This article introduces the idea of multiple habitus , a heuristic tool for analyzing the transmission, incorporation and social reproduction of religious teachings within a continuously transforming spiritual field. Drawing on data from the project ‘Buddhism in Italy’ we show how Italian Buddhism articulates a plurality of “core dispositions” that display notable congruence across major Buddhist traditions while simultaneously reflecting the localized ethos of specific pedagogical environments and of the broader neoliberal order. Through qualitative interviews, participant observation and survey data, we demonstrate that these dispositions are cultivated in collective meditation rituals and everyday practices, where interpretations of the body and its legitimate role intersect with broader neoliberal logics. By situating Italian Buddhism within the wider processes of religious pluralism, spiritual experimentation and the therapeuticization of the sacred, the concept of multiple habitus illuminates how practitioners creatively adopt and adapt religious resources in ways that resonate with the contemporary Western zeitgeist .
This article examines the relationship between voice, embodiment, and community by extending Roberto Esposito’s concepts of munus , communitas , and immunitas to the domain of voice. While voice is often treated as a bodily capacity and marker of individual authenticity, contemporary voice technologies, including brain/computer interfaces, AI-generated voices, and deepfake audio, destabilise this assumption. The article proposes Vox Munus as a conceptual framework for understanding voice as a shared obligation rather than private property. Through analyses of assistive speech technologies and synthetic media, it argues that voice technologies simultaneously enable inclusion and generate new ethical risks, reframing voice as a site where communal responsibility, trust, and governance are negotiated.
This article explores the role of bodily failure in shaping our ethical outlooks in adventure sports. Drawing on ethnographic research with white-water kayakers, it shows how the experiences of lost bodily composure and containment alter our relationship to the self by revealing its limits of control. Building on insights from anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy, the article argues that such bodily failure enables an ethical self that is not contingent on external comparison but on an acceptance of the self’s impotentiality as defined by Giorgio Agamben. This in turn enables a self-centred humility that becomes the basis for ethical dispositions. By foregrounding the body’s role in ethical becoming, this article contributes to debates in anthropology and social theory on the intersections of corporeality, ethics, and subjectivity.
This article explores embodied learning among practitioners of embodied social justice. Drawing on interview data with 18 participants, the study distinguishes between 'embodied memory' - how past moments persist to shape present attitudes and future possibilities - and 'the remembering body' - instances where the body speaks for itself through present tense re-experiencing. Initial ethnographic narratives revealed how participants framed learning as transformative impacts that reoriented their lives over time. Micro-phenomenological interviews then uncovered a three-phase structure of learning: impact (bodily disruption), resonance (embodied shift registration), and landing (integration and resolution). This hybrid approach, I argue, contributes to critical phenomenology's goal of understanding lived experiences as they are situated within overlapping social, political, and historical structures of power. It further contributes to the claim, in critical phenomenology, that phenomenological inquiry can and often does afford the kind of nuanced interrogation that has the capacity to unsettle and even transform such structures.
This article challenges dominant framings of drug-related sexual violence that position drugs solely as external agents of victimisation, offering instead an analysis of how drugs are entangled with the embodied experience of sexual violence and its traumatic aftermaths. Through case-study analysis of a survivor's narrative, I trace how her capacities to register, live with, and narrate trauma are constrained by the social, cultural, and institutional systems and structures that determine what kinds of harm are recognisable, whose accounts are credible, and what forms of survival are imaginable. Attending to the body as the site where sexual trauma is lived and reworked, I explore how this survivor attempts to inhabit her sexuality, including through cannabis use as a contingent tool for bodily recuperation. In doing so, the article offers an account of survival as ongoing, improvisational, and negotiated through structural constraint and embodied possibility.
Drawing on archival materials and interviews with donors, blood bank staff and experts, this article explores how the logics of gift, debt and inheritance shape the moral and affective economies of citizenship in South Korea. From leading haematologists' reflections on the introduction of blood banking in the mid-20th century to national crisis narratives surrounding COVID-19 blood shortages, the article traces how the figure of the nation continually transforms as it both animates and is animated by South Korean blood banking. Taking a closer look at the case of North Korean settler blood donors, the article examines how their ambiguous belonging generates a fertile terrain for renegotiating relations of gift, debt and inheritance. Blood sharing conjures different collectives and (un)common fates for actors whose belonging to the South Korean nation is contested and renewed, instantiating 'mutations' in nationhood and citizenship.
