Ethnography and Embodiment

The paradigm of embodiment helped redefining the very way cultural processes are conceptualized and investigated in social sciences. By placing the analysis at the level of lived experience, embodiment has emerged as a productive way to relate perceptions and sensations to broader socio-historical dynamics. Such a shift, tough, did not focus merely on the issues of the cultural construction of the body and the senses, it rather allowed to appreciate the very process of actors’ engagement in the production of meaning, i.e. in the practical embodied production of culture. Within this broader theoretical scenario, ethnography has been profoundly reframed as an embodied practice as well. This contribution aims at placing such a theoretical issues at the very core of ethnographic practice, showing how embodiment can help us to extend the practice of reflexivity to: 1) the ethnographers’ role in the constitution of the reality they research on; 2) the embodied ground of ethnographers’ understanding of social reality; 3) the nature of ethnography in terms of a participatory production of meaning characterized by proximity and mutual engagement.