Thesis (BTech (Surface Design))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2010 / A personal. phenomenological expression and discovery has been conducted. through being immersed in the four elements of nature. namely water, air, earth and fire. Each series represents one of the four elements. The established, Westem interpretations of the four elements have been contrasted with my personal embodied interpretation. The result of this was a concept based on the discovery of my context within the environment, manifested into an artistic reflection of my appreciation of creation. Embodiment. therefore. provides the theoretical framework as it is the merging of the body and mind in our interactions with the outer world, as a way of gaining knowledge and experience (Hocking. Haskell & Unds (eds.). 2001: xviii). Phenomenology of perception, according to Langer (1989: 158). is the study of structures of perception. and as a supporting theory, it ties in with embodiment and how our thoughts and feelings are a result of our physical body's conversation and interaction with the outer world. Embodiment is a tool used to rediscover that dialogue. and is one I have applied in order to design and create subjective and conceptual fabric sculptures. I have embodied my sculptures. shaping and installing a meaning, dictated by my experiential body perception. These two theories were important for my research in order to engage with and interpret my body's experiences within the elements of nature Inspiration for my product was derived from Deepa Panchamia. for her structured yet organic. pleated structures and Annalisa Vobis for her use of organic inspiration and the resulting conceptual interpretations. Andy Goldsworthy was also inspiration to me for the emphasis he puts on the raw and natural aspects of experience and process. This is evident in the nonpermanent characteristic of his land art. An important factor of this range is the display and exhibition of the Sculptures. by recording each series within the context of each element it represents, it grounds and highlights the strong inspiration of nature and process. evident within each sculpture. The entire range is created from polyester organza that has been permanently pleated and then hand manipulated to create 3-Dimensional. abstract sculptures. The use of this fabric creates a transparent, ethereal atmosphere. where the inner and outer layers of the sculptures seem to merge and interact. reflecting and indicating a fleeting moment of ghostlike embodied expression. Apart from the sculptures being the result of a self-expressive. introspective process, they are also aesthetically based conceptual art pieces with great potential to being translated into a variety of applications.

This inquiry adopts the non-dualist stance of Merleau-Ponty regarding embodiment, where the “body” is considered to be a socially embedded lived experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962), and considers whether this concept is useful to counselling psychologists who work with individuals with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. The study adopts a horizonal structure arising from understandings of Gadamer’s (1960) hermeneutics, which requires an awareness of the limitations afforded by different perspectives. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with eight practitioners of psychotherapy, who have experience with individuals diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. They are invited to speak about their experience of practice with these individuals, then to respond to a Merleau-Ponty quote regarding embodiment and to consider its usefulness in their work. Interview transcripts are thematically analysed (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Initial themes conceptualise anorexia nervosa as emotional control and denial of needs; where it is helpful to have a model of understanding; understand weight issues but don’t’ talk about food and weight, be aware of power-relations and avoid control battles, overemphasising weight gain and refeeding; and to understand ambivalence and work motivationally. The findings suggest practitioners use knowledge, in the form of theories, to provide structure and a familiar language with which to explore clients’ unfamiliar worlds. Embodied views are found to open up conceptualisations regarding ontology and embeddedness, where “anorexia” becomes an ontological split, with controlling minds punishing bodies, where words aren’t enough and the symptoms are a paradoxical solution to problems of power and agency. The study finds engaging with embodied views highlights the embedded nature of being, opens up ambiguity, challenges dichotomies and acknowledges non-psychological aspects of existence and practice. It is suggested this supports the humanistic value base of counselling psychology practice by raising awareness of the ways in which the use of theory iii can help and hinder intersubjective contact with clients and the importance of embodying hermeneutic openness.

