This interdisciplinary work demonstrates, by steadfast attention to corporeal matters of fact, how the concept of power and of power relations is rooted in bodily life, in animate form. It first shows how Foucault's "optics of power" is Sartre's "The Look" writ large, and proceeds to explain how optics of power are undergirded by a "power of optics" which has its roots in our primate evolutionary heritage. The exploration of an evolutionary genealogy leads in turn into extended examinations and exemplifications of corporeal and intercorporeal archetypes. Moving easily through biological, anthropological and psychological domains, and informed by keen philosophical reflection, "The Roots of Power" aims to show how the personal and political are fundamentally joined in the body, that is, how the political defines us both as creatures of a natural history and as culturally - and individually - groomed bearers of meaning. Sheets-Johnstone assesses the complex of topics that progressively surfaces such as females' being receptive "year-round", male threat/female vulnerability, Sartre's characterisation of females' being "in the form of a hole", and proposed relationships between aggression and sex. In addition, she shows through detailed analyses of Derrida's absencing of the living body from the scene of grammatology, and of sociobiologists' explanations of rape as adaptive behaviour how the tenets of postmodernism and sociobiology preclude insight into the personal-political equation. "The Roots of Power" concludes with an extended critical meditation on Lacan's psychoanalytic, showing not only how it is rooted in idiosyncratic archetypal elaborations but how, in its scientisation of life, pedestalling of human language, and silencing of the living body, it is a microcosm of 20th-century Western practices and ideologies.

When The Phenomenology of Dance was first published in 1966, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone asked: “When we look at a dance, what do we see?� Her questions, about the nature of our experience of dance and the nature of dance as a formed and performed art, are still provocative and acutely significant today. Sheets-Johnstone considers dance as an aesthetic mode of expression, and integrates theories of dance into philosophical discussions of the nature of movement.   Back in print after nearly 20 years, The Phenomenology of Dance provides an informed approach to teaching dance and to dance education, appreciation, criticism, and choreography. In addition to the foreword by Merce Cunningham from the original edition, and the preface from the second edition, this fiftieth anniversary edition includes an in-depth introduction that critically and constructively addresses present-day scholarship on movement and dance.

The purpose of "The Corporeal Turn" is to document in a single text the impressive array of investigations possible with respect to the body and bodily life, and to show that, whatever the specific topic being examined, it is a matter of fathoming and elucidating complex and subtle structures of animate meaning. The corporeal turn is envisioned as an ever-expanding, continuous, and open-ended spiral of inquiry in which deeper and deeper understandings are forged, understandings that in each instance themselves call out for deeper and deeper inquiries. The first thirteen essays have already been published as distinct articles. The two new essays constituting the final two chapters are testimony to this open-ended spiral of inquiry.

Putting Movement into Your Life: A Beyond Fitness Primer is both playful and serious, bridging both popular and scholarly texts. It is engagingly written with two reflective stopping posts-- Ponderabilia--per chapter that offer slow food for thought on a diversity of topics related to the immediate topic in the text. The book is definitely NOT an exercise book or a self-help book, but a book about movement that breaks new ground in lively and creative ways while remaining anchored in everyday life. In so doing, it answers to the growing attempt by numerous individuals, organizations, and businesses to promote health by promoting movement.

Focusing on conceptual origins, this book shows that there is a bond between hominid thinking and hominid evolution, a bond cemented by the living body. This thesis is illustrated in eight paleoanthropological case studies ranging from tool-using/tool-making to counting, sexuality, representation, language, death, and cave art.

When The Phenomenology of Dance was first published in 1966, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone asked: “When we look at a dance, what do we see?� Her questions, about the nature of our experience of dance and the nature of dance as a formed and performed art, are still provocative and acutely significant today. Sheets-Johnstone considers dance as an aesthetic mode of expression, and integrates theories of dance into philosophical discussions of the nature of movement.   Back in print after nearly 20 years, The Phenomenology of Dance provides an informed approach to teaching dance and to dance education, appreciation, criticism, and choreography. In addition to the foreword by Merce Cunningham from the original edition, and the preface from the second edition, this fiftieth anniversary edition includes an in-depth introduction that critically and constructively addresses present-day scholarship on movement and dance.

This book argues the case for a foundationalist ethics centrally based on an empirical understanding of human nature. For Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "an ethics formulated on the foundations of anything other than human nature, hence on anything other than an identification of pan-cultural human realities, lacks solid empirical moorings. It easily loses itself in isolated hypotheticals, reductionist scenarios, or theoretical abstractions--in the prisoner's dilemma, selfish genes, dedicated brain modules, evolutionary altruism, or psychological egoism, for example--or it easily becomes itself an ethical system over and above the ethics it formulates," such as the deontological ethics of Kantian categorical imperatives, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, or the ethics of care.

Taking her cue from Hume, especially his Treatise on Human Nature, where he grounds "the moral sense" in human nature seen as always in tension between the natural tendencies of selfish acquisitiveness and sympathy for others, Sheets-Johnstone pursues her phenomenological investigation of the natural basis of human morality by directing her attention, first in Part I, to what is traditionally considered the dark side of human nature, and then, in Part II, to the positive side. The tension between the two calls for an interdisciplinary therapeutic resolution, which she offers in the Epilogue by arguing for the value of a moral education that enlightens humans about their own human nature, highlighting both the socialization of fear and the importance of play and creativity.