"investigating the role of embodiment in practises of knowledge and memory, this chapter considers in particular the felt, somatic aspects of movement knowledge. I argue that thinking itself, including the way we access, organize, retrieve, and present information, is as much a matter of somatic understandings as of semiotic ones...Drawing on field research with dancers in the annual fiesta of Our Lady of Guadelupe in Tortugas, New Mexico, I review findings resulting from a somatic approach."

Sklar, 97

Philosopher Edward Casey distinguishes 'body memory' from 'memory of the body', the first working primarily through feelings in the body, the second through representations of the body as an object of awareness. For Casey, the first would properly be called remembering, the second, recollecting"

Sklar 98

"Kinestic sensations, much less their meanings, are rarely the focus of everyday awarenesss. As Marcel Mauss and, after him, Pierre Bourdieau, have pointed out, the bodily patterns we master are then enacted outside of conscious awareness."

Sklar 99

"Undertaken to refute Nazi notions about the correlation of race and gesture, Efron studies and compared the conversational gestures of two relatively homogenous and stable European communities..."

Sklar 104

"It was the affects and effects of the fiesta I wanted to understand, what it was to 'feel the Virgin's presence', as the people said, and what that presence meant to the fiesta."

Sklar 106

"Unlike the Protestants who killed or 'removed' the indigenous people they encountered in New England, the Spanish Catholics required Native labour and coveted, in the name of God, Indigenous souls...In El Paso del Norte they (the Pueblans that joined the Spanish after the Pueblo revolt of 1680)lived in mission communities among the larger Spanish and Meztizo, or mixed Spanish and indigenous mexican population"Sklar 107

Connections between embodied memory and dance

"Indeed, he (child psychologist Daniel Stern) acknowledges, they ('vitality effects', the complex qualities of kinetic energy inherent in all bodily activity) are equivalent to what Suzanne Langer calls the 'forms of feeling' embodied in dance....Until we attend to kinetic dynamics, the way vitality affects are organized in specific movement systems and actions, we lack a crucial dimension in understanding the meaningfulness of movent performance in and as social memory" Sklar 98-99

Dierdre Sklar, Qualities of Memory: Two Dances of the Tortugas Fiesta, New Mexico, 2006.