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The Multiplicities of Immersed Experience

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Bodies, Ontology, and Bioarchaeology

Part of the book series: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory ((BST))

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Abstract

How we conceptualize the body shapes the ways we understand those who lived in the past. An osteobiography characterizes a person’s life story as an accumulation of social identities, experiences and circumstances that impacted their health and well-being. Lived experiences are often viewed as things that happen to an individual. Yet phenomenology and other relational approaches recognize that an individual’s personal experiences are socially, culturally, biologically, and historically embedded and situated within the world. Lived experiences are not things that happen to an individual but are multiple simultaneous worldly encounters shaped by the ways an individual is immersed in their lifeworld.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My use of “being-within” the world differs from Heidegger’s Mitsein (literally, “being-with”). For Heidigger, “being-with” focuses on human experiences that are socially saturated engagements shared with other humans. Here I distinguish between approaches that emphasize intersubjective engagements as human social experiences (“being-in/with”) and approaches that de-center humans as one among many elements embedded in worldly encounters that include other beings, things, and spaces (“being-within”).

  2. 2.

    Cognitive studies provide other insights. For example, the meanings conveyed though discourse or metaphors in a given language have greater emotional content for native speakers than for second language speakers (e.g. Hoang, 2014; Caldwell-Harris, 2014; Chen & Lai, 2015; Citron & Michaelis, 2020). This suggests that discourse and metaphors may have been heard, perceived, and understood differently among residents of prehistoric villages who spoke different native languages (Lev-Ari, 2024; Pelkey, 2023). Similarly, the notion of “language regimes” (e.g. Costa, 2019; Kroskrity, 1993, 1998, 2009, 2018, 2021; Rao & Everhart, 2021) may involve cognitive processes that invoke different metaphorical and emotional content. For example, in asserting power and authority, ritual performances may have used metaphorically and emotionally charged forms of language and speech that differed from the discourse and language patterns used in everyday social relations.

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    Ann M. Palkovich

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Palkovich, A.M. (2024). The Multiplicities of Immersed Experience. In: Bodies, Ontology, and Bioarchaeology. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56023-1_4

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