embodiment

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Embodied Value Theory

February seems to be the month for international workshop. This 1, of which I’m proud to be a discussant, is organized by The Anthropological Institute of Hiroshima (TAIHI) and revolves around two quite specific themes dear to my heart: #incommensurability and #embodiment. It is probably the first time for me to visit Hiroshima University not as an instructor, but a researcher—except the annual meeting of the Japanese Anthropological Association, which was held here some years ago. Feel free to join us either at the venue or online!

https://taihi.org/events/stefan-ecks/

The Anthropological Institute of Hiroshima (TAIHI) is pleased to announce a lecture by Dr. Stefan Ecks on embodied value theory, the novel anthropological theory that explains how living entities value life by way of commensuration. The lecture will take place at Hiroshima University at 4:00 p.m. JST on February 20, 2023. You are invited to take part either at the venue or online. Please kindly register your name in advance by submitting the form below.

Embodied Value Theory

Value theory has always been part of anthropological theory, but only implicitly. ‘Culture’ was basically defined as a pattern of values. An explicit anthropological discussion of value is fairly recent. Some believe that a general value theory can be achieved. Others think that anthropology is all about discovering cultural incommensurabilities that cannot contain a universal notion of value. The greatest conceptual challenge is if cultural values (in the plural) can be synthesized with economic and exchange-based value (in the singular). Here I argue that values and value can be brought together within an embodied value theory (EVT). At the core of this new theory of value is embodied life as the ground and goal of valuing. Life values living, and life tries to make the most of life by valuing different possibilities. I show that all valuing rests on comparisons, and that the infinite similarities between different entities can only be decided in pragmatic contexts. I propose that biocommensurations, where at least one entity in a comparison is alive, is the universal form of valuing.

Date: February 20, 2023, 4:00-6:00 p.m. JST

Venue: Hiroshima University, Higashi-Senda Innovative Research Center (2nd Floor, Room M204) and online (Zoom)

Program :
4:00-5:00 p.m. Lecture by Dr. Stefan Ecks
5:00-6:00 p.m. Comments followed by open discussion

Commentators :
Akinori Hamada (Tokyo University)
Mohacsi Gergely (Osaka University)

Moderator :
Makoto Nishi (Hiroshima University)

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WORLDING WITH the BODY

Session at the 112th AAA Annual Meeting @ Chicago

Reviewed By: Society for Cultural Anthropology
Time: Wednesday, November 20, 2013: 2:00 PM-3:45 PM
Place: Joliet Room (Chicago Hilton)
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ABSTRACT: How do our bodies make worlds? How do people shape the horizons of their practices, knowledges, and social relations, not only through physical toil and mental exertion, but through the sensitivities, mobilities, and partial permeabilities of human bodies? Papers in this panel will contend with these questions through the analytic of ‘worlding’ (Zhan 2009, 2012). Through their focus on ‘worlding’ the papers in this panel critically analyze totalizing narratives of the body and of humanity, by attending to makings and crossings of borders between human and non-human, discursive and embodied, and the local and global. With worlding, we see the worlds of human experience not in terms of convergence and closure, but dissemination and proliferation. Bodies do not simply occupy worlds: they partially create them, and never quite in their own image. Swerving away from the ‘image’ to other senses, and from worlds to worldings, this panel explores other bodily metaphors and modalities as loci of worlding. We ask: How do bodies create the social and material worlds they inhabit? How do pre-discursive or embodied experiences structure social relations? How are sensory experiences made into objects of scientific knowledge? How are embodied experiences mediated by medical knowledges and actors? How are worlds and bodies re-shaped when people “act with things” (Ishii 2012) in nature and the environment? The papers of this panel explore these questions in North America and Asia among asthma patients, sufferers of diabetes, cryonicists, wearable technology researchers, and spirit mediums. These papers ethnographically demonstrate the variety and open-endedness of different worldings. Collectively, they show that “the worlds we inhabit are by no means finite— and neither are social inquiries into these worlds” (Zhan 2009, 24). Conversely, they also show how people apprehend the infinity of possible worldings through the finitude of their bodies (Foucault 1966). Furthermore, this panel explores how anthropologists productively negotiate the gap between their written and spoken performance of knowledge, and the visceral, embodied, sensory experiences which they attempt to capture. Papers in this panel will explore how our interlocutors and we as anthropologists negotiate the material-discursive entanglements of the body and its embodiments; humans and their various others; visceral sensations and mediated perceptions; and words and worlds.”