The Body in Action

Abstract

This chapter will use videotapes of young archaeologists learning how to see and excavate the traces of an ancient village in the soil they are digging to explore some of the ways in which the human body is implicated in the structuring of human language, cognition and social organisation. Clearly the part played by the body in such processes can be analysed from a number of different perspectives. One can focus, for example, on how experiencing the world through a brain embedded in a body structures human cognition (Damasio, 1994; 1999). Such a perspective provides a counter to theories that treat cognition as the disembodied manipulation of symbolic structures, and places the body in the world at the centre of much contemporary thinking about the neural infrastructure of cognitive processes (Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998). Moreover, it sheds light on pervasive processes that shape how the symbols that human beings construct emerge from forms of experience that have a crucial embodied component (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). For example, the universal experience of bodies situated within a gravitational field leads in all languages and cultures to a range of metaphors that contrast high and low or up and down (for example the symbols used to describe social hierarchies). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.