Paper short abstract:

Rolando Toro's "Science of Movement" integrates emotional, social, and existential dimensions, positioning movement as central to understanding identity. This paper explores Toro’s theory through Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment and Csordas’s cultural body, examining how movement reveals human culture.

Paper long abstract:

During the 1984 “II Congresso Latino Americano de Biodanza” (São Paulo, Brazil), Chilean psychologist and anthropologist Rolando Toro Araneda proposed a systemic model for categorizing human movement. This model, if not a Science of Movement, was described by Toro as “a vision and an expression of the whole, of the organism as a hologram in progressive and profound integration.” His approach redefined movement far beyond psychomotricity and a set of kinesis—for him, movement is a medium for human experience that integrates emotional, social, and existential dimensions.

This presentation examines Toro’s Science of Movement through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of the Body” and Thomas Csordas’s “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology”. Merleau-Ponty’s notion that the body is the primary medium of experiencing and interpreting the world provides a foundational philosophical context, while Csordas’s assertion of embodiment as central to meaning-making situates the body as both subject and agent in anthropology. Toro’s vision complements and expands these frameworks by presenting movement as a site of individual, collective, and cosmic identity.

This paper, thus, explores how Toro’s model illuminates the intersections of embodiment, identity, and relationality in anthropological inquiry. Complementary to this critical exploration is the laboratory “Charting Anthropology’s Movements. Literally,” which will provide an embodied experience of Toro’s Science through an introductory Biodanza class, bridging theory and practice to “live” anthropology’s movements in action.

Keywords: Rolando Toro, embodiment, movement, identity, anthropology.