AbstractsPhilosophy & Theology

Theology in the flesh: exploring the corporeal turn from a southern African perspective is inspired by the book of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the flesh. The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought (1999), who define “philosophy in the flesh” as a way to see how our physical being and all the things we encounter daily make us who we are. It is also an acknowledgement of the far-reaching and pervasive influence of philosophy in Christian thinking and in this research, doing theology from the body. The second part of the title, “exploring the corporeal turn from a southern African perspective” reflects the main research question: how did the corporeal turn manifest within other academic disciplines, within the history of Christianity and within theology, and how can the corporeal turn be integrated into a contemporary theological anthropology from a southern African perspective? While the research for this thesis lies at the junction between practical theology and systematic theology, it is mainly approached from the perspective of systematic theology. The sensitivity to the concrete context, in this case the life-world of southern Africa was sharpened by practical theology. The model proposed in the last chapter for a contemporary theological anthropology as embodied sensing captures this emphasis on the crucial importance, also for systematic theology of the bodily experiences of real people in concrete life-worlds. A postfoundationalist theology opens the door very wide to interdisciplinary dialogue, and especially in the context of initiating deeper and deeper levels of inquiry into the body and the experiences of the body within a specific and concrete life-world. A postfoundationalist notion of reality enables us to communicate across boundaries and move transversally from context to context, from one tradition to another, from one discipline to another. It is the weaving together of many voices — the voices of Church Fathers, mystics and Protestant Reformers, of philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, artists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, molecular biologists, and novelists. It brings together the voices of flesh and blood people in southern Africa with that of theologians that take the body and the experiences of the body seriously. The corporeal turn is explored in philosophy, sociology, somatic psychology, paleoanthropology and anthropology, and within cognitive science and molecular biology. The corporeal turn is evaluated in the light of this interdisciplinary exploration in an effort to develop a deeper and richer understanding of the body. The body is furthermore investigated in colonial and post-colonial southern Africa, as well as within apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa and an appeal is made to the bodily experiences of southern Africans in evaluating the corporeal turn. If social location is known in the body, and if recent research in molecular biology suggesting that trauma can be inherited up to a hundred generations is incorporated together with…