Culture's two routes to embodiment

摘要

Cultures differ on a seemingly infinite number of dimensions, including language, cultural habits, value systems,collective beliefs, cultural heritage, and shared history. The central argument of Cohen and Leung's article on The hardembodiment of culture is that cultures also differ systematically with respect to the body comportments or postures theyimpose or encourage and that this will, in turn, affect the way people feel and think. Thus, a key assumption of the article isthat "culture is embodied in the way people walk, sit, stand, eat, wash, breathe, and otherwise comport their bodies as theygo through daily life". Although this prediction may sound familiar to people acquainted with cross-cultural work onnonverbal behavior, this is, in my view, an important, currently under-researched, aspect of embodiment. The mainargument of the authors is that such culture-specific forms of embodiment will affect complex representations and thatthey will do so through two distinct routes: pre-wired versus totem embodiments. The most innovative aspect of this line ofresearch is that culture is shown to emphasize the embodied aspect of cognition by making specific links between physicalcomportment and abstract concepts more accessible (pre-wired embodiment) or by creating them from zero (totemembodiment). This shows the power of culture not only in facilitating specific cognitive processes and specific behaviors,but also in promoting and creating the relation between the two. I will briefly comment each of these points, byestablishing links with previous areas of research, identifying open problems, and delineating possible futuredevelopments.