The Multiplicities of Immersed Experience

How we conceptualize the body shapes the ways we understand those who lived in the past. An osteobiography characterizes a person’s life story as an accumulation of social identities, experiences and circumstances that impacted their health and well-being. Lived experiences are often viewed as things that happen to an individual. Yet phenomenology and other relational approaches recognize that an individual’s personal experiences are socially, culturally, biologically, and historically embedded and situated within the world. Lived experiences are not things that happen to an individual but are multiple simultaneous worldly encounters shaped by the ways an individual is immersed in their lifeworld.