Moving humanity

This project is directly concerned with the myriad ways that a human being can be human. One of the core principles is the proposition that we become human through the ways in which we learn to move; movement entails the synthesis of mind, sensorimotor skills, body, technologies, and environment. This interdisciplinary project is centred around anthropological principles while drawing on a range of their disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, ecology, and paleontology.

Project timeframe

This project began in 2014 and continues to expand and develop.

Project aims

Broadly, this project aims to understand what it means to be human by investigating ways the human sensorium shapes the mind informing distinct modes of anthropological enquiry into sport and other forms of human movement. The development of these modes will challenge basic established premises of twenty-first century modernity.

Project findings and impact

This project is setting out the parameters of distinctive and new ways to investigate what it means to be human. It is opening a neglected field of enquiry within sociocultural anthropology by identifying different sets of questions other than purely social scientific approaches.

Research team

Dr Thomas Carter

Output

Carter, TF. (forthcoming) On Running and Becoming Human: An Anthropological Perspective, New York: Palgrave.

Besnier, N, Brownell, S and Carter TF. (forthcoming) The Anthropology of Sport, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carter, TF. (forthcoming) Sport and Anthropology. Abingdon: Routledge.

Partners

This project emerged out of collaboration with the GLOBALSPORT project sited at the University of Amsterdam funded by an ECR grant.

Professor NIko Besnier, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam

Professor Susan Brownell, Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri St. Louis