This chapter considers reductionism, a major aspect of neuroscience research. I consider reductionist claims that we can only understand nervous systems from knowledge of their component parts. I then consider reductionist approaches and what we have learnt by following them, highlighting that a complete reductionist account of any nervous system region hasn’t been and is probably impossible to achieve. I then discuss decomposable hierarchical and non-decomposable heterarchical systems, and how relational aspects suggest we cannot understand the latter systems from cataloguing their individual components. I then discuss two effects that have received little attention despite being known for decades – volume transmission and ephaptic signalling – that highlight the need to consider component parts in relation to the whole system. I finish by discussing non-reductionist views, equipotentiality, cybernetics, the holonomic brain and embodied cognition, highlighting, as many have in the past, that debating between reductionist and non-reductionist approaches is a false dichotomy.

This chapter considers how mid to late twentieth-century settler poets were reconceptualising place through bringing regionality to the fore, signalling the particularities of colonisation, and a nascent understanding of Country in the interconnectedness of lands, air and waterways. It argues that writers of this period were becoming aware of the sovereign custodianship in evidence around them and the embodied aspects of subjectivity. The chapter includes a discussion of the resonance of colonial violence and reflexive subjectivity that was appearing in the writing of Douglas Stewart, and the impressionistic locality and implication of their own presence in a poem by David Campbell. It analyses how poets such as Randolph Stow and Philip Hodgins navigate forms of discomfort in occupying violated places. The chapter then turns to the mediation on localities and their knowledge systems in the work of Laurie Duggan and PiO before turned to the representation of the littoral and affect in the poetry of Charles Buckmaster, Robert Gray and Robert Adamson. Lastly, it considers the optic poetics of Grace Perry, Jennifer Rankin and Jill Jones.

This chapter discusses the effects on eighteenth-century conceptions of ‘the people’ of the experience of the revolutionary decade of the 1790s and the conservative reaction against it, paying particular attention to the writing of William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth, and their poet-activist friend John Thelwall. It discusses ideas of a convention of the people found in the popular radical circles influenced by Thomas Paine that Thelwall frequented, especially in relation to appeals to the state of exception that might allow for a revolutionary intervention in the constitution via a convention of the people. It ends by discussing the way these debates migrated into a tension between a philosophical idea of the people and an embodied politics that might coalesce around practical objects of reform that continued on far into the nineteenth century.

It is discussed in more detail how perceptions relate to propositional knowledge. In doing so, “myths” of the perceptual Given are evaluated. One myth is that a mere perception can itself justify propositions, or ground assertoric judgments, and that it can therefore be a foundational justifier. This is the Myth of the Given in Sellars and McDowell. Kant would deny that intuitions can justify propositions independently of conceptual content, be it infallibly or fallibly. After all, he makes the well-known complementarity claim about cognition “in the proper sense,” according to which intuitions without concepts are blind. However, as argued in the preceding chapters, their blindness does not entail that they do not have epistemic power in their own right.

The 20-item Female Sexual Subjectivity Inventory (FSSI) and the 20-item Male Sexual Subjectivity Inventory (MSSI) have five subscales (elements) and can produce a total score for sexual subjectivity. The five measured elements (4 items each) assessed with each inventory are sexual body-esteem, entitlement to self-pleasure, entitlement to pleasure from a partner, self-efficacy in achieving desire and pleasure, and sexual self-reflection. The measure can be referred to as a measure of sexual subjectivity, psychological sexual health, or sexual self-perceptions. In total it assesses perceptions of the self as a sexual being with choice, desire, and deserving of pleasure. The FSSI and MSSI can be administered online or in-person and it has been included in research with adolescents and adults. The FSSI and MSSI are free to use. This chapter begins with a discussion of the development of the MSSI and FSSI from item generation to psychometric analyses. This is followed with psychometric information, including the factor structure and invariance, and evidence of reliability and validity. Additional sections cover administration, scoring, and information about abbreviated versions. Finally, the response scale, the items in their entirety, instructions for administration and scoring, and permissions, copyright and contact information are provided.

The 37-item Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, Version 2 (MAIA-2; Mehling et al., 2018) assesses body awareness; that is, the ability to notice sensory signals originating from inside the body that provide information about its physiological states, processes, and actions. The MAIA-2 can be administered online or in-person to adults, including to clinical populations such as people with chronic pain, eating disorders, and depression (the 32-item MAIA-Youth should be used for children and adolescents). The MAIA-2 is free to use, and no written permission is required to use it for scholarly and non-commercial purposes. This chapter first describes the development of the MAIA-2, and then provides evidence of its psychometric properties. More specifically, the MAIA-2 was initially purported to have an 8-factor structure within exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. However, fit indices for the 8-factor model have been less-than-ideal in numerous studies, and more recently authors have found acceptable model fits when examining bi-factor models and a higher-order models, suggesting that the MAIA-2 items and scales, respectively, also load onto a general factor, with the exception of the Not-Distracting and Not-Worrying items, which may correlate with this factor. MAIA-2 scores are scalar invariant across men and women, and composite reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and incremental validity largely support the use of the MAIA-2. Next, this chapter provides directions to the MAIA-2 items and instructions for administration, and the item response scale and scoring procedure. An overview of available translations and abbreviations is provided. Finally, permissions, copyright, and contact information are provided for readers.

