Books about Embodiment from Amazon.com

David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with passion and intellectual daring.

"Long awaited, revolutionary...This book ponders the violent disconnection of the body from the natural world and what this means about how we live and die in it."--Los Angeles Times.
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When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason..
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The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience The authors - argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in Science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis..
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In Materializing New Media, Anna Munster offers an alternative aesthetic genealogy for digital culture. Eschewing the prevailing Cartesian aesthetic that aligns the digital with the disembodied, the formless, and the placeless, Munster seeks to "materialize" digital culture by demonstrating that its aesthetics have reconfigured bodily experience and reconceived materiality.

Her topics range from artistic experiments in body-computer interfaces to the impact that corporeal interaction and geopolitical circumstances have on producing new media art and culture. She argues that new media, materiality, perception, and artistic practices now mutually constitute "information aesthetics." Information aesthetics is concerned with new modes of sensory engagement in which distributed spaces and temporal variation play crucial roles. In analyzing the experiments that new media art performs with the materiality of space and time, Munster demonstrates how new media has likewise changed our bodies and those of others in global information culture.

Materializing New Media calls for a re-examination of the roles of both body and affect in their relation to the virtual and to abstract codes of information. It offers a nonlinear approach to aesthetics and art history based on a concept of "folding" that can discern certain kinds of proximities and continuations across distances in time (in particular between the Baroque and the digital). Finally, it analyzes digital culture through a logic of the differential rather than of the binary. This allows the author to overcome a habit of futurism, which until now has plagued analyses of new media art and culture. Technology is now not seen as surpassing the human body but continually reconfiguring it and constitutive of it..
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Engaging the Movement of Life is an invitation to discover new ways to experience health and embodiment Osteopathic physician and Continuum Movement teacher Bonnie Gintis offers an approach that encompasses fluid movement, open attention, and awareness of sensation and breath as empowering practices to enrich all aspects of life. She presents a philosophy in which the body is a portal to “something greater”—an opportunity to join a grand experiment in deepening consciousness and connectedness.

Moving fluidly increases our vitality, just as water in the natural world is vitalized by flowing freely. Chronicling a path that encompasses views of body, mind, and spirit as a self-healing intercommunicating whole, Engaging the Movement of Life is equally useful for medical professionals, bodyworkers, exercise enthusiasts, and spiritual seekers..
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The Intuitive Body draws on the principles of the non-aggressive Japanese martial art aikido and meditation to present a fresh approach to cultivating awareness, attention, and self-acceptance. Author Wendy Palmer shows readers through basic practice and partner exercises how to become more aware of the body and trust its innate wisdom. She introduces exercises from the Conscious Embodiment and Intuition Training program she pioneered, connection movement, meditation, and breathing. These exercises form a daily practice that can help the process of integration, of deepening and unifying the self, and learning to deal with fear and anger. Written in a direct yet nurturing style and based on the author’s many years of practice and teaching, this revised edition of The Intuitive Body contains new material on Conscious Embodiment movement and meditation practices. Also here are new chapters on advocating without aggressing and the wisdom of not knowing — embodying the qualities of dignity and integrity in everyday life. The book is ideal for readers who are already engaged in the process of becoming, as well as for those who are looking for ways to find the courage to begin..
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This book describes the many ways that the mind and body are closely interrelated, and how human thought and language are fundamentally linked to bodily action. The embodied nature of mind is explored through many topics, such as perception, thinking, language use, development, emotions, and consciousness. People's embodied experiences are critical to the ways they think and speak and, most generally, understand themselves, other people, and the world around them. This work provides a strong defense of the idea that embodied action is critical to the study of human cognition..
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This book is a collection of writings on principles and techniques by the pioneers of bodywork and body awareness disciplines. Together, they represent a historical record of the field of somatics. Ranging from hands-on workers like Ida Rolf to phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke, their lives span this century. In these lectures, writings, and interviews, editor Don Hanlon Johnson has sought to revel the unbroken lineage, theoretical differences, and major similarities of these originators..
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Exploring the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body, this volume----complete with editors' introduction----includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class, and sexual categories.

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Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the nineteenth century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this book a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues-artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. Michael Fried has written the first book in English to explore Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and in so doing has made the artist's stupendous achievement accessible to a wide audience at last.

Fried compares Menzel's art to that of the nineteenth century's two other great realist painters, Courbet and Eakins. Analyzing paintings, drawings, and prints from all stages of Menzel's long career, he asserts that the distinctive quality of Menzel's realism is found in his concern with evoking the multi-sensory, fully embodied relationships of persons with the universe of physical objects, tools, and situations. Establishing connections between Menzel's work and a broad array of extra-artistic contexts, Fried has created a work of compelling originality, one that for the first time establishes Menzel as a key artist of modernity..
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