University of Edinburgh

In December I will give a talk in the Department of Anthropology titled “The Knowing Body: Analytic Orientation, Samoan Pentecostals and Embodied Critique.”

Abstract: Recent anthropological approaches to the body situate it as porous in an increasingly global environment of toxicity, ranging from fecal and pesticide exposure to the salt and sugar that permeate most global foods. Anthropologists of Christianity have also situated the body as porous, but to immaterial things, like God, supernatural forces, desire and human emotions. However, when scholars of Christianity study weight or food, the body is instead situated as in need of discipline. This paper is about the ways that the social life of topics drive analytic orientation in ways that reflect the lasting legacy of dichotomous understandings of the body that were at the center of Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock’s critique of medical anthropology over 30 years ago. Through an ethnographic analysis of a single event, a special Zumba program organized by and for Pentecostal women in Samoa to counteract chronic sickness, I explore the body as a site of knowledge production. In the context of widespread cardiometabolic disorders in Samoa, Pentecostals situate porosity is a source of knowledge, as environments, spirits, things, and people interactively mediate the body. Pentecostals create a stance towards this porosity by teaching people to see the changing qualities of the body as a source of information about the human genesis of sickness, what I call embodied critique. Focusing on knowledge not only avoids dichotomous framings (whereby the body is considered porous when mediated by immaterial things but in need of discipline when mediated by material things) but also draws on Indigenous Oceanic epistemologies to reimagine one way to theorize the body. This epistemological approach situates the body is a medium of knowledge that is generated through movement, embodied interactions, and intersubjectivity.