Paper short abstract:

This contribution creatively explores the ways in which a somatic mode of attending to the body, as complemented by multimodal strategies, can yield corporeal images that are alternative to biomedical ones, for supporting caring and self-caring routines.

Paper long abstract:

This paper problematizes biomedical imagery by contrasting it with the skilled visualizations of the lived/living body as cultivated by somatic movement practitioners. Biomedical imagery ‘from within’ the body, while widely available, is barely scrutinized phenomenologically (van de Vall 2009) and conceals the relational basis of health (Cohn 2010). Meanwhile, the sufferer’s self-perceptions are seldom, if ever, visualized. This epistemological imbalance hinders the development of potentially generative and transformative corporeal images as developed by the sufferers themselves.

This paper argues that a dialogue between these alternative visual regimes may ‘open up’ caring and self-caring trajectories as supported by an expanded, dialogic imagination of the cared-for-body. Based on a series of auto-praxeo-graphic self-care experiments that the author (an anthropologist and somatic movement practitioner) conducted during the Covid-19 lockdowns, the paper proposes a multimodal phenomenology of a body-with-chronic pain, which is grounded on the cultivation of enhanced kinaesthesia - as mediated by somatic movement attentiveness - and ‘visualized’ by means of sensory analogies (Harris 2021).

Drawing on recent scholarship on care as crafting (Hsu 2022), and art practice as a style of anthropological inquiry (Ingold 2013), this research offers a strategy of creative speculation whereby a corporeal imagination that is grounded in sensory intermodality can engender novel and caring images ‘from’ and ‘through’ the lived/living body.