I FEEL YOUR PAIN 85not only “determines and constrains” (47) our understanding of others’
intentions but allows us to “recognize [others] as similar to us” with “ease”
(42). The idea that this recognition of the other as a conspecific, as Gallese
claims, amounts to empathy is seriously questionable (Debes 2010; Saxe
2009; Slaby 2013; Wahman 2008). More fundamentally problematic is the
insistence that our embodiments — our relation to objects, our phenome-
nological experiences, and our motor schema — are all so precisely equiv-
alent to begin with.
Sociologists of the body describe embodiment as structured through
social interactions and practices, and therefore as culturally differentiated.
Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1990) proposed the concept of habitus to address
social reproduction (especially class differences) as effects of action and
embodied practice rather than identity or consciousness. In his oft- cited
example, a tennis player doesn’t plan each stroke, but she acts with skill
nonetheless, by using her “feel for the game” (Bourdieu 1990, 66). Simi-
larly, people have an embodied feel for the social fields they inhabit, not
as the result of conscious deliberation, but of a less reflective, more em-
bodied absorption of local collective practices. Class differences involve
more than merely economic and ideological differences — they are deeply
embodied — because different fields produce distinctive habitus. As Omar
Lizardo notes, “the most important practical competences constitutive
of the class habitus are never the subject of explicit instructions, but are
‘picked up’ by the actor by virtue of being surrounded by other actors who
display the same competences” (2007, 337). Loïc Wacquant (2004, 2015)
demonstrates this ethnographically in his study of a boxing club in a poor
neighborhood in Chicago. Wacquant describes how the social organization
of the setting, the pacing of events, the collective physical work, the timing
of movements, the social roles of various actors (coaches, boxers, and so
on), generate intercorporeal interactions that are more telling than explicit
linguistic communication. The culture of the boxing club as he sees it is not
primarily discursive, but carnal.
Lizardo finds in mirror neurons, and in embodied simulation theory
specifically, the empirical grounding for Bourdieu’s and Wacquant’s view
of culture as physically enacted, rather than “downloaded” from a “collec-
tive object” (2007, 324). Following the embodied realist tradition, Lizardo
argues that it is “the human body itself ” that provides the shared conditions