Being-In/Within-The-World: Embodied Difference as Illness, Impairment, and Injury

Debates about illness, impairment, and injury in past groups are shaped by western notions of body schema and disability. However, bodily differences are more than just different cultural views where the body’s physical constraints are a given. For past groups, issues of embodied difference were ontologically contingent and co-constituted as immersed experiences. This chapter explores how “being-in-the-world” for Arroyo Hondo’s villagers was a multiplicity of worldly encounters shaped by the human body’s material conditions. By treating life histories as rhizomatic events, I explore embodied differences through the concepts of individuation, serial age collectives, and debility.