Dr Francesca Mezzenzana, a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow with the school, has published her paper ‘Moving alike: human and nonhuman relationships among the Runa’ in Social Anthropology, exploring Runa understanding of the body and knowledge. Based upon fieldwork undertaken among the Runa, an indigenous population living in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the paper shows how moving is a central way in which the Runa experience a relationship of similarity with nonhuman others. Drawing upon anthropological and philosophical works on movement as well as research in developmental psychology on the dynamic nature of intersubjectivity, Dr Mezzenzana suggests that movement and self-movement — understood here as the self-awareness of one’s movements — constitute an important means through which the Runa come to perceive nonhumans as human-like.
Dr Francesca Mezzenzana publishes paper on movement and human-animal relationships
