Endorsement from Mark Johnson

The CUP editor tapped Mark Johnson (of Lakoff & Johnson fame) for a back-cover blurb. This is what he wrote:

“In the dances of sea captains, kings, ambassadors, nationalists, and many others, Ringmar explores how the body in movement constructs and enacts our individual and cultural identities and values. Our moving bodies engage our material, interpersonal, and cultural worlds, in a dance of pre-symbolic meaning-making and affirmation of basic values. He then traces some of the most important ways our modern views of being, thinking, knowing, imagining, and willing have become attenuated and impoverished, to the extent that we have fallen out of touch with the meaning that can give us a sense of values and bind us together in communities The remedy to this disempowerment and alienation is not a return to some long-lost past, but a re-engagement with the power of our moving bodies to put us meaningfully in touch with our world. Ringmar offers us both a sociology of movement and an epistemology of embodied understanding.”

It was very much Mark Johnson’s book Meaning of the Body that started me off on this intellectual journey. In our house he is regarded as a minor deity. Amazing to think that he read the book. The back-cover will now feature quotes from Shaun Gallagher, John Sutton and Mark Johnson. Not bad.