Il corpo come luogo liminare: prospettive in Occidente e in Oriente a confronto

Since the formulation of the “paradigm of embodiment” by Thomas J. Csordas, the body has grown increasingly important in anthropological research and far from being considered the object of culture it has turned into the subject of culture itself, into the “existential ground of culture”. The body has the capability of being imbued with knowledge, to act in the world and, at the same time, to be shaped by those forces that act in the world. Not only is the body a liminal space between disciplines, it is also the means – in limine – through which human experience occurs in the world and the world enters man. In this contribution, the author will take into account some aspects of contemporary Western culture compared with the Naxi people living in Southwest China. The methodological approach adopted will provide the body as the main analytic tool for deciphering the processes relevant to the construction of societies, cultures, and the world. The notion of “embodied knowledge” will offer the opportunity for rethinking modernity and observing how, beyond the forms by which it models and weaves its social, political and economic interdependencies, modernity knows original declinations and retains areas of resistance to the homologation of identities and cultural colonization.