18 chapter
that ātman, the intangible, true self, is the enduring, stable center of the human
person and the state or position from which the person perceives the world.
Some Indian thinkers also say that one should develop an awareness of the
contingent and ephemeral nature of the body. In other words, Indian philoso-
phy, both lay and professional, challenges Merleau-Ponty and much contem-
porary academic research that considers the body to be the existential ground
of human experience. We should also remind ourselves that like Europe and
the United States, India produces literate, phenomenological thinkers. For
every Husserl, Heidegger and Dewey, there is a Śankara, Praśastapāda and
Aurobindo, and these philosophers have had a role in shaping how people in
India, and in other places where people are in dialogue with Indian thought,
experience the world.
Furthermore, just as Farquhar shows how embodiment and people’s
engagements with aesthetics responded to government policies in China (for
example, characterizing gastronomic pleasures as bourgeois indulgences), we
will see how state policies and contemporary social processes in Kerala, such
as the extension of facilities for and knowledge about allopathic and ayurvedic
health care and the state’s literacy eff orts, have aff ected people’s phenomen-
ological engagements.
A phenomenological orientation is a guide to bodily, emotional, mental
and other dispositions. It is a way of dividing up experience, leading a person
to attend to and prioritize particular aspects of the body, the self, the person.
My defi nition, however, is bound to the English language terminology and
the phenomenological orientation that underlies labels such as “body,” “mind”
or “self.” Essentially, the categories “body,” “mind” and “self ” as well as other
aspects of the person in various cultural contexts are not anticipated by our aca-
demic analyses of experience and embodiment. For example, categories such as
bōdham (roughly “consciousness”) or ātman (a true, higher “self ”) are somewhat
distinct from the “consciousness” or “self ” of Western, intellectual parlance,
and the relations between these categories of the person are culturally, and
historically, shaped. Ātman and bōdham are distinct from manas (which itself
is a more mechanical, cognitive “mind” than what is depicted by the English
term), for example, and, according to philosophical writings, ātman has no
specifi able characteristics. Although a phenomenological disposition mediates
our experience and our relation to the world, I do not claim that a particu-
lar phenomenological orientation is necessarily all-determining, blocking the
possibility of the immediacy of experience. Experience is shaped by our con-
tacts and encounters with the world, and our phenomenological orientations
train us how to organize and prioritize these contacts. We will see how people
in Kerala are especially concerned about various states of “consciousness” and