Contemplative Practice in Context: Embodiment, Enactment and the Cultural Neurophenomenology of Experience

This presentation will examine the relevance of recent work in cognitive science, psychological anthropology, and cultural psychiatry for thinking about context in contemplative science. Theories of embodiment and enactment provide ways to elaborate an ecosocial view of mind that integrates neurobiology and sociocultural contexts. In this view, mental phenomena are produced by looping effects within and between the body/brain/person and the social world. These loops are mediated by psychophysiological, cognitive, and discursive processes involving metaphoric, narrative, and rhetorical practices. The built environment, circulating narratives, and social institutions together constitute forms of life, which offer individuals particular niches or positions, with corre- sponding modes of self-understanding and construal as well as specific affordances for action. 

Contemplative practices involve regimes of attention that change the dynamics of bodily-cognitive-social loops in ways that can yield ethical and pragmatic insights but that can also cause persistent dislocation and distress. Cultural psychiatry argues that the outcome of any practice depends on both its personal meaning and the responses of others in local social worlds. Systematic attention to culture and context can inform the design of research that allows us to see more clearly how contemplative practices both reflect and challenge conventional constructions of reality. Reflection on the larger social, cultural, and political contexts of contemplative science itself can open up new avenues of inquiry and provide frameworks for ethical and pragmatic critique.