Understanding Embodiment Through Lived Religion: A Look at Vernacular Physiologies in an Old Norse Milieu

Abstract

The materiality of lived religion manifests itself in countless ways. These include fundamental understandings of embodied experience. Understandings of bodies are socially constructed and result in what is called a body image – i.e. a symbolic and iconic model of what our body is (and is not).2 The resulting body image can be thought of as an imaginal understanding of the body’s physiology. In Western cultures today, medical science is fundamental to people’s understandings of the body and how it works. The internalization of the body image occurs in the dynamic dialectic between our empirical experiences and imaginal perceptions on the one hand and, on the other, a full spectrum of circulating discourses3 about health, fitness, illnesses, pains, nutrition, muscles, organs, joints, emotions, souls, death, ghosts, psychics, and so on and so forth. As we negotiate these discourses, encounters with