Experience in and of the world is embodied before it is known conceptually and narrated discursively. In this panel, we gather contributions discussing processes of social change and historical transformation as they are understood through the human body; focussing on the ways in which they are experienced phenomenologically, how they are sensuously known and embodied in the flesh. We welcome contributions from across Oceania exploring relationships between the human body and social change in the current age of late modernity. While we aim for a cross-culturally comparative panel displaying diversity and plurality across Oceania, we also wish to identify pan-Oceanic themes. These might best be found by a focus on the ways in which this contemporary historical moment is signified across the region: through rapid demographic change, urbanisation, increased marketization and related processes, and so forth. We invite ethnographic explorations of the interplay between the body and social transformation, including but not limited to analyses of bodily experience/expression of new class distinctions, of food or clothes, of bodies in flux, militarized bodies and bodies in conflict, bodies and mobility, and relatedly: the bodies of self and strangers, and, of course, bodies and the experiences of diseases, illnesses and other risks of the time. While we are open to various theoretical perspectives we encourage papers that are ethnographically grounded and seek to understand bodily experience in ways that do not reduce them to a matter of representation or discourse.
Paper submissions are closed