687
Tomaž Krpič
Mia perry, Carmen Liliana Medina 
(eds.)
Methodologies of Embodiment. 
Inscribing Bodies in Qualitative 
Research 
routledge, New York and London 
2015, 
174 pages, USD 135.23 
(iSBN 978-0-415-81691-5)
Books on methodological issues 
concerning research into the social, 
cultural, political and economic di-
mensions of the human body are 
extremely rare. To be honest, i can-
not remember a single book entirely 
dedicated to this matter in the past. 
Only occasionally was i able to find 
some traces of thoughts and practi-
cal methodological advice in litera-
ture on the body (including embodi-
ment), but that was pretty much all. 
This is why i, as a sociologist of the 
body, am especially grateful to have 
discovered a book on the method-
ologies of embodiment edited by Mia 
perry (ecl foundation) and Carmen 
Liliana Medina (indiana University). 
Although the book is not very big – it 
has 157 pages and eight chapters – it 
is a fair and honest attempt to fill the 
wide gap between the proper (epis-
temological) and methodological 
framework for researching differ-
ent social and pedagogical aspects 
of the human body, and researchers’ 
desperate search to have one within 
their reach.
Due to the book’s modest dimen-
sions, the reader should not expect 
all branches of methodology relat-
ed to embodiment to be presented 
and explained, only the qualitative 
ones. in some sense, the editor’s de-
cision distances the book’s contents 
from various social sciences with its 
largely ‘traditional’ methodological 
approaches (for instance sociology), 
where quantitative methodologies 
are very widely used (economics) or 
are not exactly welcomed, like in the 
arts (practice as research) and the hu-
manities (literature studies). But one 
cannot please everybody, and certain 
restrictions on the topic are neverthe-
less useful. The main reason for the 
restricted content reflects the fact that 
almost all the participants are in some 
way involved in the educational pro-
cess in theatre, art and literature.
By definition, embodiment is a 
complex, multi-layered process dur-
ing which the individual’s body is, on 
one hand, subject to various social, 
cultural, political and economic influ-
ences by which it is changed, trans-
formed, annihilated, reshaped, con-
trolled and so on in many different 
ways and, on the other hand, a sub-
ject which is lived and experienced 
as a unique entity by an individual. 
Hence the body, which affords dif-
ferent ways of embodiment, is thus 
somehow always somewhere ‘in be-
tween’. However, it is still deeply and 
silently embedded in the tradition of 
researching the social phenomenon 
of bodily character, that the real body 
is somehow exempt from the picture. 
Too many times the body is under-
stood simply as a material vehicle for 
different social, cultural and political 
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TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 54, 3–4/2017
Two basic understandings of 
methodology are presented in the 
book. The first one is a goal-oriented 
practical methodology that directs 
the individual’s agency in a group 
or small community for gaining dis-
tinct personal embodiment usually 
with higher, educational aims. For 
instance, acquiring a certain revela-
tion about the situation in which an 
individual is dwelling, and as a con-
sequence perhaps some level of in-
dividual liberation from unjust social, 
economic and political constraints 
will be secured. i have already partly 
addressed this type of methodol-
ogy in the previous paragraph and it 
is this type of methodology that the 
reader immediately notices while 
moving through the book. The other 
type of methodology is less ‘recognis-
able’ to the reader, possibly because 
the volume is far from being a list of 
procedures one needs in order to 
study human embodiment in edu-
cation in art and performance. The 
book is not a researcher’s manual. 
it is more a collection of thoughts 
about various educational practic-
es delivered to the reader via non-
structured articles and essays. it is 
up to the reader to husk elements of 
this methodology and pick out what-
ever is needed. Obviously, the more 
knowledge about epistemology and 
qualitative methodology a reader has, 
the easier their task will be. in addi-
tion, the aim of this type of method-
ology is to produce fairly objective 
knowledge. 
