EMBODIMENT RESOURCES:
Topics
Embodiment, Religion and Spirituality
Greenwood
Greenwood's "magical consciousness", which she describes an "informal
way of knowing" (Greenwood, 2005: 15), is reminiscent of the participatory
perception which Abram's describes (Abram, 1996: 20) in that it is a "participatory
and expanded aspect of consciousness" (Greenwood, 2005: viii). Greenwood
gives various descriptions of magical consciousness as "a heightened
awareness of an expanded connected wholeness" (Greenwood, 2005: 47),
an altered or "shamanic" state of consciousness, or a perception
of "non-ordinary reality". Magical consciousness is usually induced
though a technique like dancing or drumming (Greenwood, 2005: 89), but simple
"participation with nature may bring an expanded awareness of the deep
connections between elements of nature" (Greenwood, 2005: 46). Greenwood
draws mainly on Bateson's notion of an ecology of mind to theorise how magical
consciousness operates, and her work remains essentially an anthropology
of "magic and consciousness" (Greenwood, 2005: vii) that ignores
wider dimensions.
Ritual Studies
Bell claims that ritual is a “bodily strategy that
produces an incarnate means of knowing” (Bell, 1992: 163), while
Grimes (Grimes, 1995) makes the provocative suggestion that ritual is a
bodily way of knowing designed to move consciousness from the head to the
body. Though Grimes doesn’t elucidate, Asad applies Mauss's notion
of the habitus to problematize the distinction between religious ritual
and more general bodily practices. Asad concludes that the role of ritual
is not to express a symbolic meaning but to influence habitus, thereby helping
to create district subjectivities (Asad, 1993: 131). Crossley makes a similar
argument that rituals “are a form of embodied practical reason” (Crossley,
2004: 31). Drawing primarily on the work Mauss, Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu,
he concludes that rituals are “body techniques”, that is to
say “forms of practical and pre-reflective knowledge and understanding”
(Crossley, 2004: 37). As such they can “effect social transformations”
through transforming our “subjective and intersubjective states”
(Crossley, 2004: 40).