Clinical transplantation relies on donor/patient ‘compatibility’, a concept entangled with biological ideas of relatedness (i.e. relatedness generates genetic similarity). Transplantation requires donor recruitment to large databases/banks, mobilising ideas of a ‘vital public’ of donors and recipients, ethically entangled by embodied relatedness. These notions of relatedness are also informed by ‘race’. The article takes ideas of mixed race, an area neglected in social science of biomedicine, unpacking how the mixed race body (its genetic uniqueness) and mixed race bodies (our capacities for collectivity and relatedness) are refracted through the science of blood stem cell transplantation. It extends debates about racialising recruitment in biomedicine, demonstrating how mixed bodies trouble the standardised approach to enrolling racially minoritised ‘communities’ into biomedical projects like tissue donation. It offers novel insights of relevance for critical scholars of race and biomedicine, as well as recruitment practitioners themselves, into the powerful relational politics of blood.
This article draws upon body becoming and new materialist paradigms, and specifically the conceptual repertoires of Deleuze and Guattari (becoming, assemblage, reterritorialisation) and Karen Barad (apparatus, and agential cut), to theorise the dynamism of fat embodiment within India. It proposes the concept of 'embodied re-visioning', and related processes of 'seeing the other-within' and 'carrying the body', to expound the conditions, mechanisms, agencies, and effects of evolving fat embodiments. This concept provides means to understand and critically interrogate the emergence and nature of the diverse strands of fat activism - 'body positivity', 'body neutrality', and so forth - revealing the nature of 'cuts' or boundary-marking practices that differently and relationally organise the possibilities for embodiment. The article moves beyond a comparative analysis of discourses or restricting its analytical scope to questions of (re)signification to reveal the entwined material-discursive dynamics of fat embodiment. Embodied re-visioning is conceptually advanced to understand and provide commentary on the 'agential becoming' of the fat body in the context of the global south.
Tattooing modifies the body and heals psychological injuries. Existing studies, however, seldom relate tattooing to the handling of wounding experiences in social movements, a field that has long assumed the use of the healthy and active body and slighted the wounded, vulnerable body. Drawing on interview data and analysing tattoo narratives, I examine the political tattoos created during and after the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong and unfold how the traumatic experiences of encountering state violence and physical injuries can be coped with and transformed into resources that keep activists politically engaged and resilient. First, tattooing renders wounding experiences tactical as it helps record counter-hegemonic memories and visualise them as subversive messages. Second, tattooing is a therapeutic process that heals traumatised activists, through which supportive emotional bonds are also built. Third, the tattoo connects, linking expatriate activists by maintaining political identification and consolidating affective ties across time-space.
This article argues that the body occupies a central place in Marx's thought, and that a critical reconstruction of his dialectical understanding of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature and his concepts of corporeal organisation, labour, tools and metabolism provides a foundation for an eco-Marxist theory of human nature and the corporeal roots of human historicity and freedom.
The aim of this work was to phenomenologically grasp the bodily ways in which rehabilitation from injury, specifically anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, is expressed and found. We draw upon the first author's experiences of injury rehabilitation in the form of diary notes, memory recall, and subsequent interviews between the authorship team. The descriptions offered temporally chart how various bodily tensions are announced during rehabilitation and the subsequent attempt(s) at restoring of the body. The findings raise awareness to how body parts that are not functioning become othered, the response to such othering, and how injury reveals itself as a dysfunction. The significance of the work lies in repositioning how the injured individual is always with injury, even if this is etched into their history. Although providing a comprehensive, human experience-orientated reading of injury and rehabilitation, this article shifts the body from being absent and background to appreciate the subtle ways in which the body dis-appears and dys-appears.
The nose is a multisensory organ and a powerful bodily technology that helps orient the experience of consciousness in the material world, and yet, we have come to a socio-technological context so driven by ocularcentrism, largely as a result of the visual nature of social media and new media, that the nose is often reduced to just an idealised 'shape'. This article explores how the contemporary construction and representation of the nose, especially on social media, is seated in a very long history of gendered and racialised politics. By examining the cultural and political implications of the nose through critical intertextual analysis, I excavate much deeper anxieties about the body, relationships to the self, and motivations for a variety of behaviours, both public (like posting on social media) and deeply intimate (like rhinoplasty). This work is about the symbolic adventure of the nose across time and culture, in terms of where it has left its mark and, in turn, how marks have been left on it.
