Shay Welch

In this chapter, I delve into the intersection of phenomenological embodiment and embodied cognition as developed by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff to help set up the frame that I construct to demonstrate the philosophical relationship between dance and Native American ways of knowing. This partnership elucidates how meaning is embodied, as both frameworks are grounded in experiential, phenomenological approaches to knowledge. This blending of Native American epistemology and an embodied cognitive theory of meaning helps to flesh out my claim that metaphorical knowledge lends itself to an analysis of procedural knowledge. Using pivotal Native American knowing practices, I will show that metaphorical knowledge is not merely expressive; it is a function of Truth insofar as it is lived truth.

The purpose of this chapter is to orient the reader toward the three components of Native American epistemology that play pivotal roles in my arguments: ethical harmony, relationality, and praxes/procedures/processes. Relatedly, my ultimate goal here is to synthesize the various accounts of Native epistemology to further flesh them out into one coherent, complete analytical frame. I then show that Native epistemology is a procedural analysis of knowledge. This understanding of knowledge as an ethical, active, and interactive means through which to discover the right path requires a shift in how we understand the conception of Truth in itself.

In this chapter, I tie together the discoveries of contemporary cognitive embodied metaphor with the significance of both the body and dance in knowing processes of Native American epistemology. I maintain, that because the mind is inherently embodied, dance is the epicenter of knowing praxes because the dancing body contains and displays embodied metaphors that operate as a narrative. I argue that the stories communicated through dance are able to be taken up by the viewer. It is not that viewers impute subjective meaning qua subjective interpretation to the rendering of the dance; rather, the story is told and taken up in as much of an objective fashion as are traditional oral narratives—story through the body does not bequeath to us less knowledge of the story and storyteller, it often tells us more. To do so, I employ the schema of embodied cognitive metaphor to dance as a performative, communicative action and process as capable of initiating and sustaining relations of ethical interdependence between dancer and viewer vis-à-vis the power of the dance so that stories that need not or cannot be spoken may yet be given voice so that they may be created and shared.

My main objective of this chapter is to construe an analytical analysis of how dancing and choreographing can satisfy the core requirements of the Native procedural knowledge framework: respectful, successful, performance. Obviously, that dance is an activity and process will already have been established and will be reintroduced to set up the analysis. The pivotal argument in this chapter substantiates how dance satisfies the successful criterion. This is going to rely on a comingling of knowing-how arguments in relation to successfully deploying embodied metaphors and technique with processes of uptake and attentiveness on the part of the viewer. When taken together with the upshots of Chapter 10.1007/978-3-030-04936-2_4—that if knowing is embodied, metaphorical, relational, and praxis based—then my argument becomes evident—that dance is the most unmediated and clearest mode through which to generate and communicate knowledge and Truth from the perspective of Native American epistemology.

Generally speaking, BPD is a cognitive-affective disposition that shapes one's conception and experience of herself, and also her experiences of interrelationality. Many BPD symptoms relating to affect regulation are spurred by psychosocial complications that can then exacerbate psychosocial complications in future relationships. One consequence of affective dysregulation due to abuse-induced trauma can be persistent interpersonal breakdowns. Such breakdowns can be caused by the inability of two differently affectively disposed persons to harmonize according to what person each needs based on a set of supposedly shared norms and expectations. Attempting to identify specific ethical issues related to affective disruptions in interrelational harmonizing requires that one pull together the embodied experiences of BPD and the effects of those experiences on interpersonal relationships and then position that distinctive dynamic within an ethico-epistemological framework. I believe that one critical trigger for BPD affective dysregulation comes from the role of abuse-induced trauma in the cultivation of the BPDer's body memory. I offer a description of this phenomenology, which I ground in the philosophy of embodied cognition. The relationship between trauma and the embodied memory matters to ethical conversations about BPD because it is crucial to see how trauma that manifests as a specific kind of affective disposition can influence the ethical harmonizing of interpersonal interactions. I write this analysis from my own first-person experience of someone diagnosed with severe BPD.

