I use the two pictures of this collection as a kind of editorial on how I see issues of embodiment in NatureCulture projects, reflecting on how a focus on individualized embodiments of discipline or embodiments according to inherited analytical languages of race, class and gender has led to further exploration of how different beings embody together, and how those embodiments are relationally or ecologically constituted (inspired by the works of feminist anthropologists and scholars like Marilyn Strathern, Anne-Marie Mol, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Donna Haraway).
The lecture outlined the refusal of Minamata movements to accept the logic of monetary compensation, disturbing modern political sensibilities by involving non-rational techniques and actors, for example the public displays of mourning emblematized by the black flags designed by homemaker and "shaman" of the movement, Ishimure Michiko. The constant summoning of the sick and dead, those made most vulnerable by their reliance on the bounty of the sea for their subsistence, brought in other worlds into an otherwise modernized political scene in Japan. This embodiment of a different world, one that is not a perfect other to modernity but nevertheless exists and his its own effects is not only close to what Strathern calls partial connections, but also reflects the lecture by Viveiros de Castro that is part of this essay, and the NatureCulture blog posts by both Hansen and De Antoni: these other realities should not be dismissed because scientists (or anthropologists for that matter) do not share them. All authors argue that some kind of translation or shared understanding can be possible. In this sense, embodiment also becomes a radical strategy for becoming sensitive to the possibilities of different ways of knowing, making and relating.
