiment. The chapters also extend beyond cognition per se. In chapter 7, Racine and Carpendale examine the development of social understanding from an embodied perspective. In chapter 3, Colombetti and Thompson discuss the embodiment of the emotions, and Csordas, in chapter 6, describes the embodiment of religious experience.
