Non-Reductive Supervenience of Social Over the Body
8 Pages Posted: 16 Jan 2020
Date Written: December 15, 2019
Abstract
In my view, society and body share a symbiotic relationship. Bodies and Societies are mutually interdependent and irreducible to one another. Society, as I understand, is a group of bodies. However, this group attains autonomous explanatory powers that shape the individual bodies in the group. In other words, one can say wholes or societies can be said to have non-reductive supervenience or dependence on the individual bodies. In this essay, I’m trying to demonstrate this fact of irreducibility by providing specific cases where one takes over another. For instance, conventionally, one thinks that a person runs faster only due to his or her athletic abilities. I try to problematize this notion using the work of Marcel Mauss and Elizabeth Wilson where I show how different societies construct the way one’s body move, rest or disciplined. In this process of problematization, I’m not denying the role of physical, biological and chemical systems but aim to show how these systems are moulded, shaped and reconfigured by the social systems and vice versa. In this manner, the purpose is to diversify our outlook in answering the question: in what way the human body functions. This is the process of embodiment where physical, psychological and social systems come into a symbiotic relationship.
Keywords: Embodiment, techniques, feminism
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