Healing the Embodied Self in Candomblé

Abstract

Recent focus within anthropology on studies of the body provide an important corrective to earlier research that took a more mentalistic approach, privileging discourse and representation over bodily experience. However, it is important not to throw out the baby (in this case, the mind) with the proverbial bath water. Peoples’ experiences are never either mental or bodily. In fact, in some important sense, mental and bodily experiences constitute one another; mental experience is the product of physical, bodily processes, and bodily experience is perceived and attended to via mental processes. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the exploration of how individuals experience selfhood. As we discussed in chapter 1, self has important social, cognitive-discursive (mental), and bodily dimensions. It consists not only of self-understandings and representations, but also of experiences that are not conscious and not part of language-based self-representation—experiences of occupying a physical body, of perceiving and being in the world. ¹