摘要：The impetus for this issue dates from a symposium on Embodied Knowledges held at Edith Cowan University in Perth in 2011. The Symposium arose from the shared interests of a diverse group, many of them practice-led researchers, and should have been a clue that the call for papers for this issue would attract different conceptions of the body. Nevertheless we were surprised by the many kinds of bodies implied in the 17 papers received and are pleased to offer a selection in the 'embody' issue of M/C Journal. Part of the difficulty of talking about the body as a source of knowledge, and also as a product of culture and history, is the backdrop of unproblematic representation of the body in popular culture. The linkage of the body to the brain, and by implication the mind, is particularly hard to escape. Through a scientific/medical lens, viewers of medical documentaries like The Human Body have learned to interpret representations of the brain. “Slices” of the brain are instantly recognisable through technologies such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans. The metaphor of the brain lighting up due to thought and activity, derived from mediated brain imaging technology, has entered common usage. Such images are understood even by non-scientists as different parts of the brain at work, running the body. Brains, bodies and thinking seem well connected in popular culture. In the academic realm, the relationship of the brain to the mind is contested, as is the place of the body. In Western culture a dualist mind/body division has contributed to a particular understanding of the body, and of knowledge making, in which objective, propositional knowledge has been privileged. An alternative monist view has variously been used by theorists of the body from Nietsche to Deleuze but also by contemporary neurophysiologists such as Damasio. Using these philosophical positions, the body is either the weaker side of a partnership, or subsumed into a whole which does not acknowledge the specificity of actual bodies, or their potential as sites of knowledge making.