The 14-item Intuitive Exercise Scale (IEXS; Reel et al., 2016) measures an individual’s adaptive relationship with exercise. Intuitive exercise is an exercise-specific parallel concept to intuitive eating; it entails listening to bodily cues for when to start or stop exercising, being mindful and having sensory awareness during exercise, and opting for diverse types of movement to maximize enjoyment. Intuitive exercise is distinguishable from other exercise constructs such as exercise abuse, excessive exercise, dysfunctional exercise, and exercise addiction. The IEXS can be administered online or in-person to adults and is free to use. This chapter first discusses the development of the IEXS and then provides evidence of its psychometrics. More specifically, the IEXS has a 4-factor structure via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis among nonclinical samples (emotional exercise, body trust, exercise rigidity, and mindful exercise) and a 3-factor structure among women with eating disorders (emotional exercise, body intuition, and exercise variety). Internal consistency reliability, convergent validity, and incremental validity support the use of the IEXS. Next, this chapter provides the IEXS items in their entirety, instructions for administration and scoring, and the item response scale. A link to a Lithuanian translation is included. Logistics of use, such as permissions, copyright, and contact information, are available for readers.

Akbari describes what it means to have a human body in the digital age and argues that datafication has transformed the materiality of the body in its very flesh and bone. This transformation is especially dangerous in uncertain spaces, such as borders and refugee camps, where identity becomes crucial and only certain categories of human bodies can pass. The consequences to those experiencing datafication of their bodies at the border are harsh and severe. However, the deliberate unruliness of the border paves the way for these spaces to become technological testing grounds, as evidenced by the development of technologies to track fleeing populations for the purposes of contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Akbari’s text oscillates deliberately between academic thinking, autobiographical accounts, pictures, and poetry, thus clearly denoting the discomfort of the human being living in a Code|Body.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s depiction of the last day of Socrates in the Phaedo is not only a tragedy in Plato’s ideal sense, but it also repeatedly contrasts its own presentation of the death of Socrates with how a traditional tragedy might portray it. This contrast brings into stark relief the intellectual, moral and emotional gap between ideal and actual tragedy, in addition to an important disagreement about the nature and goodness of death. For actual tragedy, death is the worst thing that can happen. In the Phaedo, death is presented as a kind of liberation from the body, but this conception of death reveals the insurmountable limitations on the attainment of knowledge that living embodiment entails. The problem is not with argument itself, but with our all-too-human grasp of it. This means that, because of our embodied finitude, we can never actually be certain that the arguments for Socrates’ optimistic picture of divine redemption really are sound. My interpretation highlights Socrates’ epistemic uncertainty and the role of hope, and it makes misology passage more central to the dialogue’s argument than usually recognized. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

This chapter explores an overlooked aspect of Bloomsbury’s contradictory relationship to embodiment, materiality, and empire: their simultaneous embrace of early twentieth-century nudity and their condemnation of undress when it is expressed by the lower classes and colonial subjects. By focusing on the Studland beach photographs archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, this chapter considers the wider cultural context regarding nude images, both in terms of historical representation and practices of nakedness asks. Ultimately, the chapter asks: how might we understand Bloomsbury’s fascination with both photography and nudity at a time when nakedness and race together influenced colonial thinking and civilizing imperatives? The chapter argues that a consideration of Bloomsbury’s relationship to nude photography cannot be severed from the history in which whiteness is the normative racial marker for early twentieth-century Britons.

Kimberly Hope Belcher surveys an impressive number of authors and theories who have engaged with the broad human phenomenon of ritual. For it is evident that both classical ritual studies and more recent approaches have enormous potential for engaging in a dialogue with scholars of Christian liturgy and liturgies.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of embodiment, or how bodies vary because of their embeddedness in different cultural, social, and material landscapes. Understanding embodiment entails studying the influences of the social–cultural world on bodies, and the influences of biological processes on social, semiotic, and experiential worlds. Drawing on anthropological, feminist, and disability studies scholarship, and those in contemporary biological sciences, we offer some tools for thinking about how bodily states and processes are affected by their perception, representation, and treatment within people’s lived worlds, and vice versa. A processual, “bio-looping” model helps to explain how transformations of body and world in complex embodiment might work. Emerging empirical work in the biological sciences provides evidence for the deep entanglements of social and biological systems. The intersections among meaning and perception (“interoceptive affordances”) highlight how meaning shapes perception of bodily processes and sensations. Canna’s study of demonic possession illustrates how interoceptive affordances contribute to embodied experiences and ways of being in the world.

This final, concluding chapter of the book offers a reflection on what the production of digital media reveals about the cultural politics of these technologies. Drawing together the threads developed in the previous chapters, and especially UX writers’ own theorizations of language, I discuss the normative dimensions of interface design and make the case for a posthumanist approach to language in digital media interfaces. My central argument is simple: regardless of how people choose to use digital media, the software itself always posits an ideal way of using it – it entails an inbuilt ideal users have to respond to, even if that response is to contest the norm the software produces. In this way, focusing on the production of interface texts provides a valuable perspective on the broader cultural politics of digital media by theorizing UX writers, software, and users as part of a complex sociotechnical assemblage rather than as individual, disconnected agents.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the central argument of the book. Medical anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry must steer a course between realism and constructivism, integrating the useful features of both perspectives. Metaphor theory and 4-E cognitive science provide ways of integrating cognitive and socio-cultural processes. Metaphor production and comprehension involves cognitive and emotional processes embodied and enacted through rhetoric and social discourse. These practices constitute a hermeneutic circle that can be traced from body to person to social world and back. They show how symbols and things live in the same world. This work has implications for understanding the ways illness experience and healing practices are embedded in larger systems of knowledge/power. The metaphors that arise in individuals’ struggles to make sense of their predicaments and to heal from affliction are borrowed from everyday concepts of mind and body, as well as the political language of power, resistance, and dissent. Every metaphor lends power to a particular view of the world. We must judge the value of metaphors on their moral, political, aesthetic, and pragmatic implications.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.