Turning Inward: The Visible and the Invisible in the Embodied Production of Selves and Identities.

• In Event: 1447 - Constructions of Identity: Religious and Secular

Abstract

Sociological studies that examine the relation between culture and embodied practices usually focus on how the body is used to perform and re-constitute social identities. In this paper, I argue that the same cultural practices that are formally oriented to project a self to others, to signal one’s social standing, appearance, and belonging, have a hidden side that encourages and permeates breaks from the social gaze of others. Based on an ethnographic study of the practice of vipassana, a Buddhist meditation of mindfulness that was revitalized and adapted to secular audience, I illustrate how contemporary practitioners use the collective meditative focus on the tacit parts of the body – including breath, heartbeats and skin sensations - as a way to transcend shocks and splits to the self that characterize their life as they move through multiple social relations and identities. I then generalize this argument to other communities, routines and rituals that are common to contemporary culture – including, among others, embodied therapies, dieting and physical training– through which people turn inward without stepping out of society, experience solitude without being isolated, and negotiate the tensions engendered by late-modern social life.

Author

• Michal Pagis, Bar Ilan University