Embodiment and Its Importance to People's Everyday Lives Essay

Submitted By aalu91
Words: 476
Pages: 2
Open Document
Weekly Partner Exchange
Week 4
Embodiment: a conceptual glossary for epidemiology

This article focuses on embodiment and how it is a very important concept that is pertinent to people’s everyday lives. The author states that embodiment can:

1) tell stories about the conditions of our existence 2) tell stories that often, but not always, match people’s stated accounts 3) and also tell stories that people cannot or will not tell

The author speaks of humans as social beings in a social context. Without this social context, the health of the individual cannot be properly evaluated. For example, the contending claims about racism compared to race, in the context of disease, shows that diseases cannot be properly evaluated without a view of embodiment. Without the social aspect of racism, people may pinpoint the cause of a certain health problem on an individual’s biological race, and not the social tension of racism that may have had an equally important impact on the individual’s health problem. Furthermore, in different cultures, there are different perceived waist to hip ratios, yet someone under the average in one culture may still be susceptible to a disease phenotype. Socially examining the reasons as to why one culture may have a larger waist to hip ratio requires the concept of embodiment, where it is not just biological differences, but also social phenomena that affect these traits. Also, embodiment of social conditions is also important because sometimes social conditions lead to biological phenotypes that are identified. Many species of fish and reptiles will display different character traits not based on their genes, but on the temperature of the environment.

Embodiment can also serve as a clue to life histories, hidden and revealed. Bodies can provide evidence that puts self report and other accounts into context.
Show More

Related Documents: Embodiment and Its Importance to People's Everyday Lives Essay

Walden Themes

world. Henry David Thoreau explores several themes or issues which show the importance of this novel and what it means. This novel mainly deals with one of the four themes that we discussed in class which is Innovation vs Nostalgia which I will discuss later on in the essay through some of the ideas discussed in the novel. Firstly, I’ll discuss a man being part of the wilderness or nature and how he can live off of it. We all live in a society that has been domesticated by a man. We have controlled nature…

Words 3306 - Pages 14

Love: Communication and Transmission View Essay

quite so trivial, though it is an experience more depressing than wonderful. Moreover, most of one's encounters with others are wonderful only in moments of excessive masochism. Dewey's sentence, by any reasonable interpretation, is either false to everyday experience or simply mundane if he means only that on some occasions communication is satisfying and rewarding. In another place Dewey offers an equally enigmatic comment on communication: "Society exists not only by transmission, by communication…

Words 8149 - Pages 33