Art as an Embodied Imagination
Speaking of Art as Embodied Imagination: A Multisensory Approach to Understanding Aesthetic Experience Author(s): Annamma Joy and John F. Sherry, Jr. Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 30, No. 2 (September 2003), pp. 259-282 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/376802 . Accessed: 22/10/2012 06:18
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We use three frameworks in order to clarify our understanding of the embodied mind—Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) concept of embodied existence, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) theory of image schemata, and Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) discussion of conceptual blending (a modification based on Lakoff and Johnson’s work on image schemata). We base our analysis on the metaphorical and linguistic representation of embodiment processes presented to us by the participants in our study. For the last two decades, social theorists have grown increasingly interested in the body, but almost exclusively as outcome of social process rather than as an embodied agency (Lyon and Barbalet 1994). Even the consumerist body (Featherstone 1998) has not been analyzed effectively as a laboring body, despite our discipline’s turn toward cultural phenomenology. Research in phenomenological psychology, such as Gibson’s (1966) into the haptic system, points us more in the direction of embodied agency. So, as ethnographers who use their bodies as research tools to both participate in and observe cultural phenomena (Sherry 1995), we turn our attention to body as process, for bodily experience makes up the “existential ground of culture” (Csordas 1994, p. 269). But first, we need to examine the consumer literature on embodiment processes.
EMBODIED EXPERIENCES: A