Mindful Body

Although the term “mindful body” appears in vernacular discourses pertaining to Western health and wellness industries, alternative medicine, and dance and movement arts, it appears to have entered the anthropological literature in the inaugural issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly (1987). Authors Nancy Scheper‐Hughes and Margaret Lock used “mindful body” to draw attention to initial attempts to “problematize the body” in anthropology and other social sciences in the late 1970s and 1980s. Conceptions of the body are central, they emphasize, not only to substantive work in medical anthropology but also to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire discipline of anthropology because Western assumptions about the mind and body, individual and society, affect broader theoretical perspectives and research paradigms.