Embodiment is a relatively amorphous and dynamic conceptual framework in anthropological research that emphasizes possibility and process as opposed to definitive typologies.
When the body was studied or considered in social science contexts employing these dualistic frameworks, it was treated as a categorizable, ‘natural’ object with little recognition of its dynamic or subjective potentialities.
[2][3][4] More recent edited volumes compiled by Margaret Lock, Judith Farquhar, and Frances Mascia-Lees provide a better window into current applications of embodiment theory in anthropology.
[7] Mary Douglas, Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault are often cited as key precursory conceptual contributors to embodiment theory.
[7] Embodiment theory stems from a broader project to bridge perceived gaps in anthropological study produced by dualistic ways of thinking about the world using binary groupings such as nature/culture and mind/body.
Dualistic thinking about the mind or self as distinct from the body produced research and theory that treated practice, perception, biology, culture, physicality, and cognition separately.
[4][2] Theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault grappled with these dualistic framings of the world, but each only contributed a piece of the puzzle.
It was not until the 1990s that anthropologists such as Margaret Lock and Thomas Csordas began to attempt to synthesize the intellectual contributions of these precursory thinkers into a cohesive theoretical paradigm of embodiment.
In his 1988 Sterling Award Essay, Thomas Csordas identified two key theorists through which to frame the anthropological paradigm of embodiment: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu.
Margaret Lock, publishing about 5 years after Csordas' initial essay, cites a much broader array of scholars and intellectual traditions as contributors to embodiment theory, amongst them Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Roy Ellen, Marshal Sahlins, Émile Durkheim, and Robert Hertz (in addition to Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu).
[13] Thomas Csordas notes that while Mauss’ theories served as early precursors to both practice- and perception- based embodiment, the development of the concepts completely independently from one another reproduced cartesian dualisms instead of collapsing them.
Merleau-Ponty, inspired by Heidegger's notion of ‘being-in-the world’ from “Being and Time”,[14] sought to situate the experience of ‘being-in-the-world’ as the root of human perception and the source of objectivity.
[5][8][2] Specifically, embodiment draws on his concept of biopower as it relates to institutionalized surveillance and state discipline, such as in barracks, factories, schools, and prisons.
Numerous Black feminist scholars such as Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Katherine McKittrick have complicated anthropologists' understandings of embodiment with respect to racialized bodies.
Davis's work explores the way that Western racial hierarchies complicated and transformed Black women's embodied experiences.
[28] The orientation of Black women in relation to labor and production also served to alienate them from other aspects of the ‘female’ embodied experience that White feminists placed so much emphasis on such as being a mother or a wife.
It fuses perception- and practice- based embodiment, recognizing that both are integral facets of human experience and ultimately grounded in the body.
Recently published edited volumes and scholarly articles relating to embodiment build on this theoretical base by incorporating medical anthropology, technology, commodification, colonialism, sexuality, race, gender, and transnationalism, amongst other subjects.