Artificial womb technology intended to simulate the environment of the uterus to allow extremely preterm babies to continue to develop as though they had not yet been born is on the horizon. Emerging theoretical and clinical literature that explores how this technology may impact pregnancy and birth has centred the perspective of the foetus/neonate. This article situates the hyperfocus on the foetus that characterises these works within the construction of birth in law, clinical practice, and society as something that happens to a baby ('being born'). Contesting a foeto-centric worldview, this article theorises 'giving birth' as action. Discourses surrounding the promissory artificial womb illuminate embedded assumptions about what it is to be born. By reconceptualising artificial wombs through the lens of giving birth, this article argues for a reproductive future in which legal and medical frameworks are formulated around birth as an active process and complex experience.
This article examines digital dance, not in opposition to physical bodies but in material continuity with them. By offering an expansive notion of 'presence' in dance, we intend to supersede the binarism that condemns the digital as mere traces of the 'real' or as a blunt synonym for the 'virtual' and the 'immaterial'. We depart from a historical overview of attempts to capture bodily creativity into mediated forms according to the values of each epoch. Thus, considering the current moment of dance digitalisation immersed in the information society, we formulate our argument by discussing how presence and virtuality transcend within the attempts to digitalise dance. Later, we address how, although transformed, the material dimension of the body persists through its digital capturing. In the last section, we address the relational ontologies that the digitalisation of dance can unleash in diverse cultural contexts, as dance-data regains its virtuality.
In this article, we explore how the descendants of displaced Ingrians relate to historical forced migrations and family separation by analysing their embodied family memory and family mentality in making sense of past events. By illuminating the narrative and emotional responses to past family separation among grandchildren of displaced persons, we attest to how individual reminiscing intertwines with family memories and the collective aspect of the body. We show that family memory of family separation has often been transmitted to the next generation in the familial space nonverbally. By analysing two cases from the biographical data collected among the descendants of displaced Ingrians, a historically persecuted ethnic minority, we illustrate the lack of words and affective embodiment of family separation and show how family mentality frames their sense-making of social trauma. We also discuss how past memory politics are carried in contemporary bodies.
This article examines how ideals of the male body are reshaped in online spaces linked to the manosphere, particularly incel and lookism forums. It explores looksmaxxing - the pursuit of physical improvement through body-sculpting practices such as fitness, grooming, and plastic surgery - as a perceived path to romantic success and social mobility, framed as 'ascension'. Within these spaces, body modification is guided by peer evaluations, aggressive feedback, and shared knowledge, forming what the study terms bro-pedagogy: a masculine and brutal style of support and instruction. Despite frequent use of medical terminology, users often reject mainstream science, relying instead on peer-driven advice that blends anecdote, pseudo-science, and ideological claims. The article argues that these practices politicise the male body, transforming physical appearance into a site of struggle over identity, misandry and perceived social exclusion.
This article articulates Lohana Berkins' Latin American travesti theory. Centred on the body and her feminist-influenced lived experience, Berkins' theory is deeply concerned with intersectionality as a corporeal experience. Drawing from oral presentations, media coverage, published interviews, and Berkins' writing, we elaborate on a thread of aspects that distinguish this Latin American travesti theorizing. From Berkins' contributions, we illustrate the 'body-for-others' - a result of, and resistance to, the male gaze - against a broader, internal embodied satisfaction that moves beyond deficit readings of travesti lives as 'travesti body-being'. Her situated knowledge production was influenced by her collective experience with other travestis, as was her coalitional work and struggles with cisgender women; in particular, we centre her identity and corporeality arguments in order to constitute Berkins' travesti theorizing of the self as a 'we'. We conclude with the implications of elevating Berkins' status to that of a feminist theorist.
Critical addiction studies since the field's purported turn to matter has largely favoured nominally materialist conceptual approaches more conducive to continuing de/constructivist projects of de-essentialising drugs and their presumed causal relation to loss of control. This essay demonstrates, however, that it is precisely in their attention to the pervasiveness of 'thing power', and to the banal, daily reality of things' causal relation to our compulsions, that thing-focused theories - in this essay, Jane Bennett's vital materialism and archaeologist Ian Hodder's entanglement theory - provide an alternative means of depathologising addiction, by depathologising compulsion and loss of control themselves.
This article grapples with the making of habit and the dynamics of knowledge ‘in the hands’ among outdoor adventurers. Especially in early phases of learning, budding adventurers orient their movement and sense of the environment off the body positions and perceptual judgments of experienced others. The ultimate reference point for action is the mountains themselves, and so a major lesson is one of quiet humility, inhabiting a world that others may have a weaker sense of. They adopt the term ‘listening’ metaphorically to express how they always organise their bodies in relation to what is happening beyond them. The degree of connectedness to the world is variable. The silence above the snowline heightens focus and expands the bounds of what can be safely achieved, providing a climber’s stress and state of health do not get in the way.
