Embodiment and Lived Experience in Human Biology

Lived experience is concerned with the ways that humans experience the world as embodied subjects. Lived experience and embodiment have been of growing interest to biological anthropologists across the subdiscipline. The focus of this article is how human biologists have examined and understand lived experience and embodiment. The article is structured in three sections. The first provides an overview of theories of phenomenology, embodiment, and "the body" from the realms of philosophy, medical anthropology and public health. The second reviews work within human biology that has made use of these theoretical concepts, either implicitly or explicitly. For scholars of human biology attaining statistical power for quantitative analyses of biological data drives an emphasis on larger sample sizes or analysis of decontextualised secondary data. Ethnographic engagement with research participants' lived experience, analyzed in association with biological findings, is rather rare. Particular attention is paid to what has been termed "ethnographic human biology" and to exemplars of this approach. The closing section of the paper presents a call for biological anthropologists to engage with an integrated anthropology, based around theories of embodiment and lived experience, in light of recent advances that have complicated our understanding of evolutionary processes.