Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T08:31:36.754Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Embodying Culture: Grounding Cultural Variation in the Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Edward Slingerland
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Get access

Summary

Part of the continuing appeal of postmodernism is the undeniable reality of human cultural variation, both across the world and over the course of history. People value as delicacies such foodstuffs as the durian fruit, which smells and tastes unmistakably like human vomit, or the Chinese specialty of – literally translated – “stinky tofu,” which is marinated for months in a brined mixture of rotten vegetables and putrid shrimp. I argued in the previous chapters that human beings universally value “strength” and have an aversion to “sickness,” but how are we to reconcile this with the Daoist Daodejing, which advocates the path of weakness, or Kierkegaard's celebration of the spiritual “sickness unto death” that leads to salvation? The claim that human beings share a set of cognitive and normative universals needs to be reconciled with the blooming, buzzing cultural variety that is the single most salient phenomenon to humanists.

This is particularly important because, as I will discuss, there is considerable evidence from cross-cultural psychology that these various practices, and the environments that these practices create, can result in distinct schemas at fairly early stages of perception. There is, after all, something to the claim of Thomas Kuhn that advocates of different conceptual paradigms inhabit different thought-worlds.

Type
Chapter
Information
What Science Offers the Humanities
Integrating Body and Culture
, pp. 151 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×