Ensoulment, not mere embodiment, grounds a shared Mediterranean tradition of bodily agency.

Evidence

I discuss a final example of the role of pain in the economy of action—this time from the Islamic tradition, aspects of which have been described in relation to movements of piety in contemporary Cairo in two ethnographic studies by Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind. Both studies are concerned with a tradition that is based on the idea of the soul that is at least as old as Aristotle and that has been absorbed into Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam. This tradition requires us to attend not merely to the idea of embodiment (that human action and experience are sited in a material body) but also to the idea of ensoulment—the idea that the living human body is an integrated totality having developable capacities for activity and experience unique to it, the capacities for sensing, imagining, and doing that are culturally mediated. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 434

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘ensoulment’ against the thinner notion of ‘embodiment’ that dominates modern theory.
• XREF: The ensoulment-vs-embodiment distinction is core ammunition for the Cooper-bridge claim that ‘secular modern’ frameworks smuggle in a particular anthropology of the body.