Embodiment and Cultural Ecologies: reframing Foucault through ritual studies

Studies of The Body espousing a Foucauldian approach tend to engage the body as an abstract theoretical construct –as in social science; and/or a material artifact –as in history. However, incorporating Foucault’s work into ritual studies –a subfield within religious studies— brings forward that Foucault engaged the body –as Merleau Ponty before him— as the lived material substrate wherein culture and history play out. Indeed, centering of experience of bodily performances constituted the major continuity between Foucault’s earlier and later scholarship. This paper will present my interdisciplinary framework of ritual ecological analysis as a means of reframing how we view Foucault’s approach to the body as the reflexive expression of historically contingent cultural praxes. Further, I will argue that embodiment methodologies are similarly consistent with Foucault’s approach to the body and bodily experience.