In this paper, I explore a number of issues related to a life lived with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Primarily, I am interested in discussing how one unwillingly changes their personal identity by forced medicating—demanded by others implicitly and explicitly. My motivation is something deep and invasive in me. I want to know, I have always wanted to know, why others want me to not be Me so badly. I have thought about this question for years, and though others may simply chalk it up to just one of the standard paranoid or narcissistic traits of borderline personality disorder, there is something more to this question that many of us agonize over most of our lives. There is a deeply normative component to this question that extends beyond the mere fear of abandonment; it is tied to a desire by others to erase—literally—who we are for their own comfort. In this sense, then, I invite you to travel along a path of what it can mean to be a BPDer, from a narrative, phenomenological, and cognitive lived, embodied perspective. My purpose is to show that the treatments for us that others desire cannot avoid (and usually do not want to avoid) the unraveling of who we really are. Whether we want to or not, we give up our self to keep other people with us. And for many, this is too much to ask, and can be one, though not the only, reason suicide and self‐harm seem to be necessary recourses. One in 10 people with BPD commit suicide. So this is a serious matter, indeed.

Much of feminist theory takes issue with traditional, liberal theories of consent and obligation. Though none have proposed abandoning obligation outright, there has been a general shift among feminists towards a responsibility paradigm. Responsibility models acknowledge given relationships and interdependence, and so posit responsibilities as given, regardless of whether they are voluntary. But in theories that take freedom as a principal value, a move from a socially unembedded voluntarism to socially embedded responsibility leaves something missing. Constructive accounts of and prescriptions for freedom must consider the reality of social life; yet acknowledging that relations are given need not require subordinating the role of voluntarism and consent in most relationships. In this paper I offer a commitment framework that seeks to supplant obligation while also reconciling relational given-ness and voluntarism. I propose an analysis of commitment that takes relations as the starting point and then show how the concept can: 1. guide actions 2. account for responsibilities 3. enhance freedom and 4. avoid a large share of coercive forces that are believed as necessary for reinforcing obligation and responsibility fulfillment

I construct an analysis of social trust that attends distinctively to cooperation in social relations that has the capability to (begin to) counter the default social distrust obtained due to oppressive conditions via a form of collective reasoning. For social trust to overcome oppression it must be a normatively transparent form of trust. Transparent trust can counter the effects of oppression on social interaction and foster social cooperation by correcting unequal positions of social vulnerability and improving disparities in credibility resultant of oppression since collective reasoning in norm legitimization permits all individuals to participate in the process of self and other defining and the development of the concomitant norms that guide these processes

For the purpose of advancing the feminist commitment to inclusion and nonliberal articulations of pluralism, in this essay I conceptualize the Native account of individual autonomy that itself evolves from a commitment to pluralism. I demonstrate that Native individual autonomy is concurrently strong and feminist in nature—what I call “radical-cum-relational.” That is, Native autonomy is more radical than the traditional liberal conception and is simultaneously grounded in relationality, which is the basis of much of feminist ethics. I demonstrate that the Native conception of autonomy is radical and promotes the highest degree of individual self-determination and independence qua individuality and particularity. Yet this radical self-determination depends on intense social interdependency. The grounding metaphysics and epistemology of the Native framework are conceived entirely in terms of ethical relationships between and responsibilities to other individuals, animals, and the Earth. That is, no part of the Native paradigm can be understood outside of the ethical connections persons have by virtue of their primary position as community members. It is by situating radical autonomy against a background of ethical social interdependence, together with thebackground condition of gender equality of Native practices, that the radical construal of Native individual freedom is feminist. To shore up and illustrate the connection between Native autonomy and feminism, I argue that an identification between the Native social practice of gifting and feminist reciprocity can be made, specifically Iris Marion Young’s notion of asymmetrical reciprocity. Finally, I argue that this connection avoids the problem of incommensurability and so is theoretically possible, responsible, and fits the criterion of respectfulness also at the foundation of the Native framework. Broadly speaking, the problem of incommensurability is concerned with theorists’ inability to recognize foundational incompatibilities between paradigms and their forced attempts to mergethem, often at the price of ignoring inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and contradictions that result from impossible translations and conversions. Historically and to the present day, Western philosophy has been egregiously guilty of distorting Native theories and practices. In this essay I argue that since translation takes place at the level of praxis rather than at the level of language, my argument circumvents problems that arise from failed attempts to map cultural concepts onto others that do not share similar foundations.