The Body Politic

Abstract

Our bodies define how we experience the world, and how we are experienced by the world, how we understand and how we are understood, they offer the perceptual windows through which we see, hear, touch, taste, smell the colors and textures of the world and they are the physical (albeit unstable) forms as which we are seen, by which we are touched. So our bodily senses structure our world with meaning. The direct experiences of the body become the vocabulary for the metaphors we create to describe abstractions or larger collectivities that cannot be directly felt.