Much of the criticism Heidegger has drawn from realism, from postmodernism and even existentialism, as well from the anti-Nazi protests on his philosophy, could be diluted if a defaulted connection was made between Heidegger's metaphysics and the Greeks. Being and Time drafted the blueprint of the origin of predication and world-disclosure from the primordial intuition of the limitations of action in the face of human finitude. This existential reprioritization forced a radical reversal of primacy from nature to culture, having assumed the absolute objectivity of some original world determinacy, the phenomenological structure of which, nevertheless, was never produced in Heidegger’s seminal work or thereafter. Existentialism has thus been downplayed as a counterintuitive, fanciful hypothesis, and will remain so for as long as horizontal temporality has not made itself available to itself as a negated object of perception in the horizon of disclosure. The objectified subjectivity of Dasein’s cultural bias should be demonstrable, if there is indeed a determinant even firmer and “causally prior” to the object of perception in reified nature. And the theory of freedom that is existentialism will remain a “theory” with a private definition of the term, if both the phenomenological structures of the “objectification” of subjectivity have not appeared: first as the objectivity of freedom that is absolute and universal, but no less than as the object that frees made up from nothing other than the absolute and universal objectivity of freedom. Heidegger must have felt this most pressing shortcoming in his metaphysics, because in a later monumental work, The Origin of the Work of Art, he avowed of such an object that is both the programmatic manifesto of freedom, and frees, pointing to the Greek Doric temple. He must have realized that the highest objectification of Dasein’s volatile subjectivity was somehow of “Greek” origin, and as I will argue, in this assumption alone he was right. But his proof was premised therein in an incomplete, trivial and self-contradictory way that left exposed to counter-entrenchment his arguments over both the attribution of the origin of reality, and consequently also its subjective constitution. From this point on, existentialism has remained doggedly problematic, if not inconsequential, in being unconnected to its bloodline, that is, phenomenology, and inasmuch as Heidegger’s incomplete metaphysics has remained unconnected to his miscued art theory. My hermeneutic method seeks this elusive, twofold objectification of subjectivity, in order to justify existentialism by simultaneously making the missing connections between Heidegger and the Greeks, and between Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art. The connections I am suggesting are both necessary and possible, provided that Heidegger’s theory of art is modified to grant monumental statuary its due hermeneutic primacy. Heidegger attributed the disclosure of world in truth-as-untruth to poetry and architecture, while Gadamer, who advanced Heidegger’s phenomenology to the currently predominant hermeneutic theory, also gave primacy to poetry and architecture. Their mistake is critical, because, as I will argue, Greek statuary is the patent twofold objectification of Dasein’s existential analytic, it is the convergence point of evidence to infer Heidegger’s missing theory of embodiment, and it is the ultimate origin of Western metaphysics. Current theories of embodiment, including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological case from where a missing dialogue has been attempted to derive Heidegger's theory of embodiment, typically confine themselves to Dasein’s ontological and ontic corporeality. I suggest that such theories should have addressed the necessity of the structures of Reason to incarnate themselves as the fundamental ontological prescriptions of perception. To address the necessity of this incarnation in monumental art as a primordial world disclosure, is to explore in this work a previously untapped tripartite hermeneutic conjecture, where theory of art and theory of embodiment are already theories of perception. My hermeneutic hypothesis adheres to, corroborates and advances basic phenomenological principles, to show how Dasein’s embodied structures in the exclusivity of Greek statuary have so far been misunderstood, decontextualized, and begged the question, accordingly as a “mystery” (Hegel), as “godly” (von Humboldt), as a “misunderstanding” (Buschor), or as “Greek naturalism” (art historians). Special attention will be paid to works such as the Laokoön Group, the Ptoan Apollo, the Blond Youth, the Zeus of Artemision and the Gigantomachy. I argue that these cultural fossils provide the most reliable grounds for a thorough commentary to Heidegger’s implied theory of embodiment, because they manifest as the art which relates most intimately to the instrumental modality through which the being-towards-death makes itself phenomenologically available to itself as the negation of the negation to live. Additionally, and in a postmodern world of academic wars that have claimed every aspect of Greek culture as stolen from other great civilizations, such solely uncontested cultural fossils are arguably the unsolicited proof classicists have been unable to produce regarding the exclusively Greek origin of Western metaphysics. The most consequential thrust of this work seeks to revitalize Heidegger’s claim regarding the origin and the chronology of world against competing alternatives such as Christian metaphysics, science’s Big Bang Theory, or the emasculated feminist case regarding the metaphysical primacy of the womb. The ultimate contribution this work aspires to, is the empowering of a presently stalled paradigm shift from the scientific to an existential-phenomenological world view. This shift would be akin to the one which procured with the advent of the Enlightenment between science and religion - a clash still raging in education – where further progress now demands that humanity leaves behind the disguised alienation which Heidegger himself coined as “the dictatorship of science.”

