Confronting the problem of embodiment

Embodiment has become an important construct for those in disciplines and specialty areas concerned with the form and function of the human body. This article suggests that accounts of embodiment have collapsed into an exclusionary framework that locates culture and cognition on oppositional terms. For some scholars, embodiment represents the performance of one’s body with cultural contexts that sanction particular forms of comportment and display. Others attend to the neurological or cognitive functions that arise from bodily activity. After a historical analysis that documents how these exclusionary constructs have gained legitimacy in the American academy, this article suggests that critique of the longstanding dichotomy of mind and body necessitates a conciliatory model. I advocate a theory of ‘embodied cognition’ that explains how the human body, despite its condition as an object of culture, exerts subjective influence on the mind. To illustrate how cognition is embodied, I report on an ethnographic study that documented the athletic learning of members of a single women’s intercollegiate basketball team.