Rhythms of Connection: A call for feeling in Anthropology
October 30th, 2025
London, United Kingdom
This article explores a ‘reworlding’ in anthropology through rhythm and embodied wisdom, advocating for shifts in academic practices that embrace the body’s role in acquiring, interpreting, and affecting knowledge. Rhythm is defined as our innate, multi-modal way of perceiving and interpreting sensory stimuli of the world into meaningful information, establishing connections and relationships.
Anthways
DOI: DOI:10.5281/zenodo.13982318
Posted byStephanie Ellison
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Abstract/Description
Movement, not pondering, brings new knowledge.
Bartinieff, 1980
This article explores a ‘reworlding’ in anthropology through a lens of rhythm and embodied wisdom, advocating for a shift in academic practices that embrace the body’s role in acquiring, interpreting, and affecting knowledge. Rhythm is here defined as our innate, multi-modal way of perceiving and interpreting the sensory stimuli of the world around us into meaningful information, establishing connections and relationships. In tuning into an awareness of rhythms through embodied practices, this is a call for doing in relationship with, embracing a physical approach to our understanding of human culture—an approach radical in its simplicity of engaging the body to illuminate fundamental connections with ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human. Such an approach offers a fresh perspective into human relationships and suggests that anthropology can lead academic innovation by integrating more physical and sensory-engaged learning into its curricula, fostering self-discovery and purposeful exchange by turning attention to the wisdom of what the world has to tell us. (Ingold 2013:1).
Drawing on environmental ritual and dance fieldwork in Southern England, I illustrate how greater sensory awareness and embodied presence through processes such as ‘grounding’ and ‘staying open’ offer opportunities for meaningful connections in the field and other settings. With current research exploring embodiment frameworks for learning based on this concept of rhythm, the goal is to promote new pathways to knowledge, enhancing collaboration and communication within academia and beyond. Such practices, beneficial for researchers at all institutional levels, hasten a radical embrace of interdisciplinary approaches to meet a rapidly changing world with greater empathy and resilience, where feeling—not emotions per se but sensorial feeling—and the rhythmic patterns and narratives those sensory perceptions produce are as integral to anthropological understanding as traditional methods of direct observation and analytic discourse. As Donna Haraway says, “Reworlding requires the ability to engage with the world through sensory and material practices,” directly highlighting this need for an embodied approach (Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, 2016) where in the deepest of truths “Knowledge ‘is always an engaged material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas” (Haraway 2004b: 199–200, Haraway’s emphasis).
Bartinieff, 1980
This article explores a ‘reworlding’ in anthropology through a lens of rhythm and embodied wisdom, advocating for a shift in academic practices that embrace the body’s role in acquiring, interpreting, and affecting knowledge. Rhythm is here defined as our innate, multi-modal way of perceiving and interpreting the sensory stimuli of the world around us into meaningful information, establishing connections and relationships. In tuning into an awareness of rhythms through embodied practices, this is a call for doing in relationship with, embracing a physical approach to our understanding of human culture—an approach radical in its simplicity of engaging the body to illuminate fundamental connections with ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human. Such an approach offers a fresh perspective into human relationships and suggests that anthropology can lead academic innovation by integrating more physical and sensory-engaged learning into its curricula, fostering self-discovery and purposeful exchange by turning attention to the wisdom of what the world has to tell us. (Ingold 2013:1).
Drawing on environmental ritual and dance fieldwork in Southern England, I illustrate how greater sensory awareness and embodied presence through processes such as ‘grounding’ and ‘staying open’ offer opportunities for meaningful connections in the field and other settings. With current research exploring embodiment frameworks for learning based on this concept of rhythm, the goal is to promote new pathways to knowledge, enhancing collaboration and communication within academia and beyond. Such practices, beneficial for researchers at all institutional levels, hasten a radical embrace of interdisciplinary approaches to meet a rapidly changing world with greater empathy and resilience, where feeling—not emotions per se but sensorial feeling—and the rhythmic patterns and narratives those sensory perceptions produce are as integral to anthropological understanding as traditional methods of direct observation and analytic discourse. As Donna Haraway says, “Reworlding requires the ability to engage with the world through sensory and material practices,” directly highlighting this need for an embodied approach (Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, 2016) where in the deepest of truths “Knowledge ‘is always an engaged material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas” (Haraway 2004b: 199–200, Haraway’s emphasis).
