Embodied Belonging: In/exclusion, Health Care, and Well-Being in a World in Motion

Abstract

In this introduction, we propose the notion of ‘embodied belonging’ as a fruitful analytical heuristic for scholars in medical and psychological anthropology. We envision this notion to help us gain a more nuanced understanding of the entanglements of the political, social, and affective dimensions of belonging and their effects on health, illness, and healing. A focus on embodied belonging, we argue, reveals how displacement, exclusion, and marginalization cause existential and health-related ruptures in people’s lives and bodies, and how affected people, in the struggle for re/emplacement and re/integration, may regain health and sustain their well-being. Covering a variety of regional contexts (Germany/Vietnam, Norway, the UK, Japan), the contributions to this special issue examine how embodied non/belonging is experienced, re/imagined, negotiated, practiced, disrupted, contested, and achieved (or not) by their protagonists, who are excluded and marginalized in diverse ways. Each article highlights the intricate trajectories of how dynamics of non/belonging inscribe themselves in human bodies. They also reveal how belonging can be utilized and drawn on as a forceful means and resource of social resilience, if not (self-)therapy and healing.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Young People’s Mental Health in the UK: Key Insights from Social Media Using Online Ethnography

“…A tendency to hold up singular causes, such as school closures, has pinpointed solutions in disconnected acts such as the reopening of schools or allowing the “young” or the “healthy” freedom. In contrast to the sense of “embodied belonging” [ 50 ] that runs through young people’s narratives on social media, such solutions risk doing more harm than good through a politicised and enforced unbelonging that fails to recognise the social embeddedness of young people’s mental health.…”

Negotiating agency and belonging during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic: an interview study among older adults in England, UK

“… 29 Most crucially, it demonstrates belongingness to a wider national culture, one in which they share the responsibility of protecting the health of the population and preventing extreme pressure on the UK’s NHS. This ‘readiness to give and contribute to the interests of those who co-constitute a social collective’ 30 allowed them to demonstrate their right to belong.…”

“…It did so through social recognition by and interaction with others, which served to provide those who are somehow marginalised with a sense of agency, security and confidence. 30 These wider community patterns of interaction and care that older adults actively engaged with provided an avenue to reinsert themselves as social beings despite the more official narratives of vulnerability and isolation.…”

Emotional Pathways of Embodied Health Vulnerability: Maternal Health Risk and Emotional Distress among First‐ and Second‐Generation Immigrants on the US‐Mexico Border

“…In the local biologies of the border, immigration policies are a crucial “environmental” factor influencing how people are healthy or diseased. Inclusion or exclusion generated by policies contributes to a sense of belonging with health implications (Mattes and Lange 2020). Women perceived the implementation of immigration policy as a significant source of emotional distress potentially harmful during pregnancy; based on what is known about the health consequences of the stress response, their accounts are biologically plausible.…”