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Updated: Oct 3, 2025

Virtual Hand with Ambiguous Movement between the Self and Other Origin: Sense of Ownership and 'Other-Produced' Agency
Published on: October 28, 2020
Body Knowledge, Part I: Dance, Anthropology, and the Erasure of History
Abstract:
A photograph depicts the anthropologist Franz Boas posing as an Indigenous youth in search of human flesh. It looks like an icon of cultural appropriation, but behind the picture is a history of Indigenous influence. The archive of body knowledge-memories encapsulated in the motions of dance and indexed in images-reveals that the Kwak'wala-speaking peoples civilized the white man who came to study them, converting him to the Host-Guest logic of "potlatch" encoded in their Hamatsa dance. Seeing Boas as a host body of Indigenous knowledge radically reconfigures our understanding of influence, compelling us to ask who creates modernity.
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Anatomical Movements
Here are some common anatomical movements:
Flexion and extension motions are in the sagittal (anterior–posterior) plane of motion. These movements take place at the shoulder, hip, elbow, knee, wrist,...

