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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Dancing empathy. A methodological approach for kinesthetic research and new modes of connecting from a feminist perspective

presenters

    Grit Kirstin Koeltzsch

    Nationality: Argentina

    Residence: Argentina

    CISOR/CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Jujuy; CEIC

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

Movement is a core medium of our daily practices and a form of thinking while exploring the world. Our contemporary life is marked by ecological, health, and humanitarian crises resulting from the domination of nature and rationalism as the fundamental principles on which modern science is based. The subjugation of women, animals, the body in general, and even one's own body (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002) is part of the dilemma. However, our body does not exist outside the relationship between nature and the cosmos. Therefore, a critical approach to epistemological questions regarding the relationship between bodies and nature is to develop an approach that applies kinesthetic knowledge as a methodology grounded on embodied experiences, movement, and dance practice. Based on a framework of transdisciplinary theory and complex anthropology where the human being participates in the world through subjectivity, adopting an anthropo-cosmomorphic nuance in a dialectic between the human being and nature, I analyze movement examples and own dance performances called "Human and non-human dancing bodies" which are part of my methodological strategy as a female anthropologist. I conclude that to achieve ecosocial justice, and because of weak kinesthetic awareness in our modern life, it is necessary to rethink the connection between body and nature, not as an intellectual relationship or of possession, but as a living and lived relationship.

Keywords:

Body, dance, kinesthetics, methodology, performance