Paper short abstract:

What connects cognitive and somatic intelligence? What drives the extraordinary human interest in sharing and caring? I use the Mbendjele and Ju/hoan terms "Ekila" and "N/om" respectively to propose that morality is fundamentally a corporeal element: it must be experienced in order to remain live.

Paper long abstract:

Corporeal morality is premised on contact. The continuity of the person from birth onwards with a larger, socio-kinetic body guarantees the felt morality in which one is able to connect by having experienced the other. Real morality is both painful and empowering. Less about abstract rights and wrongs than issues of trust and respect, it registers somatically, affecting the gut, the stomach, the lungs. It is visceral, a kind of heightened sensitivity to the feelings and needs of others, and a desire to be similarly known, which Hrdy convincingly argues must have underpinned all subsequent cultural and linguistic developments. Egalitarian hunter-gatherers such as the Mbendjele offer a striking example. These are societies known for their continual working against the privatisation of things, food, and people. Both Mbendjele and Ju/hoan refer to an embodied source of power or heat located in the gut area and cultivated through various cultural and ritual practices. This core power, expressed for the community through spirit or healing dances, flows out of and into the person simultaneously. "Ekila" and "N/om" belong to individuals but are inseparable from the collective body. By keeping the experience of the body public, and by ritually fuelling reproductive claims and counter claims, they epitomize what Bakhtin called "the great generic body of the people": an intensely political moving force which breathes sociality. This is corporeal morality, where the chemistry of the system - its heat and velocity - is stored in and remains accessible to the body.