Embodied Intersubjectivity and the Vitality of Cultural Meaning: Narratives of Communicative Musicality in Learning and Teaching

Human learning is inspired with the purposes and feelings of individuals who seek conscious, in-the-moment cooperation. It is social and co-created through mutual attunement of the movements of body and mind. In school, the interested learner needs to be encouraged by a skilled teacher sensitive to the rhythms of the child’s friendly, open vitality. They co-create shared projects in play, with movement and language, developing meaning and learning in sympathetic collaboration. From infancy, projects of imagination are expressed by the body and voice with the creative forms of 'communicative musicality' – gestural narratives created in rhythms of movement, felt, seen and heard. They anticipate being responded to with love and care. Learning within these embodied narratives incorporates affective, energetic, and intentional components to produce schemas of engagement that structure knowledge, and become meaningful habits held in memory. The rituals of culture and technical skills develop from the psycho-motor structure of human nature, with its vital impulses of thought-in-action that express an integrated, imaginative, and sociable Self.

Phenomenology of Embodied Intersubjectivity

Hermann Schmitz has developed a “New Phenomenology.” It emphasizes fundamental conceptions that undercut traditional subject-object distinctions. In the Chinese classic The Zhuangzi we find stories that describe involvements and dialogue that can be seen as doing something similar. I will bring out some of these parallels. In particular I will focus on freedom and mutual understanding.

(Dis-)Embodiment in Schizophrenia

A research team from the German National Project Body Language of Movement and Dance conducted a feasibility study on the influence of mirroring interventions on the self-experience and interaction skills of patients with schizophrenia in a psychiatric hospital setting (N = 14). They investigated how a manualized dance movement therapy (DMT) intervention influenced (1) body awareness, (2) the sense of wellbeing, (3) empathy, and (4) social skills in the patients compared to a control group. In this chapter, the authors define the terms, briefly describe the method of therapeutic mirroring, compute the results, and discuss the findings. The results suggest that wellbeing and empathy were strengthened through mirroring in movement. The intervention further increased positive affect (and coping), and decreased depressed affect and anxiety as aspects of wellbeing. Future studies should improve the DMT intervention for schizophrenia, integrate changes in body image, body self-efficacy, embodied intersubjectivity, expression of emotion, and increased numbers of participants.

Embodied intersubjectivity, sedimentation and non-actual motion expressions

As part of a long-term project investigating the relevance of phenomenology for (cognitive) linguistics we analyse two central, interrelated concepts:embodied intersubjectivity(intercorporeality) andsedimentation. With respect to the first, we spell out a number of different intercorporeal structures, emanating at the most fundamental level from the dualLeibkörpernature of the body. Further, we demonstrate that sedimentation is more than a ‘geological metaphor’ as meaning is intrinsically layered in human experience. This is first illustrated by reviewing evidence from ontogenetic semiotic development within the framework of the Mimesis Hierarchy model (Zlatev 2013). Then, we focus on the linguistic construal of situations lacking actual motion in dynamic terms through expressions of non-actual motion such asThe road goes through the forestandHe was uplifted by her smile. We review studies of non-actual motion in Swedish, English, French, Bulgarian and Thai extending and re-formulating previous analyses. We argue that the present analysis is more adequate than cognitive linguistic explanations in terms of ‘mental simulation’ and ‘conceptual metaphor’. We conclude by pointing out how our phenomenological investigation can help resolve a number of classical dilemmas in semantics: Is language primarily grounded in the body or in society? Is the ontology of linguistic meaning mental or social? What is the relationship between pre-linguistic experiences and linguistic conventions?