The Arc From Bodily Experience to Cultural Concepts
A wealth of theories in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology (as well as spin-offs in literary and music studies) has begun to address how abstract cultural notions are possible, given that humans are endowed with a cognitive system primarily geared to real-time action in a physical environment. This essay reviews several approaches to the grounding of abstract thought in bodily experience. The dominant theories have a slightly universalist touch to them. They draw on notions such as “image schemas”, i.e. gestalts acquired in infancy by moving in space and manipulating objects, and on “primary metaphors”, i.e. hardwired linkages between experiences of affect and warmth or relationships and spaces. The main challenge for these theories is to explain how universal kinaesthetic and bodily building blocks can produce non-universal cultural concepts of higher complexity (and what role more culture specific body experience may play in this process). I shall distinguish two broad lines of argument. From one vantage point, embodied concepts give rise to complex cultural meaning results via saturated arrays of affective-somatic states. These have been largely described by cultural phenomenologists, but can also be legitimately seen as combining universal constituents (e.g. what are known as the “basic emotions”) in context. A second group of theories emphasizes conceptual scaffolding processes. They describe universal conceptual mechanisms like analogical mappings, the creative recombination of knowledge in so-called conceptual integration networks, and the dynamization of imagery in scripts. In practice we find high continuity between these two sides of the cultural body-mind. However, differences in how term “embodiment” is used have created a real impediment to a dialog between the respective disciplines. By embodiment, the former group of theories means culture-specific visceral experience, sometimes called “the lived body”, whereas the latter group focuses on sensorimotor knowledge used for conceptual inference. I shall argue that an emerging field of ethnographically oriented cognitive phenomenology has some potential for integrating the two approaches by providing a stereoscopic view. The recognition of unique experiential gestalts appeals to disciplines that emphasize non-reductive contextuality and historicity, whereas a differentiated recognition of their basic constituents appeals to disciplines who seek viable explanations for embodied grounding as such and universal cognitive mechanisms. The enterprise of cognitive ethnography benefits the rapprochement between the “Two Cultures” and the agenda of “vertical integration” (Slingerland 2008).
