Porous bodies and physio education
Recognizing that bodies are ecological implies that human bodies have much less clearly defined boundaries than is relayed in conventional anatomy and physiology education and its accompanying imagery. The idea that the body is permeable and the environment is a beneficial or dangerous intruder was a common theme in older humoral cosmologies from around the world. However, where the latter risk suggested a need for declaring, controlling, and defending boundaries, more recent work reaching across biology, sociology, technology, philosophy, the arts, and other fields highlights that the ecological nature of bodies ‘challenges the ways in which the biological subdisciplines have characterized living entities’ as singular and separable from their environment. Ecological bodies, always necessarily in the plural because no ecological body is just one, challenge and raise fundamental questions about biomedical definitions of the human body.
Exerpt from Ecological Bodies and Relational Anatomies: Toward a Transversal Foundation for Planetary Health Education, new paper by Robert Richter and Filip Maric. Open access avaialble here.