Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written practices and how they are transmitted. This study concentrates on incorporated practices and provides an account of how these things are transmitted in and as traditions. The author argues that images and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances, and that performative memory is bodily. This is an essential aspect of social memory that until now has been badly neglected.

The dominant notions of consciousness in the West are anchored in a peculiar matrix of dissociated sensibility held in place by unthematized body practices. It is misleading to evaluate spiritual and philosophical notions of consciousness simply from the point of view of verbal, logical analysis, when they are expressions of these deeply rooted experiential sensibilities, deliberately cultivated over long years of habituation. There is a dramatic difference between how the West thinks of body practices as irrelevant to analyzing states of (...) consciousness and how other cultures make direct links between these practices and the shaping of consciousness. For at least the last 150 years in Europe and the United States a number of teachers have developed body practices in deliberate resistance to the dualistic structurings of mentalities and physicality. They constitute a cultural movement of resistance shaped by the recognition of the mistaken notions embodied in Western dualism. An example is given of the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the creator of the School of Body‐Mind Centering. Key Words: Embodiment, Somatics, Cultivation, Practices, Dualism. (shrink)