Marine Climate Change Unit (Ravasi Unit)

Freelance academic let the bird fly […] somatic practice and sufi hadra performance, the embodied experience abstRact Based on an ethnographic case study conducted amidst the Sufi women of the Naqshbandi group in Cape Town South Africa in 2013/14, this article discusses and analyses Sufi women's verbalized ideas of the embodied ritual practice named hadra. From their experience with the ritual I argue that body and mind can somatically cohabit in a relationship in Sufi religious ritual practice. I challenge Sufi women's ideas of an 'outside of the body' and 'inside of the body' experience during the fan'a, or final stage of the ritual. This article argues that that when body and mind are connected within ritual praxis, they generate a direct embodied experience, going beyond Sufi theological thinking, making sense of the body movement as it happens.

sufism through the body: symbolism, selfhood expression and somatic process in embodying hadra ritual practice 1 abstRact This article is based on an ethnographic study conducted among the female members of the Naqshbandi Tariqa in Cape Town, South Africa, and their home base in Lefke, Cyprus. It examines how Sufi knowledge influences women's notions of the body in daily life and in ritual practice. This article discusses the topics of the body and the soul, and body movement representation in hadra and analyses the embodied symbolic meaning of the ritual as described by Sufi women. It argues that hadra is a platform that enables women to encounter that space, recreating and making sense of their embodied self.

In this chapter I show how awareness plays a role in reshaping ideas of physical pain. By awareness, I mean the natural ability that each one of us has to imagine, visualise, and focus into the sensations, feelings and emotions that occur in the body and mind. In other words, awareness in this chapter is seen as the ‘here and now’ of experiencing walking meditation in the natural environment through a body in pain, as it happens. This chapter suggests that walking meditation may be approached as a somatic practice, (instead of a spiritual practice) and that scholars can critically engage with events and topics that impact on their personal and professional worlds, while navigating between those spaces.

Declaration This work has not been previously submitted in whole, or in part, for the award of any degree. It is my own work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of other people has been attributed, and has been cited and referenced.

This article offers an anthropological and ethnographic perspective on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected and shaped rural community social behaviour in Kayo village during Japan's first official state of emergency, April 7th to May 6th, 2020. It draws from observations and informal conversations with villagers during this period. First, it discusses the researcher's experience of living in a rural village in northern Okinawa during the state of emergency and addresses the position of the ethnographer during the pandemic. It explores the Japanese concept of uchi/soto (inside/outside), to discuss the insider/outsider dynamics that characterise everyday social life in Okinawa. Secondly, it engages with Marshall Sahlins' (2013) idea of kinship as 'social mutuality' to consider how the pandemic invites us to rethink interpersonal relationships, space negotiation, and social boundaries, and how the latter are reconstructed and negotiated according to the new situation (emergency state). The example of Okinawa rural communities shows how rural populations can reconceptualise their environment and practices during the pandemic. It allows us to understand how notions of space, accessibility and kinship are reshaped into subtle boundaries between locals and outsiders in order to regulate access.

In this study, we conduct a detailed analysis of qualitative survey data focusing on adult populations in the UK, Japan and Mexico to address the following question: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed people's lived experience of their bodies, other people's bodies and the world? We identify five themes: (i) fear and danger, (ii) bodily doubt and hypervigilance, (iii) risk and trust, (iv) adapting and enduring and (v) changes in perspective. We use two theoretical frameworks: first, Mary Douglas' anthropological work on purity, risk, danger and symbolism is applied to understand how social and cultural meanings attached to the body have changed during the pandemic. Second, we use the concept of bodily doubt developed by Havi Carel to interpret how people experience their bodies and other people's bodies differently during the pandemic. While we recognise the significant variation in people's embodied experience of the pandemic, our findings suggest there are commonalities that span different countries and cultures. Specifically, we look at responses to COVID-19 protective countermeasures such as national lockdowns and physical distancing which we suggest have reduced people's ability to put faith in their own bodies, trust other people and trust the political leadership. We conclude by proposing that the changes to our lived experience during the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted changes in perspective and a renewed focus on what people consider important in life from a social, moral, cultural and political point of view.