This thesis explores somatic practices as a social movement by focusing on the relationship between embodiment, somatics and contemporary dance practices. It looks specifically to Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) and traces an ethnographic history of the practice examining it as a post-modern western somatic method forming part of an international social movement. The research is grounded on post-structuralist dance anthropology and analyses BMC® as a “socially constructed movement system” (Grau 1993). Through experimentation, the somatic movement cultivates bodily awareness and an embodied sense of self. The thesis points to the ways in which the emphasis on embodiment may form a key component in this social movement and its relation to British somatic-informed dance. While providing the conceptual and historic context for experimentation in contemporary dance in Britain since the 70s, the thesis illustrates that New, and later, Independent Dance artists drew from BMC® as well as other somatic practices. It argues that the exploration of embodiment as a human attribute and lived phenomenon from a somatic perspective gave rise to a culturally distinct discourse of practice, known today as somatic-informed dance. It works to illustrate the nature of the new pedagogical approach that emerged and, specifically, the way this aspect of contemporary dance evolved as a result of the emphasis on embodiment and the somatic influence. To do so, the thesis identifies and analyses distinct principles and pedagogic tools employed through an anthropological perspective and ethnographic, historical and practice-led research methods. Further illustrating the way the concept of embodiment is understood in somatic informed dance pedagogy, it critically examines the claim that embodiment processes may re-educate dualist perceptions. It, thereby, argues that it is only in the experience of integration in the lived moment that the problem of dualism might be challenged. Through an investigation of lineage, the thesis situates BMC® and somaticinformed contemporary dance practice within the socio-cultural, artistic, conceptual and philosophical context in which they developed. Pointing to the parallel expansion of scholarly and artistic interest in embodiment over the past five decades, it demonstrates a permeability of bodies, places, ideas and culturally constructed movement systems. Overall, the thesis is underpinned by a critical engagement with the position that embodiment and experience form the existential ground for culture and self (distilled in Csordas’ 1994a), offering an analysis of BMC® informed dance practice as another source of data shedding new light to this insight. Capturing a moment in dance history with a synchronic investigation (Sahlins 1998), this research works to further contribute towards an understanding of a diachronic property of the formation of cultures. In line with Csordas’ position, it suggests that given their distinct approach to experientially gained corporeal knowledge and awareness, the emergence of ‘culturally constructed movement systems’ such as BMC® and somatic informed contemporary dance form a potential illustration of the way culture is existentially grounded on embodiment and experience.

In this thesis I argue that the early conceptualization of American identity was achieved through the dehumanization of blacks at slave auctions, and that the subjugation of this group informed more areas of the collective, normalized, American identity than just race. I contend that blacks were deprived of qualities that are considered inherently human (and American) and reduced to the facts of their bodies. To do this, I analyze newspaper advertisements for slave auctions, abolitionist editorials, and postings for runaway slaves. I also look at primary accounts of slave auctions that speak to the performative nature of the setting. I analyze the former set of texts to see how black bodies, in the context of their sale at auction, are discursively constructed in print media. In regard to the latter set of texts I discuss how slaves auctions mimicked theatrical settings, and how this staging and spectacularization of black bodies influenced the creation of a collective national identity. I argue that the emphasis on the slave’s body in newspapers and the spectacle of it on the auction block function to dehumanize blacks in such a significant manner that they become distinct from their free, white counterparts in ways that go beyond racial difference. This thesis expands on scholarship that considers the influence the institution of slavery had the normalizing of whiteness in America by positing that characteristics fundamental to American identity, such as individualism and creativity, were also established through the dehumanization of the blacks.

The focus of this thesis is how the body and its corporeal articulations can be used as a tool for composing for contemporary dance, with the aim of creating music with corporeal qualities that communicates on a physical level. For this purpose the author has collaborated with choreographers in a practice-based approach to examine how the body of the composer can be exploited in composition and performance, and how the voice can be exploited as a mediator between body movement and music. The body and its sensorimotor system is the foundation for our understanding of abstract concepts in music; the immaterial movement of music can serve as a foundation for a deep bodily-sensed understanding of complex concepts. By reversing this process of understanding, or rather by engaging in the action-perception loop of conceptual understanding, this understanding can help encapsulating abstract and complex concepts artistically in music. For this purpose the Feedback Instrument has been created, representing a direct way of engaging the sensorimotor system of the composer, where the intuitive body resonances are engaged in close connection with the sounding music.

