The body learns where it lives

Corporality, Culture and Relations

For seven years, while living in an ashram in Siberia, traveling around teaching movement, much of my daily life took place close to the ground. We sat, listened, learned and moved without the constant presence of chairs and tables. At the time, I did not think of this as a particular way of organizing bodily life. It was simply the environment in which life was happening, and my body gradually learned how to inhabit it.

Years later, while travelling through the Langtang Valley in Nepal, I noticed another continuity between the body and the ground. People squatted while waiting, working, preparing food or talking. They sat close to the floor and carried children and objects as part of the movement of everyday life.

I do not mention this to compare two distinct cultures or to romanticize difficult material conditions. Siberia and Nepal are not interchangeable, and my experiences in each place were profoundly different. What connected them for me was a question: how do the places where we live participate in the formation of our corporality?

We often look at posture as if it belonged exclusively to the individual. We speak of flexibility, mobility, strength or limitation as personal physical characteristics. But a posture is not only a position of the body.

Squatting can be a way of resting, working, washing, waiting or talking. Sitting on the floor changes how people gather, learn, eat and share space. Carrying a child on the hip, chest or back creates a continuous adjustment between two bodies through weight, proximity, warmth and movement.

The meaning of each movement comes from the whole situation: the activity, the terrain, the objects available, the people nearby and the social world in which it happens.

A room organized around the floor invites different movements from a room organized around chairs. A life spent moving between a desk, a car and a sofa maintains certain bodily possibilities while giving less space to others.

This does not mean that every person should be able to squat or sit on the ground. Pain, disability, aging, health, safety and accessibility shape movement in different ways. The point is not to establish another bodily ideal. It is to notice that physical capacity is not formed by the body alone.

Brenda Farnell’s work on dynamic embodiment helps us understand movement as more than a mechanical action or a cultural symbol placed upon the body. People create meaning while moving. How we sit, walk, gesture, carry, wait and approach others participates in social life.

A movement can communicate belonging, respect, gender, social position, resistance or intimacy. The same squat may belong to work, rest, ritual, dance or rap culture. Its physical form does not contain one universal meaning.

This also means that what feels “natural” may be something the body has practiced for years within a particular environment.

Some movements become so familiar that we stop noticing them. Others gradually disappear from everyday life, not necessarily because the body is naturally incapable of performing them, but because the environment no longer invites, values or accommodates them.

Architecture participates in this process. So do furniture, clothing, work, climate, social expectations and the material conditions of everyday life.

The body learns where it lives.

But this learning is neither passive nor permanent. People adapt movements, combine bodily vocabularies and create new ways of occupying spaces. This becomes especially visible during migration, when movements that once passed unnoticed may suddenly become inappropriate, unfamiliar or remarkable in another cultural context.

Jovino Camargo Junior uses the concept of corporality to describe something broader then the physical body. Corporality involves how a person perceives, moves, relates and becomes present within a situation.

From this perspective, the body is not an object that we mobilize separately to work, exercise or complete a task. It is part of how we participate in what is happening.

This helps explain what marked me in Siberia and Nepal. I was observing environments in which movement, learning, work, proximity and the ground seemed less separated from one another. The body did not disappear between activities and then reappear during a designated moment of exercise. It remained involved in the situation.

One important idea from Jovino is the reorganization of corporality. Reorganization does not mean correcting someone’s posture or deciding how a person should move. It means creating conditions in which movements, sensations and ways of perceiving that have remained in the background can become noticeable again.

The psychologist also describes the art of accompanying oneself: the possibility of noticing oneself while moving through different states and situations, rather than observing the body only from a distance or trying to control it.

In my body-oriented work, conversation remains central. Attention to breathing, posture, rhythm, sensations and movement can support this exploration, but there is no correct movement to recover and no supposedly natural body to which a person must return.

This shifts attention away from how the body should move and toward how each person’s bodily repertoire has been shaped by everyday life, relationships, environments and changing circumstances.

Perhaps our bodily repertoire tells part of the story of where we have lived, how we have worked, who we have lived beside and what the spaces around us have allowed.

Observing this story does not require judging it. It begins by noticing the chair beneath us, the distance between our body and the floor, the movements our days repeatedly ask of us, and those for which they have almost stopped making room.

Written by Juliana L. Camargo

References

• Camargo Junior, J. (n.d.). Aproximações ao método terapêutico da Arte Org. Unpublished training manuscript.

• Farnell, B. (2012). Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory: “I Move Therefore I Am.” Routledge.

• Farnell, B., & Varela, C. R. (2008). The Second Somatic Revolution. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 38(3), 215–240.