Corporeal indeterminacy: The value of embodied, interpretive sociology

Interactionist and phenomenological approaches to embodiment posit corporeality as a symbolic universe within which active subjects constitute shared meanings of bodies through their bodies. The constitution of self, body, meaning, and society is an embodied affair primarily because such processes depend on intentionality and therefore, as Lee Monaghan suggests in this chapter, on “particular ways of experiencing bodies, specifi c cognitive styles, and forms of sociality that jar with other ‘taken-for-granted’ modalities of embodiment.” For Monaghan this process is therefore quintessentially “mortal” in that it is open to befuddlement and reconfi gurations, inevitably limited in its potential for shared understanding, and ultimately “open” in its indeterminate predisposition. Mortal embodiments, both as objects of analysis and as interpretive subjects, cannot but engage in a type of analytical inspection that is therefore fi nite; circumscribed by an “unavoidably ambiguous, messy, and complex” process of embodiment. Such is the nature of interpretive sociology for Monaghan: Its embeddedness within embodiment, and the uniqueness of its value as a mortal undertaking.