Kinaesthetic sedimentation: in the hands of ancestors

Abstract

The article explores how bodily movement and sensory experience sediment into one’s being as a form of memory and tradition. It draws on Edmund Husserl’s idea that each subject’s primordiality contains not only their own past but also the primordiality of Others. This means that our movements, posture, and bodily habits arise not only from individual experience but also from intercorporeal relations – experiences passed down through generations. Building on Husserl’s notion of empathy, I examine how I empathize with the Other through spatial and intercorporeal relations. Identification occurs through different forms of intercorporeal congruence: transposition, rotation, reflection, and complementation. These phenomena can be illustrated by the example of dance, especially ballroom dancing, where movement, rhythm, and partnership become a practice of intercorporeal memory. I draw on my conversations with my dance teachers Jūratė and Česlovas Norvaišos, who discussed their training with Alex Moore (1901–1991) in the UK. Alex Moore emphasized that, in dance, the body never ceases to move as movement is a continuous flow, and learning occurs not through words or diagrams but through shared bodily action. This experience led me to realize that such knowledge is sedimented in bodily tradition passed from teacher to student, from one generation to the next. Ballroom dance makes this particularly visible through the principle of complementarity. The intercorporeal memory is both synchronic – when two bodies move together, “unlocking” each other – and diachronic, when movement experience is transmitted from teacher to student and from parents to children. I was held in my parents’ hands, and now I hold my child in my own hands, continuing that same embodied experience. My parents were once in my grandparents’ hands. Looking “back,” my grandparents were likewise held in the hands of their parents – and so on. That is why I say: we are all in the hands of our ancestors.