Ch3. Interpreting Africa’s Seselelãme: Bodily Ways of Knowing in a Globalized World
Kathryn Linn Geurts is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Global and Area Studies Department at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her research focuses on investigating bodily experience—not through a Western lens but through a West African perspective. She is the author of Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (University of California Press, 2003) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She has been the recipient of fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, NIMH, the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.
Related Co-author with Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie
An African language term seselelãme (meaning bodily ways of knowing) has recently spread into a globally popular phenomenon appearing in films, workshops, blogs, therapy sessions, and other venues spotlighted on the world wide web. This chapter explores questions such as: What sorts of interpretations are being made about seselelãme by people attempting to deploy it in Global North contexts? What are the implications of individualizing and commoditizing seselelãme in fee-driven self-transformation workshops? In what ways does this perpetuate symbolic and structural asymmetries underpinning institutional power? This chapter problematizes some of the ways in which seselelãme is being used in Global North contexts (including as a quick fix to the mind--body problem) and then revisits how Ghanaian people themselves narrate bodily ways of knowing. Taking a psycho-socio-cultural approach, the authors align seselelãme with a modal (compared to categorical) way of understanding and being in the world. Finally, the chapter argues that seselelãme is one of Africa's treasures, which is nonetheless being culturally distorted, culturally appropriated, and culturally stripped of its richness.
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For updates from the author and access to supplemental materials (interviews, podcasts, syllabi, etc.) when they are made available, please visit Chapter 3.
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