Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.

The brief conclusion summarises the book’s argument about Blake in relation to the critical terms of humanism and posthumanism. It argues that Blake’s nuanced representation of the body, which, in his universe, is simultaneously preformed and self-organised, aligns him with a distinctly Romantic humanism while also allowing him to anticipate the insights of posthumanism. Finally, it suggests that Blake’s works offer the concept of elasticity as an alternative to plasticity – a concept which acknowledges the complexities of embodiment while insisting on the importance of resilience and identity.

John Locke’s influential account of personal identity emphasizes the importance of consciousness.  This had led many commentators to argue that Lockean selves just are consciousnesses.  Charles Taylor has mounted persuasive critiques of this “punctual” Lockean self; such a conception of the self is too thin and stands divorced from our values and moral agency.  This chapter shifts the focus from Locke’s views on personal identity to his views on personhood in an effort to show that Locke is sensitive to the kinds of worries raised by Taylor.  Lockean persons are more than consciousness.  In particular, the chapter focuses on Locke’s exploration and analysis of the complex faculty psychology undergirding consciousness and on the ways in which persons can be embodied.  This allows for a richer conception of the self.  It then argues that this richer conception better aligns with Locke’s own views about the value and importance of the self and with what he says regarding our moral agency and our duty of self-improvement.  Finally, the chapter shows that understanding Locke’s examination of human cognition as contributing to an analysis of the self allows us to resituate him with respect to some of his predecessors in seventeenth-century England.

This chapter introduces the reader to the understanding of the human person articulated by Gregory Palamas (1296–1357) during the late Byzantine Hesychast controversy. The notion of the self elaborated and defended by Palamas is notable for its stress not only on the practice of inner prayer and stillness (“hesychia”) as crucial for the true cultivation of the self, but likewise for its robust defence of the embodiment of the self. Before discussing Palamas’ approach in detail, some background on the question of the relationship of body and soul in Greek patristic thought is offered, with special reference to Maximus the Confessor. This sets the scene for Palamas’ argumentation regarding the body as constitutive of the self together with the soul. Several ways in which Palamas both adopts and challenges classical views of the human self are presented. For instance, while the human soul might be detachable from the body, the human self, or person, is not. In some sense, moreover, every activity of the human self can be understood as a “common activity” of soul and body. The interweaving of body and soul in Palamas’ thought ultimately challenges a straightforward hylomorphic conception of the human being, notwithstanding certain commonalities.

Mary Astell (1666–1731) relies on a Cartesian account of the self to argue that both men and women are essentially thinking things and, hence, that both should perfect their minds or intellects. In offering such an account of the self, Astell might seem to ignore the inescapable fact that we have bodies. This chapter argues that Astell accommodates the self’s embodiment along two main dimensions. First, she tempers her sharp distinction between mind and body by insisting on their union. The mind and body are united in such a way that they exert reciprocal causal influence and form a whole together. Second, she argues that the mind–body union is good, that the union has its own distinctive form of good or perfection, and that the mind should pursue this good alongside its own.

The introduction outlines the main thesis that metaphor is not only for understanding abstract concepts but also for understanding human bodily experience. If the body itself is understood as metaphor, this gives a completely different view of how metaphor functions in thinking, language, and action.

Chapter 6 outlines three embodied systems – schema, image, and global – in order to explain the nature of systemic dissonance in the human body, along with the signal generated by this dissonance. The chapter discusses a number of religious cases of embodied dissonance, including spirit possession in India, body modification in the United States, the Hindu Kavadi practitioner in Southeast Asia, and the complicated bodily phenomena that characterize the life of the twelfth-century mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux. Systemic theory allows us to understand some embodied religious practices as complex responses to an internal body-self dissonance rather than the effect of a single cause.

Chapter 6 considers the ‘perceptual’ version presented autobiographically by Peter van Inwagen but supported conceptually by figures such as David Brown and Mark Wynn. Here sainthood is understood in terms of providing an embodied source of religious experience, and evidence is understood in perceptual terms. More specifically, the perception of divine reality is indirect and materially mediated through the saintly source, and examples are provided from Christianity, Judaism, Sufi Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Japanese folk religion, and secular media. Unlike the propositional version presented in Chapter 5, the perceptual version is inter-religious and does not lead to any specific understanding of divinity.

Folk dance remains a diffuse and contested concept and yet its performances and meanings retain contemporary saliency to many people across the world. This chapter reflects on definitional issues, the relationship of folk dance to ritual and folk dance’s embodied ideology in Europe and beyond. Given that nineteenth-century thinking haunts the later literature and manifestations of folk dance, I re-visit Felix Hoerburger’s concepts of ‘first existence’ and ‘second existence’ folk dance, together with their critique and key modifications by Andriy Nahachewsky and Anthony Shay. I consider contemporary ritual folk dancing that draws upon evolutionist theory for inspiration and discuss examples of folk dance as cultural heritage that bear performative testimony to perceived unbroken connections between land, people, gender, race and nation. I conclude by urging both persistent critical interrogation of folk dance as ideology in a global frame and further investigation of the choreographic and artistic relevance of folk dance to its widespread practitioners and audiences.

This chapter considers reductionism, a major aspect of neuroscience research. I consider reductionist claims that we can only understand nervous systems from knowledge of their component parts. I then consider reductionist approaches and what we have learnt by following them, highlighting that a complete reductionist account of any nervous system region hasn’t been and is probably impossible to achieve. I then discuss decomposable hierarchical and non-decomposable heterarchical systems, and how relational aspects suggest we cannot understand the latter systems from cataloguing their individual components. I then discuss two effects that have received little attention despite being known for decades – volume transmission and ephaptic signalling – that highlight the need to consider component parts in relation to the whole system. I finish by discussing non-reductionist views, equipotentiality, cybernetics, the holonomic brain and embodied cognition, highlighting, as many have in the past, that debating between reductionist and non-reductionist approaches is a false dichotomy.

This chapter considers how mid to late twentieth-century settler poets were reconceptualising place through bringing regionality to the fore, signalling the particularities of colonisation, and a nascent understanding of Country in the interconnectedness of lands, air and waterways. It argues that writers of this period were becoming aware of the sovereign custodianship in evidence around them and the embodied aspects of subjectivity. The chapter includes a discussion of the resonance of colonial violence and reflexive subjectivity that was appearing in the writing of Douglas Stewart, and the impressionistic locality and implication of their own presence in a poem by David Campbell. It analyses how poets such as Randolph Stow and Philip Hodgins navigate forms of discomfort in occupying violated places. The chapter then turns to the mediation on localities and their knowledge systems in the work of Laurie Duggan and PiO before turned to the representation of the littoral and affect in the poetry of Charles Buckmaster, Robert Gray and Robert Adamson. Lastly, it considers the optic poetics of Grace Perry, Jennifer Rankin and Jill Jones.

This chapter discusses the effects on eighteenth-century conceptions of ‘the people’ of the experience of the revolutionary decade of the 1790s and the conservative reaction against it, paying particular attention to the writing of William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth, and their poet-activist friend John Thelwall. It discusses ideas of a convention of the people found in the popular radical circles influenced by Thomas Paine that Thelwall frequented, especially in relation to appeals to the state of exception that might allow for a revolutionary intervention in the constitution via a convention of the people. It ends by discussing the way these debates migrated into a tension between a philosophical idea of the people and an embodied politics that might coalesce around practical objects of reform that continued on far into the nineteenth century.