Despite expressing and shar-
ing certain enthusiasm for the book 
processes without having any other 
particular influence on them. Wheth-
er, and if so to what degree, the body 
can affect those processes is a mat-
ter of debate, but this is something 
the reader cannot find here. The re-
viewed book is thus far from being 
immune to the effect of the ‘miss-
ing body’; only rarely do the authors 
speak about the corporeal body in 
the cases they investigate, although it 
is obviously present all the time. 
it is important to note that anoth-
er element common to all eight of 
the book’s chapters is the educational 
character of human embodiment. 
While neither different outer (social, 
economic, political and so on) nor 
inner elements (the individual’s men-
tal state) of embodiment are directly 
controllable in a small environment/
community, for instance in a class-
room, the body is. The body can be 
disciplined in order to achieve specif-
ic aims and altered in many different 
ways to fulfil many different purpos-
es. The body is thus inevitably a suit-
able target of embodiment of various 
educational methods, whether in the 
form of a devised theatre (Mia perry), 
creative play and embodied critical 
literacy (Candance Doerr-Stevens, 
Cynthia Lewis, Debra ingram and Ma-
ria Asp), attunement (James Asch and 
Lesley Anne Gallacher), embodied 
multimodality (Burcu Yaman Ntelio-
glou) or feminist embodiment (Carol 
Brochin and Carmen Liliana Medina) 
whose goal is to shape and direct the 
individual’s embodied behaviour to-
wards a critical engagement with the 
world. 
regarding the methodological issues 
about researching human embodi-
ment, i still find several peculiarities. 
The main puzzle for me is the book’s 
title which, in my modest opinion, 
promises far too much compared 
to what the reader can actually find 
inside the book. Not only is the en-
tire diapason of methodology which 
could be applied in researching hu-
man embodiment not exhaustively 
covered, but the book’s cover does 
not reveal that the methodological 
issues of embodiment chiefly focus 
on examples taken from education 
in theatre and performance. Now, i 
am not saying i was not pleased up-
on discovering this. On the contrary, 
since i believe the theatre and the 
performance are some of the finest 
ways for social, political and aesthetic 
use of the human body. This makes 
me, i admit, highly biased. Yet, on the 
other hand, i stress the editors should 
give readers ‘fair warning’ by using 
a more appropriate subtitle to better 
indicate what the book is all about. 
Another critical moment of the 
book is its use of the concept ‘em-
bodiment’ throughout the book in 
analyses and interpretations of sev-
eral social phenomena related to 
the pedagogical process. However, 
i shall address this issue only briefly 
here for two reasons. First, the book 
certainly has a somewhat surprising, 
maybe even intriguing, end. The last 
chapter, which is actually an after-
word, is written by Elizabeth Adams 
St. pierre and has a suggestive and 
at the same time a revealing subtitle: 
Troubles with Embodiment. in fact, 
this short ‘chapter’ contains a pedan-
tically critical approach to the book’s 
contents or, more accurately, its un-
critical use of, according to Adams 
St. pierre, the obsolete term ‘embodi-
ment’. She does not deal separately 
with each contribution in the book. 
instead, she points to the very origin 
of the problem with the concept of 
embodiment. it was rene Descartes 
and his infamous philosophical split 
between the body and the mind, later 
on so eagerly and widely adopted by 
the positivists, that not only allows, 
but also forces us to use the concept 
of the embodiment on a daily basis, 
and to which the author of the after-
word, who is considered one of the 
most radical advocates of post-qual-
itative inquiry, so strongly opposes. 
As a consequence, the book already 
includes its own fundamental criti-
cal opposition and, for that reason, 
there is hardly any need to ‘drop by 
to spoil the party’. Second, while the 
book’s editors and authors may have 
not learned that an epistemological 
‘war’ is raging against understanding 
of the body as merely a subject of the 
mind in terms of Bryan S. Turner’s 
‘one has body’ in order to reach and 
complement ‘one is body’, we can 
only hope that they will learn about 
this sooner rather than later. After all, 
the editors confess at the end of the 
introductory part that when they fin-
ish their ‘work in curating and edit-
ing the chapters and ideas brought to-
gether in this volume, we depart with 
more questions than when we began’ 
(p. 11). 
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