Baka Quotes

Social Fascia

Baka quotes

Doerte Weig Tensional Responsiveness Ecosomatic Aliveness and Sensitivity with Human and More-than. Transcript publishing. 2021

Weig, Doerte 2013. Motility and Relational Mobility of the Baka in North-Eastern Gabon. PhD dissertation. University of Cologne. URL: http://ku ps.ub.uni-koeln. de/5238/

Social sensing

sensing and feeling each other’s ways of being and what is happening in the community, being actively sensorially connected with each other. This kind of sensing is strong in many tight-knit communities, but with the Baka what is special is how this way of relating and communicating is central to their egalitarian social system. What does being social mean

Systems thinking benefits from embodiment

A greater emphasis on systems thinking is advocated as crucial to responding to contemporary political, economic and environmental issues. 1 Interweaving systems thinking, social theory, and neurophysiology highlights that the real urgency of our times is that we cannot afford to not include more actively our moving-sensing bodies in considerations around our futures. Responding to critical issues, may become easier and more applicable not only

On embodiment

This is much easier than it sounds,

Social Fascia

Recent medical discoveries around fascia, the bodily connective tissuesystem just beneath our human skins, give embodied depth to how tension is an active part of social organisation and process. Fascia tissues are continuously shifting-sliding in response to how we move through the world, and to the different kinds of tensions we are faced with. Drawing together fascia as one aspect of our neurophysiologies with capacities for being social, opens up to appreciating how these topics are not separate. At a deeper level, this also emphasises how detrimental it is to deny (eco)systemic and bodily impacts of social tensions, which side-lines strain and rigidity into individual and collective shadow spaces. Said another way, if we are not aware of and actively working with tension and pressure, we cannot develop capacities for the social, considered as organising sensitively and non-violently in relation to what others are doing.

Environmental

becomes a ‘mere’ forest from close up. The forest is seen by people as a fluid space, a place without borders. What I loved most during the initial phase of arriving in Gabon was how people listened and shared in whatever was going on in that moment, or as one Gabonese woman summarised the different dynamics, ‘we have time – you have the watch’. The caring, the taking an interest, the warmth at heart made for a different kind of withness.

Movement and Sociality

My understanding of what is ‘body’ has been shaped through my scientific research as much as my passion for dancing, through all of which I learned that studying body is intimately intertwined with studying movement. This starts with embryology and infancy, and studies with infants have shown that the capacity to move and the capacity to experience are related.55 We begin learning how to relate, how to move and be social, in the socio-cultural environments of our childhood. There is vast diversity in human movement styles, as ways of bodily movement are socio-culturally distinct and gender specific.56 As adults, we continue to live in conscious or unconscious resonance to this socio-cultural diversity of people we move with, and also in ongoing and multi-sensorial resonance to the architecture and infrastructure of our daily lives.57 Productions of sociality and how we feel for example belonging, happen also through culturally inflected notions of movement, which are directly related to our bodily physicality and awareness. After many years of investigating what bodies can do, with different groups ranging from huntergatherers to contemporary dancers and body therapists, for me, it has become impossible to think and feel one without the other: Body and movement go together as do capacities for bodily presence and socio-political-cultural context.58 This perspective is further influenced by the field of somatic studies. Generally speaking, somatic is another way of saying body or physiology. The difference is that in comparison to the body as seen from the outside, so from a third-person perspective, somatic refers to a first-person perspective of the body’s internal workings.59 53 Margulis & Sagan 2000:27 54 Margulis & Sagan 2000:27 55 Sheets-Johnstone 2011, Stern 2010:7–8 56 Mauss 1979 1934, Manning 2007 57 Pallasmaa 2019, Hedley 2019, Zardini 2005 58 See for example: Weig 2019, Weig 2018, Weig 2015c, Weig 2015b 59 Hanna 1970

Also: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.823971/full