Oct. 16 Jessica Hardin Lecture

A public lecture presented by

Dr. Jessica Hardin
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Rochester Institute of Technology

Wednesday, October 16, 2019
12:30pm
354 Academic Center

Recent anthropological approaches to the body situate it as porous in an increasingly global environment of toxicity, ranging from fecal and pesticide exposure to the salt and sugar that permeate most global foods. Anthropologists of Christianity have also situated the body as porous to immaterial things, like God, supernatural forces and human emotions. However, when scholars of Christianity study weight or food, the body is situated instead as in need of discipline. I suggest that this distinction reflects the lasting legacy of dichotomous understandings of the body that were at the center of Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock’s critique of medical anthropology over 30 years ago. Through an ethnographic analysis of a single event, a special Zumba program organized by and for Pentecostal women in Samoa to counteract cardiometabolic disorders, I explore the body as a site of knowledge production. Focusing on knowledge is a way of avoiding dichotomous framings whereby the body is considered porous when mediated by immaterial things but in need of discipline when mediated by material things. To concentrate on the knowing body is to draw instead on Indigenous Oceanic epistemologies suggesting that the body is a medium of knowledge, which is generated through movement, embodied interactions, and intersubjectivity. ​