Samba no Mar: Bodies, Movement and Idiom in Capoeira

This chapter explains surpassing dualism by way of theoretical reflection and articulation of an alternative concept. It discusses the socio-semiotic reformulation of body-image that treats the body not only as a sign vehicle, but as ‘sense’, and how the approach can renovate interpretive sociological interest in the important concept. Clinical and social psychology employ two measures of body-image: perceptual and subjective/attitudinal. In contrast, ekstasis is transactive and denotes obliteration of the alleged boundary between mind and body, self and body, and body and the bodies of others. The ecstatic body is a habitual body; old and new habits are the emergent outcomes of non-dualistic processes of transactive evaluation, the starting point of this argument is Dewey’s idea of organic interaction, or transaction. It is somewhat ironic that aesthetics is never mentioned in psychological or social psychological literature on body-image. As an evaluative process, the constitution of the ecstatic body is also the genesis of socio-semiotic structures of bodily differences.