This dissertation uses Heidegger’s critique of technology and its essence in an attempt to understand how Virtual Reality technology can change how we interact with the world and each other. The history of VR devices is unpacked to understand the motivation behind VR’s uses and development. Merleau-Ponty’s theories about embodied experiences are also used to understand how VR has an increased capacity to generate a sense of telepresence in the virtual environment for the user. Cases are investigated that specifically deals with how VR has influenced human interactions and rituals and made them more convenient to the users. The first cases focus on religion and how it changes when it is taken online. Specific focus is given to the Church of Fools online church and D.J. Soto’s VR church. The difference between how an online church operates is compared to the VR Church and how embodiment in the VE is experienced in each. This dissertation also explores cases where a user enters a ‘cross-dimensional’ relationship with the virtual. Two cases of people marrying virtual characters are examined. In these cases, the user entered a relationship with a character that was constructed by someone else. The other case examined, is that of Sgt.Hale (username) who created and then married a virtual character in a VE that he designed and based on a real-world location. In each of the relevant cases, how technology has influenced and, in a sense, encouraged them, is explored and unpacked. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Visual Arts / MA / Unrestricted

The claim that neuronal activity represents properties of the world outside of the brain plays a fundamental role in most of cognitive science. Enacted embodiment is the name of a theoretical framework which purports cognition to be rooted in bodily action. To investigate the relationship between representation and embodiment, the work presented here focuses on reasoning processes involving spatial relations among objects which are not part of the cognizing agent’s body. These environmental spatial relations are called allocentric. After defining the term “representation,” a model of human cognition is developed which allows us to experimentally distinguish representation from computation and action in the brain. It is further argued that the relation of neural activity in areas classically considered sensory and motor is a fundamental organizational principle of the brain. Importantly, the structure of the relation also depends on the embodiment of the agent. Finally, a study is presented in which participants explored a virtual reality (VR) city in different embodiment conditions and on multiple days. After each exploration participants completed tasks asking for different allocentric spatial relations. Performance in the spatial tasks interacts with both exploration time and embodiment condition. The findings indicate allocentric spatial representations to be structured by bodily action. Remaining variance can be explained through individual differences in spatial aptitude. Embodiment cannot account for the individual levels of ability. In conclusion, bodily action only partially structures the cognitive processes which represent spatial relations among objects in the agent’s environment.

Autoimmunity is a modern age medical dilemma which is inextricably linked with emotional stress. Based on semi-structured interviews and participant Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) survey results, this study confirms that the autoimmune process may be initiated via psychosocial factors like emotional stress and childhood trauma. Ninety-three percent of participants experienced adversity or trauma in childhood, and 50% of participants talked about a period of prolonged stress that preceded the onset of their condition. This study also confirms the intimate and satisfactory relationship developed between patients and complementary and alternative (CAM) practitioners, who invite patients to be co-producers of health and holistically address patients' minds, bodies, and souls. Finally, this study demonstrates the incredible resiliency of people diagnosed with autoimmune conditions and how they find healing and meaning post-diagnosis.

As a distinct category of yoga practice, “modern yoga” evades simple definition. Researchers study modern yoga within a variety of disciplines, adding to the ambiguity of the category. These diffuse approaches can harden the disciplinary boundaries that surround certain expressions of the category. Consider that although yoga originated within South Asian religious traditions, some current expressions of yoga practice, such as those found in fitness or biomedical contexts, can appear to have little to do with Religious Studies. However, I suggest that bracketing off such expressions of modern yoga practice—although necessary for specialized analysis—can hinder the fruitful investigation of “yoga” as a more complex category and limit the potential reach of Religious Studies inquiries. In this dissertation, I draw on methods from intellectual history, phenomenology, and comparative analysis to explore the category of modern yoga by developing a typology built around three organizing principles: legitimacy, embodiment, and American identity. Legitimacy represents the various ways that types of modern yoga practice are considered authentic. Embodiment represents the common theme among the various expressions of modern yoga practice that each is an embodied form of practice. I develop embodiment further to analyze the concept of connectedness, which includes connection with oneself, others, and one's environment. Finally, American identity represents how the varieties of modern yoga practice dynamically respond to their cultural contexts. The typology proposes that modern yoga comprises five sub-categories: religious yoga, spiritual yoga, fitness yoga, wellness yoga, and biomedical yoga. Like the unique colors on a palette, these categories are themselves distinct. Yet, also like colors on a palette, each represents just one shade among a nearly infinite number of real-world expressions. I argue that this classificatory system is useful to Religious Studies, because comparative analysis of the subcategories illustrates how even the most apparently secularized forms of yoga practice are relevant for Religious Studies inquiries. By constructing the categories of this typology, while simultaneously blurring their internal boundaries, I provide an expanded conceptual vocabulary with which to discuss the expansive expressions of modern yoga and to support future interdisciplinary work.