Vol. 11 No. 1 (2025): Somaesthetics and Anthropology

In our call for papers, we invited authors to think anew about socio-cultural anthropology’s longstanding engagement with “the body” in light of the “somatic turn” in contemporary thought shaped by the philosopher Richard Shusterman’s extensive corpus of work on somaesthetics. “The body” has been a central concern for anthropological theorists and the focal point of ethnographic practice, extending from Marcel Mauss to Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu to Arthur Kleinman, Thomas Csordas to Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (and beyond). However, dominant currents within ethnographic research have tended to reduce bodies to sites for the operation of power or resistance, ideology or subjectivity, with rare exceptions. One such exception is the work of Robert Desjarlais in Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas (1992a) which introduced the notion of “embodied aesthetics,” but the idea did not catch on. It was premature: the time was not yet ripe. With a tip of the hat to Desjarlais, we invited authors to engage with the somatic condition/ing and aesthetic textures of social life and leave prior preoccupations of the field behind.
As “an ameliorative discipline of both theory and practice,” somaesthetics as defined by Shusterman, concerns the body “as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning”; it “aims to enrich not only our abstract, discursive knowledge of the body but also our lived somatic experience and performance” (Shusterman, 2012, p. 27). These dual aims (somatic analysis and self-cultivation) are intimately familiar to anthropological fieldworkers concerned with the question of how it is that meanings and values become felt
qualities in the everyday use of (our) bodies. However, inquiry into the somatic and aesthetic immediacies of everyday experience has remained at the periphery of ethnographic analysis, until recently (Masquelier and McDowell, 2026).
As editors, we envision this collection as an invitation for ethnographers and somaestheticians alike to find their own ways across an obviously makeshift but nevertheless traversable crossing between anthropology and the field of somaesthetics. As a reminder for those coming to thesepapers from other disciplines, much of this bridge-building is dependent upon ethnographic efforts to show rather than explain the influence that people’s (un)selfconscious habits of thought, movement, sensing (and so on) have on shaping their spontaneously felt inclination to “go on” with their everyday in ways that ultimately serve to reiterate its ordinariness – “this is just what we do” is a popular refrain from interlocutors that every ethnographer has heard and had to wrestle with in the field. Yet, come to think of it, isn’t it in just those moments that ethnographic practice intersects with the somaesthetics project in the sense that bodies unavoidably, manifestly and quite literally embody our conditions of life? Making the “right” moves or responses in life is dependent upon our training to become persons, virtually from the moment we are born (see Guerts and Komabu-Pomeyie, this collection). We “body forth”, as the German phenomenologist Medard Boss memorably put it (Schatzki, 1996, p. 45). Significantly, when in the early 1990s Desjarlais in his work on illness amongst the Yolmo Sherpa people in the Nepal Himalayas was writing on how “[e]mbodied aesthetics pattern the ghostly presences, the emotional resonances, of cultural experience” (1992b, p. 1116) Shusterman was simultaneously staking out the aesthetic conditions of life that lie “beneath interpretation” where language mastery is, he would write, not necessarily mastery of “a system of semiotic rules for interpreting signs” but rather, or at least in part, “the mastery
of intelligent habits of gesture and response for engaging effectively in a form of life” (1990, p. 192). Even before somaesthetics got off the ground then, a complementarity between a new ethnographic project and Shusterman’s emergent philosophy appears to have been in formation. Indeed, as Desjarlais would phrase it in his aforementioned book Body and Emotion: “There is much to experience that eludes the logic of signs, and a key mandate of future ethnographies will be, in my opinion, to evince the felt immediacies that mark songs of grief, rhythms of healing, divine presences … the following pages try to bring the reader’s body into the ethnographic endeavour” (1992a, p. 32).

David Howes and Mark K. Watson